This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: A Body Swap Episode Conundrum
• A Surprise Game Boy Advance Tangent (I Actually Like The Modern Decade-Long Console Lifespans…)
• Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is Getting Remastered! (Capitalism Hoooooo~?~?~?~)
• New Year, New AI Musings (I Really Wish AI Tools Could Help Me With Anything…)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
A Body Swap Episode Conundrum

Over the holidays, a friend of Natalie.TF, Charishal, directed me to a video from a prominent cartoon-centric YouTuber, or ToonTubers as I like to call them. One that showcased and gave an overview of 19 different body swap episodes. As an avid body swap enthusiast, I am curious as to how relative normies tend to view the genre and its implementations, so I gave it a watch. The video itself was well produced, while the writing and approach to the subject was… fine, but suffered from a lack of focus and much of an overarching theme. Like the episodes were chosen before the script was written.

The three categories used to break up these examples— status, reputation, personality— did not make much sense to me, as these are factors in most examples listed. The examples listed were not examined as much as I would have liked, both as someone familiar with these episodes and someone not familiar with the shows or the cast. And some of the examples were… only kind of body swaps. 

Like the Powerpuff Girls episode being one where characters are transformed into each other, while retaining their power sets and positions in the world. Which makes it a transformation that visually resembles a body swap, not an actual body swap, just a cosmetic swap of sorts. Or the Rick and Morty episode, which sees two characters’ brains get scattered and mixed up, making it unclear where one begins and the other ends …Before the characters are combined into a single body. They’re both TF and adjacent to body swapping, but obfuscate what body swapping is. 

However, going through so many examples, mostly from children’s cartoons, it really did emphasize how formulaic and limited a lot of these body swap episodes are. As pretty much all of these examples hit a combination of the following notes:

• Present something zany and wild for the sake of it.
• Position the characters in an unfamiliar situation where the comedy and entertainment comes from their success or failure in this new predicament.
• Teach the characters a lesson, i.e. empathy, by seeing how someone else lives and how hard their seemingly cushy life actually is.
• Bring two characters closer by having them ‘literally walk a day in their shoes.’
• Somebody took a character’s body and they need to get it back. 

None of these are bad things. In an episodic series, these are all desirable goals for an episode, and these concepts can all be used well in a longer-form story. However, this is also a rather limited way of presenting what a body swap can be. These body swaps are always temporary conflicts solved at the end of the episode, and rarely focus on more physical elements beyond more surface level observations. Like people being taller, shorter, older, younger, prettier, uglier, hairier, stronger, weaker, etc. Living out their life is a chore or obligation, perhaps a vacation in some instances. And there is a lack of interest in embodying someone else and what that means or feels like beyond small observations. When that— the act of embodying someone— is one of the most fascinating ideas of a body swap. But it doesn’t make for good comedy.

Body swapping is not presented as something done for fun or recreation. It’s presented as a conflict to solve, and those who elongate or cause it are presented as being in the wrong. Switching back is always the goal and, in these episodes, is always the result, which huts the narrative potential of this concept. Living as someone else, physically being them, should change someone’s perspective, how they see the world, and how they see themself. They might find it revolting, they might love it too much, but a reaction of ‘that was weird, let’s never speak of it again’ is not interesting. 

I would say that body swapping is something that lends itself better to longer form storytelling. To explore the ramifications of living as someone else, or working better in a higher stress situation. It is one thing to live as someone else for a day. Sure, it might suck if it’s an important day, but a crappy day is whatever. It shouldn’t matter that much. But a week, a month, or a year? Then one really needs to recognize and register what it means to live as someone else, to be someone else. 

Well, assuming that is the goal. If the goal is just to have a deluge of bizarre adventures for the sake of comedy of the like, then just doing that is perfectly okay. But to have much more than that, some level of continuity and follow-through is kind of necessary. Otherwise, it is just another bizarre adventure for the scrapbook. 

Okay, but are there good examples of body swap episodes? Of course they are! …And I actually coincidentally just watched one with Cassie and Shiba this past week when going through the first season of Nyaruko-san: Another Crawling Chaos.

Nyaruko is loosely Lovecraft-themed absurdist comedy harem anime centering around the even-tempered, saltine-flavored protagonist Mahiro Yasaka, who comes into contact with a bunch of human-shaped aliens. The titular Nyaruko, a hyperactive and irreverent teenage girl who loves anime culture and also Mahiro. The twintailed soft-spoken, yet passionate Kuuko, who loves Nyaruko but not Mahiro. Along with Hasuta, a cute boy who develops a growing crush on Mahiro, despite not quite knowing how relationships work.

The body swap episode, or rather episodes, since it’s spread over two, sees Nyaruko and Mahiro switch bodies through alien meddling, and they’re stuck like that for a day. Nyaruko in Mahiro is completely psyched to be in the body of her crush and proceeds to make the most of this experience. Doing naughty things in the bathroom, trying to bathe with her original body, and using her status as Mahiro to bring them closer together, in her own twisted, chaotic way.

Mahiro in Nyaruko, meanwhile, is unnerved by all of this. Not wanting to get involved in any lewd things, trying to keep Nyrauko from using his body as she pleases, and trying to treat her body with the utmost respect. Yes, even while bathing, as he professes to not be interested in her romantically, despite her having begged him to impregnate her several times at this point. Again, absurdist harem comedy. Kuuko and Hasuta meanwhile are both enamored with Mahiro in Nyaruko. Hasuta loves Mahiro… for his mind. While Kuuko loves Nyaruko… but will settle for just her body. 

Everybody loves Mahiro like this, and throws themselves at him, and he actually uses this to his advantage. He uses Nyaruko’s body to write and sign a contract promising Kuuko and Hasuta to protect himself from Nyaruko’s endless perversions and keeps himself free to have an awkward night’s sleep. …Only for the following day to see the two go to school— yes, these Lovecraftian horrors are attending high school— where Nyaruko in Mahiro professes how much ‘Mahiro’ loves ‘Nyaruko’ before the entire class.

This is actually a very important moment in their relationship, forcing them to be closer in the eyes of others after being presented with irrefutable evidence, and leaves Mahiro just melting with awkwardness. This leads into the second episode, where the body swapping takes something of a backseat, but remains a persistent element as the two need to solve a new conflict. An alien battle. While Mahiro retains Nyaruko’s athleticism and combat skill— somehow— he is not as careful as her, nearly dies, only for Nyaruko to throw herself into danger. 

However, it turns out this was all a goof by Nyrauko, that she’s actually fine, and merely feigned death so she could kiss Mahiro for the first time. This leaves Mahiro floored for multiple reasons, and before he can recover, the body swap is undone. Yet, it is not forgotten, with the echoes of this experience being felt in the remaining two episodes of the season, as Mahiro keeps thinking back to his time as Nyaruko and how it changed his perspective on her. Particularly the kiss though.

Oh, and also Nyaruko in Mahiro’s body is voiced by Mahiro’s voice actor, and Mahiro in Nyaruko’s body is voiced by Nyrauko’s voice actor. Animated body swap episodes basically never do this, when they really should. When someone is in another body, they would speak with that body’s voice. They might have similar inflections, but you know what voice actors are really good at doing? Acting with their voices! If you are going to swap characters’ bodies, do not swap their voices. Instead, have the voice actors just impersonate another character. Would that be confusing to a casual viewer? Sure. But it’s a body swap. It’s supposed to be confusing!

I guess the point I’m making is that one way to make a good body swap episode is to have characters who lend themselves well to the concept. And another is to change characters and/or their relationships. Because a temporary body swap is supposed to be enlightening. However, like with anything, the question of how to make a good X depends largely on what the creative team wishes to do with X. What is the goal, what is the intention, and does this intention work within this situation or context?

With body swapping, and Transformation Fantasy (TF) in general, there is a lot that one can do, which is both good and bad. Because it gives the creator a lot of directions to send the story into, but it can also be easy to lose track of what this story is really about and what its goals are. 

This is something I have struggled with in Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, my ongoing novel project. I know that I want to tell a big story about a group of 20-ish people with access to body swapping devices. But a regular issue with the creative process is… trying to find the right thing for characters to do. What should the conflict be, what should the story be, how should I balance characters growth between the large cast with zany body swapping and transformation antics? 

Act 1 was primarily driven by the introduction of body swapping amongst the group. Showing characters cope, struggle, and thrive with their temporary lives during a week-long body swap. It was there to introduce characters, show off their personalities, and their views on body swapping. (They all love it, except for one, because it’s more fun that way.) Act 2 carried over the expanded cast from Act 1, introduced TransSex (TS) (gender swap) transformations, and saw a lot more miscellaneous fuckery. Characters changing their ‘default’ bodies to become entirely new people. Characters coming out as sorta-trans. A new character coming from the dead because I needed boys badly. And a lot of weird and wild crap, like multiple characters possessing the same body at once. While Act 3 is to be more centered around ‘body swap and transformation adventures’ with the established cast.

There are so many factors in the air, it’s hard for me to always determine a conflict, a goal, and a place where this body swapping chaos can go, while still retaining human characters with distinct personalities. And while a body swap episode is far smaller and more limited in scale than VD2.0, the principle of ‘think things through if you are going to do something’ remains a truism. …And the first step in doing just about anything well.

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A Surprise Game Boy Advance Tangent
(I Actually Like The Modern Decade-Long Console Lifespans…)

It’s the first of a year, meaning it’s a slow news week, so let me find something else I can gab on about… 

Something that I rarely see emphasized during retrospectives of the GameBoy Advance is just how incredibly short its tenure actually was and how miraculous its run was. The system launched in Japan in March 2001, and its successor, the Nintendo DS, came out in November 2004. That is basically a four year lifespan for a game system, and that is rarely a good thing, and often indicates that a system wasn’t doing well. Like the Saturn or the Wii U. Except that wasn’t the case here. 

The GBA sold a million units in its first month in Japan, and it was doing almost PS2 numbers during its run. It was an incredibly successful system, even outpacing the original GameBoy. While the GameCube was struggling, the GBA was thriving, being basically the only viable handheld game system. There was no Game Gear to compete with, just wannabes like the N-Gage, and nobody cares about the N-Gage except for freaks!

The only reason the GBA’s run came to a close was because of the Nintendo DS. And the only reason Nintendo released the Nintendo DS when they did was because they were concerned about Sony’s then-upcoming PlayStation Portable dominating the handheld market. So they released their system first and for $100 less, and won! …But when getting second place still means shipping 82,523,607 units, does that really count as losing?

This was an artificial cutoff, spurred developers to pivot away and shift projects to the more powerful DS (or rarely the PSP). Despite this, the system still managed to feel like it had a pretty feature-complete run. It had its own arbitrary bullcrap with the Nintendo e-Reader and its associated deluge of cards. It had oodles of GameCube support with both a link cable and the Game Boy Player. It managed to get a redesign in two years with the GBA SP. And its library is something that I feel gets overlooked.

Reason one is that many of the best-selling games on the system were some manner of port or re-whatever of a game from another system, namely the Super Mario Advance series. I cannot find good figures for this, but I would estimate that at least 10% of the 1,500 game total library is just ports, conversions, and enhanced versions. Reason two is the sheer quantity of licensed games based on movies and shows, because development was fast, cheap, and so was producing these tiny cartridges. But that still leaves the system with a deluge of quality original games. So many that anybody who would say it ‘lacked its own identity’ is either dumb or crazy. Especially when it maintained relevance about as long as the GameCube did.

The GBA was usurped by the DS in late 2004, though it did have a strong 2005, where Nintendo and third parties were still cranking out games for the thing. They even put out the Game Boy Micro in September 2005 to show that the system was still kinda relevant. Though, I think they just thought it’d look cute and be a fashion accessory. But come 2006, the system was just propped up by a few swansongs. Like Mother 3, Yggdra Union, bit Generations, and Rhythm Tengoku. (I am counting the original release date as the real release date.) Then, around the time the DS Lite launched in spring 2006, Nintendo started ignoring the system, expecting it to wrap up, when this thing just kept on selling.

Conventional wisdom is that after a system’s replacement comes out, sales of the prior system will drop like a rock. Sony has not sold that many PS4s after launching the PS5. But the GBA? It sold over 14 million units in the US alone after the DS launched, bringing its lifetime total up to 81.5 million units. A figure that I have seen some highlight for being too small, but that’s because it’s being compared to systems that were being widely supported and marketed for longer periods of time. The GameBoy was a decade-plus device, and the DS was still selling in the US in 2012. In part because people didn’t realize that the 3DS wasn’t just the DS but it played games in 3D. (I had to explain that to at least five people IRL in 2013.)

The GBA wasn’t the first big handheld gaming system that benefitted from a late life resurgence thanks to one of the biggest gaming movements of the 20th century. And the game system that really brought in the ‘casual gaming’ audience. I mean, during its prime, this system was doing crazy numbers. Fiscal year 2004 alone it sold 17.6 million units worldwide. And I got one of ’em! Was it worth dredging my way through Cub Scouts? …Yeah, it was. I got to play real Pokémon games!

Weirdly though, I think that it’s easier to appreciate a lot of what the GBA was doing in retrospect. It was kind of the last hoorah for these small scale 2D games that could be shoved out in a few months or a year. Which you would want to think is represented with the indie boom over the past 20-ish years, but nah. Indie games take forever to make because they don’t have full-time staff, or get bogged down with revisions and scope, when sometimes you just need to wing it and go with what your heart tells you to do. …At least that’s a key reason cited by game dev veterans whose words I have permitted into my black cauldron. 

Also, here’s where I found most of the GBA sales data for this section. Not the most official source, but it’s easier than digging for old financial reports.

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Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is Getting Remastered!
(Capitalism Hoooooo~?~?~?~)

Now this takes me back! Recettear is a cult classic Japanese PC indie game that made headlines and a lot of noise when it was localized back in 2010. Partially because it was the first Japanese indie game Valve allowed on the platform, which gave it a strong novelty. However, it was also a cute, well-designed game with a novel concept. You play as a girl running an item shop who haggles with customers to make a profit on her goods, gets exotics by hiring adventurers to go on expeditions, and works to pay off her mortgage. 

Recettear came out in an era where shop management games of this genre were largely unheard of— Dragon Quest IV doesn’t count, put your damn hand down! And this novelty helped it sell super well. Through reputation, word of mouth, and routine discounts, putting the $20 game down to $4 or $5 every major sale. A lot of people love the game, and it did an unquestionable amount of good for Japanese indie games on Steam. It expanded the audience, opened the doors for others, and just about any shop management game nowadays owes something to Recettear.

I personally played the game way back when I got into PC gaming in 2013, thought it was great, and still think it would hold up decently. However, even in 2013, the game was already showing its age. Being a 4:3 2D game with only a few 3D elements, and higher-end doujin level production values. It had good effects and details, but it had just enough jank that it would feel sticky if you handed it to someone today. PC games polished up a lot right after Recettear, and the game… just feels kind of old. I briefly checked it out— after losing my old save file because I didn’t realize it was in the main game directory, not AppData or my downloads— and it sure feels like a 2007 game. Because that’s when it came out in Japan! The way it’s truncated, the way dialogue is limited by the size of the text box, the quality of the 2D artwork, and the clunky configuration menu with limited options. Even the slow and not great introduction.

It’s still readily playable, but I also completely get why developer EasyGameStation is looking to remaster the title as Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale – HD Edition. …Except this is also confusing, as EasyGameStation was a successful Japanese indie developer back when the indie scene was small. However, their last release was in 2013, they let their website lapse, and their in-development game, Territoire, was never released. Something clearly happened, maybe it’s hidden in a Japanese Twitter thread. Also, the company who localized Recettear and brought it to Steam, Carpe Fulgur, has similarly been inactive. But the two key staff, Andrew Dice and Robin Light-Williams, went on to work on some pretty noteworthy stuff. Namely Trails in the Sky SC (2007/2015) and the recent Trails Through Daybreak (2021/2024). And it looks like they will be returning for Recettear HD. 

It’s one thing when a big corporation shoves out a remaster without the involvement of the people who actually made the original game, but this? This is a team getting back together to refine something they created 17+ years ago, and I hope it does well. Hell, I hope they can bring it to the Switch, as this is exactly the type of game that would work great for this platform, and would get people hyped to see in a Nintendo Direct. …Assuming they don’t just write it off as another obligatory cozy game… that also features dungeon crawling action RPG gameplay.  

And if a game like this still can’t come to consoles… then just what are we doing with the games industry, dude? I’ve said we should stop the games industry before, consequences be damned, but this year I mean it just a little more. 

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New Year, New AI Musings
(I Really Wish AI Tools Could Help Me With Anything…)

Gosh my feelings on AI are always so stupidly mixed and I hate them for that. While I am pissed at corporations for pushing forward all of this AI generated spam contaminating the human-made internet and hate everything corporations are using it for, I do think AI has some use cases. 

Helping people find information in a way that search engines really are not the best at doing by providing summaries and sources that may or may not be full of lies. Which is what a lot of professional internal AI programs are doing these days. Providing people with templates and pieces to get the direction and tone of writing something right. Something that can often be the hard and valueless part of writing, especially for people who are not writers. And just generating crap that people can use in whatever noncommercial ventures they have. I don’t really care if people use generated AI in whatever they want to use, as I view it as no different from appropriating existing assets for your own purposes. Making captions, using unlicensed music, that sort of thing. 

There are arguments against these things, of course, but I’m bringing this up because I keep on occasionally checking out AI generated TSF comics, which are an odd animal. While all the image content is provided by an AI, it is ultimately being written by a human, because I don’t know how you could get an AI to write a comic script. Clearly, work and creativity are necessary, as you cannot just crap out 100+ panels in an afternoon without thinking.

Sure, an AI generated comic takes materially less work than using a program like Koikatsu to create comics. You need to fight with the prompter to get what you desire, but that’s easier than posing characters in a 3D world. And it is far, far less work than picking up a digital pen and drawing a comic. But there is at least some artistry and human creativity on display here. I don’t think it’s much less than, say, tracing artwork, modifying the characters, or nabbing photos to tell a sequential story. It’s not good art, but there is enough human intention for me to consider this stuff art.

Anyway, I bring this up because I checked out AlwaysOlder’s latest AI TSF comic out of curiosity, Working Girl. Which is strangely a waitress TF, rather than a sex worker TF, when that’s usually what the term refers to. And it stuck out to me because I find it to be kind of hilarious, while also being 200 panels long. 

It features this wildly homophobic and hate-spewing teenage kid having the worst time while playing some multiplayer shooter. Except the exact writing circles back around from being worrying to being funny. At least to me. Rather than just rush through the transformation with a deluge of ‘what the fuck is going on, why am I so dan HRENY?’ like a typical one of these, there’s an attempt at dual storytelling. Bouncing between the protagonist and his sister while the dialogue fades into the next scene. There is a lot more unrest, uncertainty, and fear associated with the transformation, rather than gaining a sexy confidence like most of the creator’s other works. The dialogue in general is a level beyond what I would have expected, feeling very honest, not afraid to convey some real fear and anger. And the story… goes places.

You have this self-important shitbird being thrust into a scenario where he becomes this puddle of nerves. A reality change that his sister only barely remembers, turning her into his only confidant. Yet as he starts coming to terms with the fact that ‘oh shit, this might be my life now’, bam, handsome man comes to make his pussy gush like Niagara Falls! I normally hate this crap. If you are going to mind wipe a character, go for broke and give them a full identity death! But there is enough discussion over this, and enough plausible deniability to support the protagonist’s nymph lust, as this is also a reality change transformation. 

It actually does something with its narrative, has a goal for a story beyond just a sexy scenario, and takes time to establish its two main characters. It even has a two-part epilogue… that ends on such a good joke. That even after being transformed into a completely different person, without a facet of the former identity, the protagonist still loves trash talking teammates while playing multiplayer shooters.

It’s genuinely funny, has a lot of little things to talk about, and would meet some of the criteria for a TSF Showcase candidate. …If not for the fact that it’s AI crap, and I’m not going to showcase AI crap, especially when it looks this bad. Because half the time, this comic looks like a dog’s shit-caked asshole. 

The worst part has to be how the software does not understand what clothes and nipples are and assigns such Eiken-tier proportions to anything that I would say the comics look like trash on a visual level. Just genuinely unpleasant looking, and if this is your kink… what the fuck, Jack, you’re better than that! Which is before getting into how many of them are low resolution and artifacted to shit. …Wait, didn’t Eiken get an AI generated remake a while back? Yeah, it did!

Akumako: “The fuck’s an Eiken?”

Blasé harem trash, where every girl has rigid spherical boobs bigger than their heads. It stinks. But not as much as AI images. 

That being said, I know that something like Working Girl could NEVER work if it required an artist to draw everything. There isn’t any time or money for that! And there also should not be any money with what AlwaysOlder is doing. I will say that I like them as a creative mind and writer, but charging for AI images is something I have zero support for. I’d rather pay for something that was outright stolen, rather than something that has been creatively laundered and thrown through an acidic tumble dryer that ripped out the heart and soul of the source. But doing this for free? Yeah, sure, why not. There’s an environmental argument against that, and a damn good one, but blaming the common individual for systemic issues is totes lame, yo!

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Progress Report 2025-01-05

I would love to say that I started off 2025 being super productive, but I really wasn’t. In part due to fatigue from the end of year rush, but also my boss throwing a massive project my way full of pesky busywork. Don’t do DeFi kids, it will make your accountant’s life Hell and she will bill you $10,000 a year.

2024-12-29: Decided to review 10,000 words of lore for VD2.0, about a fifth of the World Information document, to expand and correct a few things. Then I fumbled through this 800 word GBA thing that my brain told me to create. And then I decided to go back to that Japanese body swap VN I talked about last week.

2024-12-30: YO! I wrote up 3,000 words for that VN I was talking about, did so well that I decided to just make it a last minute TSF Showcase for this year. ‘Cos fuck y’all! Wrote, edited, grabbed the images, replayed for more screenshots, who is the fucker in charge over here? I is the fucker in charge! Love Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde. Top 5 favorite album!

2024-12-31: Hey! Guess who was busy with work until around 18:00 and watched Rogue One with Cassie and Shiba? ME! I did about 800 words for the intro section of the Ramble during my downtime, but then decided to spend what remained of my New Years messing about in PokéRogue… because they have a holiday event going on.

2025-01-01: Hey! Guess who was busy watching movies with Cassie and Shiba at 12:00 and then had to go hang out with family until around 18:00? ME! Wrote 1,000 words for the preamble and 650 for the Recettear bit. Did some light organizing and just cleanup, but then I got distracted by more Rain in my DMs and tried editing what I could of this Rundown while working on an AI segment for 500 words.

2025-01-02: ARGH! Guess who was busy working from 11:00 to basically 21:00 on some mind numbing bullshit? Dis Bitch! Crypto accounting is a goldarn nightmare when you start shifting to more niche blockchains like Solana and Jupiter trades that cannot be read by most crypto reporting platforms. IDGAF if it’s a DEX, the developers are a bunch of ignorant fuckheads for not including a basic export option.  

2025-01-03: Another busy day for me, not really finishing up with work until around 20:30, and having some personal crud to deal with before my post-shower activities, where I decided to proofread and edit the World Information for VD2.0. I got through the info on the main four and that was about 8,000 words.

2025-01-04: After MONTHS, I finally cleared out my file backlog. I had over 1,000 pictures, and sorting them all out was an ordeal of file management. I keep asking why can’t an AI do this crap work? Maybe because AI is only good at generating specific things. Not doing specific things or learning. Copilot my bum! Went through 15,000 words of World Information, going over more of the main cast. Also wound up playing a bunch of Hades, and even got my first two clears. Hooray~!

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