Rundown (10/04/2026) Cruise Ship Body Swap Brainstorming

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Cruise Ship Body Swap Brainstorming
• Steam Changes Its Specials Section (Show Us The Games We Want!)
• Grasshopper Manufacture Goes Indie! (Get Hosed, NetEase!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Cruise Ship Body Swap Brainstorming

…I hate how these preamble rambles keep going back to the same well of topics, but I just can’t help it! There’s only so many unique things I can think of saying! Two weeks ago— just so you know how far I prep these things in advance— I watched Lindsay Ellis’s latest video, detailing her experience on various American cruise ships.

Akumako: “Of course you like her, ya lifetime Nebula subscription-ass-bitch.”

As someone who will never go on a cruise ship, much of what she discussed was brand new to me, and it got me thinking… that this would make a GREAT setting for a mass swap body swap event!

Akumako: “Just like how you thought that a Costco was a great setting for an event like that back in May?”

Yeah, exactly! Cruise ships are a very utilitarian setting for a story in general, as they are contained isolated spaces that are full of a broad spectrum of people and assorted entertainment activities. They are great settings for mysteries and detective stories as a rule, with murder mystery cruise ship stories being a pet genre in and of itself. And if something works well for a murder mystery, it will probably work well for a body swap story. …What? There’s more overlap than you might initially think!

I’ve already gone over what I mean by mass swap events, but as a refresher, it’s basically a body swap or possession event event that involves dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of people. Large enough to affect multiple groups of people, even make the news, but also small enough for it to be covered up, suppressed, or viewed with a widespread suspension of disbelief. The key factor in making the most of the premise, in my mind, is have the incident happen in a setting with a diverse and interesting demographic of people, spanning several genres. This isn’t the Minor Shift where like 1% of the world’s population gets swapped. That’s too broad. A mass swap event must be isolated to a defined place.

Ideally, you want to create avenues for an anthology of fascinating swap pairs or scenarios that can clash and intersect over the span of a narrative. To see the type of diversity I’m thinking of, One Year After the Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPMouse is still a gold star example of this concept.

So, why does a cruise ship setting captivate me so? Well, look at what they are. A giant hotel on water, full of recreational activities including pools, stages, casinos, opulent or faux opulent settings. Supplies are typically plentiful, yet strictly limited and easy to misappropriate, steal, or destroy. Food is plentiful through the kitchens, stocked with supplies, but there is little in the way of freedom to prepare one’s own food. While privacy is offered through one’s rooms, they are typically small places to sleep, bathe, and relax, lacking designated rooms for families or couples, and with the design of everything else, you cannot really get away.

Socialization and interactions with others is inevitable, and anybody who has frequented enough cruises has seen people get stir-crazy, violent, or generally pissy. And if that’s what they’re like in their normal body, imagine what they’d be like in someone else’s! It is a stage with plenty of room for unique set pieces with the assorted features and locales within a typical cruise ship, and by being an inherently social setting, interactions are mandatory.

Next, we have the demographics available. You might think cruise ships are full of rich old people, but that’s a fool’s assumption. Cruises are not as expensive as you may think, often have family packages, and held a status as an “every few years” middle class vacation destination for a few decades. Not so much nowadays, but I like writing stories set in the past more than the post-canonical present. This means you have both affluent retired folks who want to get away and full families who are doing the same, giving way to people spanning the ages of… 2 to 85? The lone thirtysomething vacationer, vacationing young couple, and middle-aged-not-senior aimless person who needs to get away after life threw them a curveball, all should be considered at the very least.

This is before getting into the staff of the cruise, who are easily ignored despite their constant presence as the people who make everything work. They are typically in the range of 25 to 50 years old and, depending on how expensive or international the cruise is, are typically staffed by people from poorer (browner) countries who commit to lengthy stays on the ship. They are expected to work for 10-12 hours a day, no weekends, for 6 to 9 months at a time, generally in order to send money back home to their families.

Despite their intensive nature, these positions are heavily desired, so the people working them feel fortunate on some level. However, they spend their days surrounded by cheap opulence, entitled Americans, and being “the help” for a predominantly Caucasian audience, watching them blow what they make in a week on some opt-in luxury. Resentment, animosity, envy, there are a lot of emotions that would be swirling through their mind, so the idea of them swapping bodies with a member of another class is ripe for exploration.

Perhaps they swap into a young child and have the opportunity to start their life anew with the financial backing of parents able to afford a cruise. Perhaps they manage to nab the body of a young vacationing couple, and must work with their legal partner in order to plot out their new lives, depending of course on who their partner used to be. Are they another staff member? Are they an elderly person given renewed youth, someone who had their life stolen from them abruptly? Or are they half of a young couple who must reconcile with the fact that they are now their spouse while some stranger is in their original body and want to act like nothing changed? That’s some HOT MILK if I do say so myself.

You could be boring and do inter-family swap, putting them in an isolated location with limited resources, limited privacy, and high tension. (Which is HOT MILK, but that’s arguably LESS interesting on a cruise ship than in jolly old suburbia. Less role performance.) Or you could play around with people gaining and losing various things with the transformation, making threats, trying to secure their former body’s assets to start a new life, and exploiting chaos for their own gain. Say someone swaps bodies into the captain or someone with access to keys. This gives them and a few trusted allies the ability to go in and snag valuables, raid the on-site gift shops of jewelry, and commit various flavors of financial fraud, abusing the shitty on-boat Wi-Fi.

God, It’s What’s Inside just poisoned my mind with phone banking and the ability to move millions without approval. I would say that’s bullshit, but I keep seeing crypto bros push against my conception of that sort of thing.

Also worth noticing is the fact that some cruise ships have various classes for people of various income levels. So you could get the folks treating this as their sole annual vacation and people who have more money than time and choose to go on cruises, first-class, like it ain’t no thang! The same is true for staff. The forward-facing staff of first-class would probably be whiter, better compensated, and be seen as more respectable than someone working as a housekeeper for the lower floors. Which is before getting into the back-end people making sure the ship is operating effectively. Maybe someone would flip out after swapping into one of those people, break something, and leave the boat nonoperational while the lead technicians, now in the bodies of a granny and 6-year-old, can’t do their darn jobs!

Like with many mass swap events, you could just imagine a list of genres of person that may be at a site like this, throw them into THE WHEEL, see how pairs go, and start exploring!

This is all before acknowledging that people would be trying to get away with some MAD SHIT while nobody is looking. There would be no effective monitoring system, no way to control people who want to steal, rape, start fights, or bring the motherfucking ruckus. Some may even nick a lifeboat and make their own route back to Puerto Rico with a new body and American Driver’s License in tow, staging their own death, just to more effectively steal their new body.

You might think I’m just harnessing my inner Saturday Morning Edgelord— because she’s one of the six voices in my head— but I do think a cruise ship is uniquely tuned to violence. With a smaller contained setting, like that of a Danganronpa game, the amount of people in attendance is relatively small, you can keep track of them, fit them on a bus. With the Costco idea, people could still just drive away. With The Great Shift or The Minor Shift, they were at least on land, generally only a couple kilometers from home. But on a cruise ship? Home’s probably a thousand plus miles away, they are literally at sea, which is where madness flourishes, and in an environment that BUILT as a social space. Hell, who is going to go into the kitchen to make food for everybody? With no food, people go bonkers!

This is chaos and tension is especially true if this event were to happen during the mid-point of a cruise. It would be far enough along where they can’t just turn back to cancel things. They would still have plenty of resources for a few days, but they would be stuck, in the middle of the ocean, with no idea how this happened, and no realistic way to turn back. (Body swap stories that result in character swapping back are fine, but I don’t think they work in a mass swap scale setting.)

I also want to stop and clarify that this concept is considerably different from TG staples like Exchange Island and Bikini Beach.

For those not privy on this Gen Xer shit, Gexxer shit if you prefer, Exchange Island is a resort where every visitor is swapped with someone else for the duration of their stay. Except, I swear they must be luring baddies with the promise of a free vacation and reprieve from “girl problems” so THEY can be the geriatric Mister Fubby. While Bikini Beach, from what I can gather, is in the name. It’s a beach where dudes become girls. ‘Nuff said. However this cruise idea, like many of my bigger ideas, would strive to shine a light onto the less palatably sexy side of body swapping.

Alas, I know I don’t have the time capacity to start writing a novel with shifting perspectives, oodles of side stories, and an overarching narrative of people trying to discover who was responsible for this swap. …Which would naturally result the mystery remaining unsolved by any living person.

Akumako: “…I think you would LOVE being part of some monthly TSF writer’s club where you are FORCED to go through with a big overarching idea, or similar theme, and crank out a 5k to 20k word story every month.”

Honey, if I had three extraverted bones in my body, as opposed to zero, I would have tried running that YEARS ago. I still have slight regrets not doing that with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018) after it became, objectively, a possession game. …At least in terms of the main campaign. I even made a list!

Akumako: “So this is just another idea for the pyre?”

Unfortunately, it is.

…Boomers, Gexxers, Minullz, Zoomies, Alphers? Yeah, I can futz with that naming scheme.

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Steam Changes Its Specials Section
(Show Us The Games We Want!)

…This is kind of a nothing story, but it’s Wednesday night when I’m writing this, and I gotta gab about SOMETHING.

For as much as I complain about Steam for this, that, and the Nazi thing, I also acknowledge that what they are doing is incredibly difficult. With tens of millions of people logging on a day, with thousands of games released a year, running it is simply a nightmare. Valve’s solution, for better or for worse, has been to automate as many things on their store as possible to get people to buy things. The discovery queue, tag-based recommendations, friend-based recommendations via user reviews, and various systems meant to lump users together. Without these systems, people wouldn’t be able to find things in this slurry, and the crap games hitting the platform would be shoved before more than 1% of users.

Valve has been trying to dedicate more and more of their store page to a wider, more user-tuned, list of games for years. They are relying less on generalized hotness and more on what an established player has played, or what their friends have played. You can see this with the general design of the store page, starting with the corral of bigger titles, maybe a banner for a major new release. But if you scroll down, you get into more personalized stuff with the new calendar system, wishlist games, DLC, and the aforementioned discovery queue.

In line with this desire to differentiate Steam for all users, Steam has begun sunsetting their staple Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals program. Instead, users will see wishlisted games on sale, or that they might be interested in. This is partially due to Valve’s desire to not manage dozens/hundreds of requests for deal placements, where they will only listen to publishers with more than a pittance of panache. But it is also a move that should make Steam a slightly more fair platform for smaller and lesser known games, as they will be shown to more users. It sounds more like a band-aid of a solution, but anything that can help smaller games get more page views, which this change is already doing, is a good thing.

Also, just to clarify, this is not Valve exerting more control on developers or anything. Devs can pretty much do whatever they want when it comes to discounting their games, only limited by start time and duration. Valve is also not doing some “dynamic pricing” thing. Nor is this an end to big publisher, expo, themed, or seasonal sales. All it is doing is changing what it shows you by default, something that user generated content platforms just do nowadays. It’s not going to cost you more for games, but you will probably spend more on them this way, and that’s kind of what stores are designed to do.

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Grasshopper Manufacture Goes Indie!
(Get Hosed, NetEase!)

Oh heck yeah! Grasshopper has gone independent after 13 years of corporate ownership!

For those not privy to its history, Grasshopper was one of those studios to rise out from the creative glut that persisted in 90s Japanese game development. From the glorious husk of Human Entertainment, Grasshopper was one of the more enduring names to come from it, developing a smorgasbord of oddball titles over their tenure. From peculiar adventure games like Flower, Sun, and Rain (2001) to cult classics like No More Heroes (2007) and pure what the fucks like Rebuild of Evangelion: Sound Impact (2011). …What, did you NOT know there was an Evangelion rhythm game for PSP? What are you, a larper?

Unfortunately, with game budgets rising, and spreading themselves around like mad during the PS3 generation, Grasshopper needed stability. In 2013, they were bought by GungHo Online Entertainment. There, they produced Let It Die (2016), seemingly lost a bunch of staff, before veering off to their own thing with a No More Heroes reprisal and a 2021 transfer from GungHo to NetEase. Why NetEase? Because they were on a big international purchase bender, and have been back-pedaling since The Trump 2.0 Era began and fucked up too many things to recount.

Under NetEase, Grasshopper only released Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered (2024) and Romeo Is a Dead Man (2026). A fair remaster of a game that would need a ground up reworking to “fix” itself, and another eccentric and esoteric Suda51 bender. Neither sold too well, and nothing about Grasshopper makes sense under NetEase’s current China directive.

With their independence reclaimed, it’s anyone’s guess what Grasshopper will get up to next, but I truly hope it’s that of an indie developer. Simply put, their games are so bizarre it’s kind of a waste for them to be chasing the mantle of $60 games that last 10+ hours, and I would like to see them pursue more traditionally indie game shit. Games more on the level of Sine Mora (2012), Liberation Maiden (2012), and Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day (2014). Hell maybe even go back to The Silver Case (1999) and Contact (2006) days. …Or give people Michigan: Report from Hell (2004) again, as the Zoomies would freaking LOVE that game.

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Progress Report 2026-10-04

Ah beans, Cassie told me to write about Aokana. Well, I guess I can give a short review. Adapted from a 2014 visual novel of the same name, Aokana is a vibrant sports anime set in an idyllic near future sci-fi world where humans have achieved their long-held dream of flight with special magic shoes that let them soar through the air. As such, it’s only natural that they use this technological innovation for the invention of a new sport, Flying Circus! Which is a slightly misleading name for a series of one-on-one racing battles where players must hit goal posts in the over-sea battle arena, choosing to either specialize in speed or in bonking their opponents on the back of the head.

While conceptually simple, and likely not the most riveting in VN form, the anime adaptation does a great job of making the games thrilling. Characters soaring across the blue-on-blue battlegrounds with trailing colors, clad in outfits that are more extravagant than exhibitionist, and bashing into each other with a colorful symbol clash. However, the reason these mean anything is naturally due to the cast of characters, wisely limited to three main girls, and Rika the purple extra one, who all share in their desire to be the best sportsgirl they can be, entering under the tutelage of the protagonist who… is mostly there for the most part.

It hits all the necessary spots for a quality girls sports anime. Characters start from the bottom before rising from the top. Dealing with unresolved childhood issues. A group of misfits and oddballs rallying together around a passion where their quirks are a boon over a bane. And a fair bit of drama, as these are teenage girls, and what is a teenhood without a bit of drama, doubt, and personal issues? It’s not the most original one, and I got the inkling that a lot was streamlined to funnel the story into a tunnel of training and tournaments, but it still executes on everything it sets out to do well. With a gorgeous setting, cute girls, and an endearing soundtrack you might recognize from the award-winning Press-Switch, it’s a Cassie approved, Good Time™.

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2026-09-27: Spent time with Cassie, birthday funsies with her, and watched Aokana. REALLY WEIRD watching an anime and hearing music from Press-Switch play! Spent too much time theorycrafting ideas with Missy on a project she’s working on. FINALLY started work on my FSN review, getting 2,800 words in. This will be like 7,000 words long.

2026-09-28: Played some Donkey Kong 64 after working for 10 hours, wrote like 3,200 words for the FSN review. I do not care if it winds up being 10,000 words long, I WANT to talk about themes and characterization in detail! I think I decided on the right format, but I need to figure out how to talk about the first two routes.

2026-09-29: Played too much Donkey Kong 64, still love-hate that best-worst autistic game. Wrote like 400 more words for the FSN review. Taking forever.

2026-09-30: Worked late, chatted with Missy for like 2 hours, discussing the merits of a game where you play as a defined protagonist versus one where you control a party. Wrote the Steam and Grasshopper bits, so that’s 850 words. Quickly made this week’s header. Had to do banking at night, so no additional writing.

2026-10-01: Played some Sengoku Rance before it came out on Steam and became UNCOOL! The game’s pretty dope, but it REALLY could use a proper manual to help me understand all of its systems, because grand strategy games, even more simplified ones, always overwhelm me. Edited this Rundown, got her ret-2-go. Wrote like 300 words for the Fate Stay Night review.

2026-10-02: FINALLY! Made some good progress on the FSN review, writing the Heaven’s Feel bit, the presentation bit and finally the conclusion. Now I just need to edit it, watch the anime, and write about its pros and cons as an adaptation. Watched six episodes of the anime, really liking how they mix, match, and add new stuff.

2026-10-03: Fuck it, we ball! Worked today, watched some Date A Live Season 5 with Cassie, then decided to FINISH the Fate Stay Night anime adaptation. Really interesting how they adapted it, and that’s all I wanted to see!

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Natalie.TF To Do List

• 2026-10-14: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain Request)
• 2026-10-28: Natalie Rambles About Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled
• 2026-11-11: Ecstatica Review
• 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau de Bitz
• 2026-11-25: Money for Girls: Amortized Review
• 2026-12-09: Natalie Rambles About Delicious in Dungeon
• 2026-12-30: Natalie Rambles About 2026
• 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
• 2026-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6

• 2027-02-03: Danganronpa 2×2: Super Summer Slayhem Review
• 2027-02-17: Metroid 6: Ravenous Review
• 2027-03-03: Muramasa: Re;Venant Blades Review
• 2027-07-15: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act IV: Post Psycho
• 2027-??-??: Beast of Re;Incarnation Review
• 2027-??-??: TSF Showcase: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
• 2027-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
• 2027-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)