BenLuke

Walking Dead Season the Second

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Ah! Dagnabbit darn dangit damn.

 

I don't think it affects the ending you got but it felt more in-character, in the moment.

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Yeah that's all I really wanted, since that's all the really game is, hah.

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I think you misunderstood me, I said they were awful for leaving the baby behind with Kenny, if they think Kenny is so terrible, why leave the baby with him?

And while I agree Kenny is a jerk, but they make him look much worse than how I saw him, maybe taking his side make him act or say kinder words?

 

The only question is, would Arvo still make the group defect if Kenny didn't beat him up? Would Arvo still tell the group of Russian thugs to rob us if Jane didn't steal the medicine? While it was true she had a sister, it did seem like he was lying about her being ill, he's the one with the leg brace, it seems nobody ever talks about it.

 

So yeah, Kenny is violent jerk, but the whole group had spent enough time with him to know how he is, it's kinda dumb for the group to all of the sudden flee from him as if they just met him and didn't know how he was... it felt so forced. All of it, the beating, the group running away, all of it...

 

Kenny might be violent and want people to do as he says, but he's probably the most valuable member of the group in resourcefulness and usefulness, he knew about farmer, he's a tinkerer and can fix and make things, he was the only one who seemed how to take care of a baby, the rest of the group... knew how to use a gun and not much more. That's mostly why I tend to stand with Kenny, he considers Clem "family", so he'll protect Clem with his own life, heck, he practically sacrificed his life in my ending.

 

But anyway, like I said the decisions in general feel more forced than organic and thank God The Wolf Among Us felt more organic than this.

 

But isn't Bigby as violent as Kenny? Even more if you choose a darker path.

 

I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm just annoyed at how forced everything felt in this episode.

 

I really hope they wrap up things in the next season, if there is a fourth one, I don't think I'll be able to care about it. I don't know about you guys, but when it comes to more dramatic stories, the longer they get, the more I lose interest in them.  <_<

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Bigby was definitely as violent as Kenny. Probably/definitely more! But Bigby had power. Kenny wanted power, but the world conspired against him. Not like, an actual conspiracy or anything, just that the world of The Walking Dead is an incredibly shitty one. The Fables world, for all its darkness, has hope. If there's one lesson we can take from this season of TWD, it's that there is no hope.

 

Which, you know, could easily be an argument against TWD's favor, but that's not my point. Oh well.

 

Also, you're right, sorry, I misunderstood you re: Mike, etc. taking the baby!

 

I don't know if Arvo would've still done all those things, but my gut says yes. I think he was stealing that medicine himself in episode four, hiding it from his group. For what reason, I don't know, but why would he be hiding it by himself instead of taking it back to his group, otherwise? He's a shifty character. He clearly hated Clementine, regardless of the rest of what happened, because she killed his sister. Even though she'd already turned. It didn't matter.

 

I did tend to flip-flop a lot between siding with Kenny and not. I like Kenny. But he was wrong so often, it was hard. Kind of like season one. He was wrong. A lot. But he was also one of the most real characters to me then, and now. I felt sorry for him more than I hated him, but I know that most people in real life would not. They'd react with their own anger. Kenny is one of those types of people who can bring out the worst in everyone around him. Hell, I think they even explicitly say that in this episode. Bah.

 

Things I liked from this episode:

The campfire scene. All the dancing around the subject of sex with Clem. "It's just kissing and stuff." Oh, Clem.

 

Arvo going back and forth between Russian and English. I liked not being able to understand him. Good touch.

 

The fight between Kenny and Jane was well done. I kept getting stressed out because I liked both Kenny and Jane and couldn't decide who to help. Finally when Kenny started driving the knife into Jane's chest I had no choice. It was good.

 

I "like" the fact that Jane was a lying asshole. It fucking killed me.

 

I hate having to put everything in spoiler tags; for some reason, it makes it harder for me to organize my thoughts. ):

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All this "not as good as season 1" and "cliche" hand waving is horeshit. I cried just as much at the Lookaway/Wellington ending as Season 1's ending. The inflections in Kenny's voice at his most sincere is heart wrenching. Season 2 was worth the money and the time. I have no desire to see other branches or even youtube the others because that shit ended beautifully. Season 3 with a new protagonist and some surviving season1/2 characters is all I'll need to start again.

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Frankly, I choose to stand by Kenny since the game seems to want me to do the opposite and I'm glad I did, the ending I choose with Kenny was the most gut-wrenching from I've seen how the others end. Despite how upset by the very forced decisions I saw coming, the ending did tear me up.

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While I don't think the season as a whole was better than the first, I do think this was a fantastic end. And heart wrenching too.

 

In the end I decided to look away as Kenny killed Jane, following which I panicked and opted to also shoot Kenny. The way Clementine points the gun and Kenny just says "do it".....fuck. Instant regret. :(

 

One thing that has disappointed me about this season was the lack of puzzles. The first season I felt still had one foot into its point and click roots, this season seemed to abandon that in favour of straight storytelling. Ferrying the player from encounter to the other, which is fine I guess as it's still one of the finest video games written. I just maybe want a little more interactivity in the next season.

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So I played the entire game in one long sitting on Labor Day.

 

I feel like a lot of the deaths in the game happened out of narrative convenience more than anything else. A bandit girl kills Omid and then in the next scene, a bandit group kills Christa? (Also, what happened to Christa's baby?) In ep 3, the distinct lack of Sarita, Alvin, and Carlos, telegraphed that the writer's didn't have anything more to say with them, so might as well kill them all off now. I actually feel worse about Matthew's and Walter's death as Matthew was quite kind and Walter at least was perceptive w/ Clementine.

 

Walter in particular helped define the game's tone for when he told Clem that people underestimate her. I found myself only liking the characters that didn't patronize Clem, which were Luke and Jane. I noticed there are a few times that Clem can say something along the lines of "I'm just a kid!" but I never took those b/c my perception of Clem is that she doesn't see her relation to the world that way anymore.

 

A couple of parallels that I noticed involving Kenny were interesting. The most obvious one is the dog in ep. 1 and Jane noting that Kenny is like a rabid dog later on. In season 1, I always felt Kenny was more of a burden than Clem specifically b/c he always felt ready to explode and he was constantly splitting the group apart, as he continued to do in season 2. Sure he seemed friendly, but as soon as something didn't go his way, he would start biting; I think this crystalized for me in episode 2 of season 1, where he drops the cinder block on top of the man having the heart attack while Lee was trying to help him, which leads me to my second parallel.

 

I cut off Sarita's zombie-bit arm in an attempt to save her. She still got mauled by another of the horde and as Kenny is on the floor begging her not to die, I had Clem drive the axe into Sarita's head. I'm not sure if this played out the same for all ya'll across the seasons, but it made me think again about the cinder block scene.

 

In the end, I chose to kill Kenny. Both Jane and Kenny were deeply flawed while still being sincere in their actions, but I felt Jane would be a much more stable, safer choice for Clem's partner.

 

Did anyone else think Luke had got bit when he talks to Clem in the comic book store? His skin seemed to have that gray hue that they give characters when they're turing to zombies and his frantic behavior made him look feverish. When I went to give him the radio and there was no response, I assumed it was because his zombified corpse was waiting to pounce me.

 

 

While I don't regret playing season 2, I didn't enjoy it anywhere as near as the first. Sure the first had glaring issues (the judgement finale; throwaway character in S1E2; etc.), but I feel it got away with that stuff b/c it was so novel. I still like the idea of being a sort of co-writer/actor in these types of games though, so I'll definitely check out reviews for season 3 and hope they do a better job with it all.

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No you're right. The animation system is getting a bit long in the tooth. The body animations can be pretty wooden but I find the transitions between facial emotions or whatever they're called even more jarring. Like, I pick a positive response and the person I'm talking to transitions to "smile" face...it's too robotic. I hope they revamp things for the next season.

 

I don't know if I'd like puzzles to come back. I don't think they fit with the style of game Telltale is going for, but I would like to see some more open ended areas, where I'm free to move around, check things out, and talk to people as I want. Sometimes this season felt too on rails for me.

 

Regarding the final episode:

I ended up killing Kenny and staying with Jane. I wanted so, so badly for Kenny to get his shit together, but when it came down to it the guy was just too unstable despite his usefulness. Jane's little trick worked on me I guess. I mean what good is a guy who can fix a car when he might slam your head in the door for disagreeing with him? I guess after I shot him he finally realized how off the reals he'd gone...that scene killed me. I thought about leaving Jane after that, but a girl and a baby probably don't have good odds by themselves. Same reason I let the family in.

 

My big complaint is that the zombies seemed to appear and disappear at the whims of the story. Like they were out there chasing us on the lake, but then everyone gets in the house and they're gone. Or they're all around that rest stop, but after Kenny and Jane fight, they just vanish. Kinda lazy, I thought.

 

Overall I thought the season was pretty good...I liked the new characters and most of the writing (though there have been some valid complaints made in this thread). I'm curious what they do with season three. I think Jane would have been an interesting playable character, but she's dead in some playthroughs so that's out. Just have to wait and see I guess.

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Don't you...

... Kill all the zombies? I chose to pick them off from a distance to be safe, (also fuck you Bonnie, it was you who cracked the ice you blame-shifting dick 'ead). Anyway, there were only about 10 of them who were attracted by the initial gun shot, anyone who's survived this long is pretty good at picking off walkers anyway.

 

Maybe in the scene on the ice you do, or it's implied at least, but at the rest stop I deliberately didn't kill the zombies when I was wandering alone in the snow figuring it might attract attention. They don't attack you and later on they're just gone. I feel like there were other scenes where this happened but I can't remember...

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I just finished too.

 

Over this season, I have been a little disappointed and I think the flashback scene was a good reminder of what I miss from season 1. There was no core emotional hook to the season. The first was all about Lee and Clem. This one was about Clem and... a series of different survivors. There was no key character really, even with say Kenny or Jane or the sheltered girl I forgot the name of, there is a relationship but the way the series was planned there was no one person to tie it all around.

 

The main emotional focus of the story was Clem maturing/showing her maturity but to be honest, I'd be more interested in playing Clem as a vulnerable character that has to deal with everyone else taking charge on her behalf. I didn't feel like Clem's experience was very different to Lee's, they were both influential and highly capable members of the group.

 

Also for for choices I was similarly unwilling to let Kenny go on, even if Jane was using very questionable methods to show me what I already knew about Kenny. She does literally pull out a knife on him.

 

Frankly I was more surprised about the baby choice from the start of the episode, so many people wanted to try saving a baby in the middle of a fire fight where we were already pushing the limits of luck with no injuries.

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Just finished it, and...

 

Overall, I enjoyed this season more than the first. I really welcomed the focus on dialogue and decision-making at the expense of puzzles and gotcha-QTEs that frustrated me in the first season. I also felt like my decisions had more impact, as they had direct implications for the person that Clementine was growing up to be. I also found it hilarious and kind of an interesting statement about humanity that so many of the adult characters were ultimately dependent on the leadership of a pre-pubescent girl. That's probably a criticism for some people, but I really enjoyed that aspect.

The narrative didn't have the same neat focus that the first season had, but I preferred that as well. The themes and relationship dynamics felt a bit more subtle; for example, in the first season I often felt at times that Kenny was just an unreasonable and illogical arsehole, but in the second season I think they did a much better job of contextualising his shitty behaviour. I also felt like the most significant choices were more thoughtful and inspired than some of the choices offered in the first season; there were more choices along the lines of, 'Do you want to make the survivalist choice or the humanist choice?' as opposed to, 'Choose whichever you personally prefer out of these two roughly equivalent choices'.

With the multiple endings, it's hard to imagine that Clementine will be a playable character in the third season, which I'm kind of okay with, as I think her story is done. I do kind of hope the next season is the last though, and that they tie everything up in a satisfying conclusion, because it would be a shame if this excellent series became a classic victim of the dragged-on-too-long syndrome.

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I just finished too.

 

There was no core emotional hook to the season. The first was all about Lee and Clem. This one was about Clem and... a series of different survivors. There was no key character really, even with say Kenny or Jane or the sheltered girl I forgot the name of, there is a relationship but the way the series was planned there was no one person to tie it all around.

 

The main emotional focus of the story was Clem maturing/showing her maturity but to be honest, I'd be more interested in playing Clem as a vulnerable character that has to deal with everyone else taking charge on her behalf. I didn't feel like Clem's experience was very different to Lee's, they were both influential and highly capable members of the group.

 

These are my main criticisms of the second season, as well.

 

I also felt like there's no strong central arc to tie the season together, certainly nothing on the level of the Lee/Clementine relationship in season 1. I was hoping it would be all about Clem's journey, how she grows as a character, what sort of person she becomes and her struggle to be taken seriously and respected by the adults around her. But there's not much sense of a progression - she starts out pretty tough and self-reliant, and ends up pretty tough and self-reliant, with some tragedies and misadventures along the way alongside a cast of fairly one-note fellow survivors (most of whom were too-easily sorted into "good guy" and "bad guy" categories).

 

And you're right, she plays too much like Lee. When she speaks up in favor of a plan, the rest of the group tends to go along with it, and she seems to be entrusted with the lion's share of dangerous tasks. Of course she's the protagonist, and the player obviously needs to have some agency in the story, but I really wanted to see more characters ignore, dismiss and underestimate her, or try too hard to coddle her. My favorite part of the whole season is when she stitches herself up in the shed. To me that moment - more than any other moment in the game - drives home how resourceful and tough Clementine can be in order to protect herself when no one else around her will, even though she's scared and alone and in way over her head (although the mood is totally ruined by the predictable zombie encounter, in my opinion). 

 

I didn't find the climax very effective, either. The season doesn't give you much time to warm up to Kenny before he goes off the rails, Jane is a cool character that doesn't get much time to develop, and the baby kind of comes out of left field. Everyone's instinct is naturally to be protective of a baby, but I don't think it really ties into Clementine's character in any specific way. I guess it was super-effective as the catalyst for Kenny's insanity, though. And I will say, although I don't like Kenny and found the final decision too easy to make, I think he's one of the best-written and fullest characters in the series. 

 

Lastly, I really disliked a lot of the zombie encounters. It's a problem that most zombie fiction seems to suffer from, but it seems like the zombies pop up out of nowhere simply because the plot calls for it. They're slow, mindless and clumsy, but they seem to have a knack for materializing out of the trees and instantly surrounding the group, somehow without making any noise or getting noticed until the last second. It really felt like a zombie ex machina that happened whenever an action scene, some tension or a character death was called for.

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So I finally finished this, and

 

I agree with a lot of what's already been said.  I stand my comment from earlier in this thread that this season felt quite unnecessary in comparison to Season One.  ("Well, Walking Dead was a hit, guess we have to make more!" It works for Star Wars, but not for Casablanca) The episodes were disjointed, Clementine was illusion-breakingly competent for small child, and in general the characters came and went far too quickly for me to care dramatically about their deaths.  By episode 3, I had already started to lose track of who was who, and when Luke mentioned that he was the only survivor left from his original group in episode 5, he was basically putting a giant "I'm about to die" hat on.

 

I disagree about Kenny being wrong repeatedly in this season.  He's repeatedly proven *right* about a whole host of things, from the need to resist Carver & Co down to Arvo being untrustworthy. (Also, speaking of Arvo, did Telltale really have to borrow Hollywood's "untrustworthy Russians" trope? Lazy stereotyping in an otherwise smart series, IMHO) Just because Kenny is *blunt* about being right, everyone makes him about to be this sociopath, when really he's just an asshole, who calls the terrible world he's in like he sees it and doesn't see the need for being diplomatic.  Even so, I killed Kenny in the end because Jane tricked me, the player, in addition to Kenny about the baby.  Thinking about it makes his whole arc and appearance this season more frustrating, though.  I was at peace with the fact that he died at the end of S1, then they miraculously bring him back to life, just so I can watch him break down to the point where I'm manipulated into killing him?

 

And what happened to Christa? What I thought was going to be a huge driving narrative push this season was basically dropped completely. Why does S2 leave her fate ambiguous if it's never going to mention it again? There was also potential here to draw parallels between Christa surviving, presumably at the expense of her child in Episode 1, and Rebecca's child surviving at the expense of her life, but the game never seemed to go there. Oh, and speaking of the baby...

 

The baby surviving while all these adults are fighting and complaining about lack of food was by far the most improbable part of this season. Newborns eat *constantly*, like every hour, and they scream when they don't get fed.  But here in Walking Dead-land, this baby's mom dies after a day or two, and is carried around in the freezing cold by a bunch of people who seem to make no effort to feed her at all.  Kenny and Jane hate each other so much that they just have to fight it out to the death, but the baby can be left in a truck in the freezing cold and be fine? Riiight.  This tops even the part where Clementine is shot in the chest after while still recovering from hypothermia and survives, seemingly without any medical help at all.

 

I agree that it needed some puzzles, too, not because adventure games "need puzzles" but because it needed some spacer moments where the player could just take some time to *go do some stuff* instead of having another heated conversation.

 

I don't mean to be totally down on the series, I still think it has some great writing and fantastic beat moments, and Telltale is one of the best in the business, but I think this season needed some serious design changes. Clementine should not have been the PC, at least not so young. It raises too many narrative problems and draws comparisons to Season One.  This season was mostly disappointing not because of the various missteps I stated above but because of the seeming missed opportunity. I think it would have been more satisfying if they'd just completely shifted focus to a different group and we'd seen a dynamic other than "Group tries to stick together but instead everyone slowly dies."  (The DLC was actually pretty promising at this sort of direction, and then turned out to be almost a complete red herring in regards to Season Two.) I get it - in a world run with zombies, it's not the zombies who are a threat, it's the people.  This is a strong theme and it worked well in S1, but christ this series needs something else to say or else it should not be.  It's not that there aren't options: What does hope look like in this world? What does the future look like? Is there going to be a new society built that can accommodate for the existence of walkers? If not, how many people are left - the population of non-walkers must be dwindling by now.  I would like to see a high-functioning group wrestle with the fact that, even if they do everything right, and kill all the walkers and *don't* have any major disasters or conflicts, they are all going to die from the simple inability to produce or find enough food.  I hope Season Three moves in this direction.

Edited by lobotomy42

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The thing people seem to ignore about motion capture is that you're motion capturing ACTING. So you still have to spend the time casting, rehearsing, and directing the actor that you would otherwise spend animating them. It means you can't cast for voice alone, you have to cast actors who can act (in an isolated face capture box) at a nuanced and true-to-the-character degree that's better than your animators or cinematic direction team can produce on top of a good voice performance alone. (Note: there are very few actors who can do that.)

Other points:

- A good voice actor can often lay down more than one line a minute, which is valuable as hell in a game with a script that is thousands of lines long even for a couple hours of gameplay. This means a team can get all the lines for the main characters recorded, trimmed, and into the games language database within days of the script being complete, which is of immense value On an episodic schedule, and very hard-to-impossible to achieve with other methods.

- The previsualization phase has to be WAY longer and cannot overlap with main production, if mocap is involved, because once you mocap something, that is basically your final motion data unless you do a lot of ripping apart, reconstructing, retargeting work to fix something you don't like.

- If your characters face designs have a stylized look and pull exaggerated comic book or cartoon like expressions to convey emotion simply (as they do in WD), real human face capture often ends up looking creepy and unnatural when applied to those face models, and have to be touched up or re animated by hand anyway.

I think motion capture -- especially face capture -- for a cast of 15, for a bi-monthly 90-120 minute video game is just an untenable solution. Referring to those processes as automatic or as some magic bullet is assuming that just "recording a human doing something" is all that is involved, when the part that takes up all the time is actually conceiving and getting the performance right, regardless of your production pipeline. (And that has to be coupled with the reality of your budget, schedule, team size, etc.)

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played the first two episodes of this over the last week. Quite enjoyed it.  I wasn't sure about how i'd feel about controlling Clementine, like my feelings toward her are attached to lee if you know what I mean. She's an established character and I've been seeing her through someone else's eyes, in the first season she was this person who you based all your decisions on and cared for the most. Now she's all those things AND YOU as well. I was really worried about it but by the end of the first episode I was really in to it. I really like this new savvier, more mature Clementine, she can be manipulative and a bit of a d*ck.  It's also quite striking at times to be in control of someone so small. I really liked the moment in episode 2 where

you got to the top of the lookout tower and the camera zoomed out away from Clementine to show the landscape. It was a really small touch but it was something TWD hadn't done before, it was a cool cinematic effect.  I think episode 2 was pretty darn strong in general really. The intruder in the house was really creepy and unsettling, the incident on the bridge and the dread waiting for the inevitable fall out. Ace.

. Cant wait to play more but I am determined to ration it. One a week from now on. Make an event out of it, like a TV show. Get in to my dressing gown, pour a glass of whisky and play through it like a king.

 

I do have one minor observation/ gripe. I would have loved an option for Clementine to say "Don't call me Clem" because Pete does that almost immediately and I was like whoa man that's a bit familiar... and lee called her that :'(.  Although that would have created complications in dialogue down the road probs. 

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I also share the view that the characters were not as interesting and developed as in the first season and that the twists in the finale felt quite arbitrary. One thing I haven't seen mentioned here (sorry if I've missed it) is the car scene. It looked like Kenny and Jane were actually beginning to figure out how to get along in their own way. Sure, it was a pretty heated discussion but it seemed quite healthy for these characters to have it at that point. It definitely didn't strike me as something that could really lead to violence and both Kenny and Jane dropped it immediately after they had to stop the car suggesting it was just a way these personalities have to communicate sometimes. I'm not sure if it had been written that way intentionally to increase the shock value of the following events (and the effect was more confusing than shocking to me) or I'm just being crazy in interpreting the fight this way.

The last episode also contained several events whose portrayal and consequences were obviously completely unrealistic which is something the game always tried to avoid. The initial shootout was almost comical in how it was portrayed and how lucky all the "named" characters were. Getting shot later was no big deal for Clementine, she just passed away for a while and then she just held her shoulder with her other arm for a moment and that was it. Also you probably don't want to hang out in your wet clothes after getting out of frigid water.

Sure, there were some jarring moments in previous episodes too but they never had such a negative impact on my experience as the S2 finale ones.

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Played Episode 3 the other day and really enjoyed it

I quite liked Carver as a character and how this episode they played on Clementine actually being a bad ass asshole now. And Sarah is basically Clementine in season 1, i've started to be more and more tough on her. Liked the choices too. I didn't even consider not staying to watch, although I was surprised at how violent and shocking it was. I did hesitate on chopping off the arm though, that ending was quite brilliant. Like Jane too and her comment "they're all going to die, look out for yourself" is pretty much how I approach the game. Clementine first. I am enjoying this savvy, capable, asshole Clementine.

 

There was one bit where the I thought the game broke though. When you had toput the music on I just couldnt find the bloody CD!. Walked around the room about 50 times. I wasn't able to search the desk which I found odd. Was sure it was a bug. Then i found it right under my nose under the mic. Idiot.

 

Can't wait for episode 4 :)

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Finished this yesterday. I didn't like the last three episodes and will definitely not be buying the third season. I guess a lot has been already said and the experience was so deflating I don't feel like going into all that bothered me. I just felt like the game manipulated me throughout without any notion of sticking to the established rules of this world.

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