Easy to Find - Sayakaquest 2

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To make people actually remember, here's it once for posterity: Minako is nonbinary and uses they/them. This message will be pinned so you people stop getting it wrong and pissing me off. If you get it wrong in the future I'm going to be much less nice, considering you have to scroll past it just to read the quest.
 
Really liking the pictures for this so far.

[X] "New in town?"
-[X] Anyone give you Meguca 101 yet? The dos and donts?
 
[X] "New in town?"
-[X] Anyone give you Meguca 101 yet? The dos and donts?

The new girl is magical girl, what a twist.

Sayaka's transformation and armor is next level grandiose, I approve. You must have had fun.

Enjoy the use of Land of the Lustrous music, watched it over the course of a week and I have to say it was probably the best 3d anime I've seen (it's a VERY low bar, but now it's been set much higher).
 
[X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)

Don't treat a witch so lightly. Kill it fast, and kill it well. Conversations can come afterwards, where we can see how Woke she is as a meguca.
 
MobiusOneDT said:
Enjoy the use of Land of the Lustrous music, watched it over the course of a week and I have to say it was probably the best 3d anime I've seen (it's a VERY low bar, but now it's been set much higher).
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Hot take it's one of the best directed animated shows I've seen period. It's a gorgeous series with exceptional camera work, a wonderful aesthetic and really interesting existential themes. I mean I'd gush more but this is a quest thread not a "moid is incredibly self-indulgent" thread.

look i just love this series about nonbinary immortal gems okay.

Also a fuckton of buddhist imagery but that gets more emphasis the further into the manga you go.
 
[X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)


I'm very iffy on the idea of talking meguca 101 when the witch isn't dead yet. She doesn't seem like a new girl. Let's kill the witch first.
 
The Laurent said:
Okay, I want to, like, become her mentor-ish figure, or something, while voting for options that keep her from "meeting the parents" as long as possible, just so that when they finally "meet for the first time" it's just this complete disaster.

Is that too much to ask?
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I support this plan.

[X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)
 
Kinda noticing that people are kinda wondering what the hell happened in SQ1 and given how big (and messy) it is I honestly cannot blame anyone for not wanting to blitz through it.

So I'mma write a summary that covers the broad strokes in a bit.
 
SAYAKAQUEST 1 IN A NUTSHELL
  • Informational
    • SayakaQuest 1 is a product of uh...two years of meandering about, slapping on a keyboard nearly every single day, multiple times a day in short bursts of hundreds of words. It is also four years old, six if you just include everything up to the beginning. So naturally that's a big red flag. It's no wonder then that a lot of people might be intimidated because, I mean, SQ1 is fucking big and honestly messy.

    So let's get to it, fuckers.

    That said, keep in mind this is a summary, and as such it's going to gloss over a lot of minute details. This is mostly to cover the key players in SQ2. If you want everything, you might still be better off reading through SQ. Preferably when it has a functional threadmark system.

    (A massive thank you to @Interested Party for that, by the by.)

    PART ONE. INTROBEGINNING.

    Sayaka Miki is a magical girl, but more important her wish was to help her crush get his ability to play the violin back. This means that she can heal from pretty much any injury. In this show, this means super durability, but in Sayakaquest, it means she can heal from basically any injury.

    I mean ANY injury, as long as it doesn't destroy her brain. This basically lets her tank through any kind of injury, and gives players an easy way to just fumble their way through combat encounters on their merry way to victory. The joke is that to compensate for that, I made death come very swiftly.

    So Sayaka gets chopped into little bitty pieces by the first witch in the goddamn quest. rest in spaghetti never forghetti.

    Timeline reset. Sayaka soon meets Kyouko, but this time in completely different circumstances. Rather than meeting up in the heat of battle, Sayaka and Kyouko meet up at an arcade. You kind of get the implication of this given that this is also where they meet up in SQ2 for their sixteenth anniversary, but I digress.

    Sayaka and Kyouko, honestly, have a lot of parallels. It's part of what makes their arc in PMMM so compelling. The different meeting emphasizes their similarities, rather than how far Kyouko is (supposedly) willing to go for her own selfish ends.

    Oh yeah and DDR.

    There was DDR.

    Sayaka also decides to ask Homura a few more questions. Rather than immediately assuming that Homura is hostile, she instead takes a second to ask a question. This is obvious player influence and really Sayaka would be an impulsive hothead but she asks. Homura then makes it clear the context behind her trying to stop Mami from dying.

    This sets their relationship on the right foot.

    Kyouko and Sayaka aren't necessarily friends but they're clicking really, really well. Sayaka also decides to confront Kyousuke about her feelings and is soundly rejected. He likes her, but as a friend.

    Sayaka takes it surprisingly well and moves on with her life just kidding she bawls her eyes out and is a bisexual disaster.

    A few days later. Homura isn't really comfy detailing more of the history and deeper darker secrets of what Being Meguca Is Really Like, but what she does do it emphasize the Ticking Clock that is Walpurgisnacht. The original show has Waluigi Night as a way to add tension to the series; a horrific endgame that will probably destroy everything and ruin the timeline again. Walmart Night serves the same purpose in SQ1; the second WhataburgerNight is made clear to Sayaka is the second that she realizes "Ah shit I have to learn to be a better meguca" and so she starts to train.

    Sayaka and Kyouko get really close really quickly, and as it turns out they click pretty well both as friends and as combat partners. Kyouko is also extremely gay and she's starting to have feelings for Sayaka almost immediately. Part of this is her bouncing after Mumi, part of this is "oh no my heart."

    She asks Sayaka out. Sayaka, who is bouncing after Kyousuke, accepts her advances and they become a couple. They are teenagers and don't know better, but a lot of Sayakaquest involves them growing closer as a couple, both for the better (as they're able to support each other in times of emotional crisis) and for the fucking worst (because they're both magical girls, and grief can literally kill them. They become wildly codependent over the course of the quest).

    PART TWO. MEGUCAMAFIA.

    Kyouko and Sayaka, while on patrol one day, then meet Akane, a mysterious punchguca refugee from Tokyo. She's surprisingly threatening; a buff, tall, powerful magical girl that made the wish to "Be Strong". Now, magical girls are explicitly superhuman; the baseline is "I can throw a car fifty meters."

    Akane can throw a bus halfway through the city at mach 1. She is hideously, cartoonishly strong. Akane also has the social skills of a brick, and Sayaka and Kyouko meet her with immediate suspicion. They basically tell her not to fuck with them.

    A few days later, and they run into Akane getting the tar beaten out of her by a mysterious magical girl without a weapon. Said magical girl is powerful, shockingly so, enough to give Homura a run for her money. Sayaka takes off her arms, but she still keeps coming, her shadows acting as weapons from the dark. When Sayaka is forced to finally kill her (as by this point, she's learned that Soul Gem is literal), Akane makes it clear that this isn't the end of these powerful magical girls.

    She was one of the Tokyo Six, and by killing just one, Sayaka basically kicked the hive. The Tokyo Six were a band of magical girls that were hideously strong, each one capable of killing any magical girl that they didn't like. Which they did. With a frightening regularity.

    In fact, Akane's friends were some of these girls; they stole her friends' soul gems and obliterated their bodies. And they threatened to shatter them if Akane didn't collect the grief seeds they wanted.

    Oh yeah and Sayaka is also fighting some wildly lethal witches, because I had no idea how to balance games back here, and I thought "HARD IS GOOD". So Sayaka kept on getting fucking maimed with every other fight. I mean it fits her character; she basically brute-forced her way to victory half the time, but Kyouko just kept on getting bad rolls for no good reason. It was hilarious and stupid.

    Two more Tokyo Six girls. One is psychic and goes for a Nui Harime look because I happened to be watching Kill la Kill at the time. Sayaka kills her by overloading her psychic powers with discordant music. Her sister is left alive, and since Akane was here and not being beaten senseless, she asks where her friends were.

    Set up, punchline. Her friends became greef sid.

    This is how Sayaka and Kyouko learn about it, too. Pleasant.

    The last three Tokyo girls come. Among them is the leader herself. Sayaka kills her, and it becomes abundantly clear that the Tokyo Six weren't just working for the sake of cruelty. They didn't take the Witch Bomb all that well, either. They were once just as righteous as Sayaka was, with the same general ideas, then they just collapsed. Everything they tried died with their seventh friend.

    PART THREE. WHAT THE FUCK IS FOCUS.

    The rest of the quest becomes about gathering strength to fight WhambamthankyoumaamNight. It gets super meander-y here, but the general jist is that Sayaka now has to play mentor to new magical girls that are going under the same crash course she just went through. Sayaka is forced to grow up way, way too quickly, and she and Kyouko don't deal with it well.

    They don't collapse, but everyone's hurting. Everyone's suffering. And nobody has any idea if they'll survive the looming disaster.

    Eventually, Sayaka realizes that maybe keeping it between themselves isn't working. Keeping yourself isolated doesn't actually help; it just sucks. It sucks and it hurts and there's no benefit to it. So she extends her network.

    She lets her mom know about her status as a magical girl.

    Now, Miho Miki isn't just a random no-face person; she's a lot like her daughter. Strong-willed, kind of stubborn, and kindhearted at the base of it all. She's also nursing her own trauma after the death of her husband, even years later. She's also a powerful emotional support throughout a lot of the quest, even before Sayaka lets her know her status as a magical girl; she readily accepts that Sayaka is bisexual, gives Kyouko a place to stay, even lets Akane sleep on her couch.

    She also learns that her daughter has to risk her life in order to survive. Constantly. And she runs the risk of becoming the very monster she fights.

    She doesn't take it well, but she gets better eventually. It takes a lot of time.

    Sayaka and Kyouko keep this up. Each new magical girl they encounter (eventually coming to be known as The Ducklings) becomes a part of their roster of magical girls to help and train. Each one could be helpful at Walpurgis and honestly, they'll need all the help they can get to minimize casualties.

    Madoka's also been privy to all of this, too. There's no reason to keep her in the dark.

    PART FOUR. THE CIRCUS IS HERE.
    Walpurgis Default Dances Over Mitakihara's Grave
    Wario Land: Shake It! arrives. And it takes a solid fucking month of frustration for it to go down because good lord it is a multi-stage, epic boss fight, where Walpurgis starts off as her canon self...then she flips over and threatens to nuke the city and instead causes a tsunami somewhere, then she gathers bits of Mitakihara and flies upwards into the stratosphere to become her own stage. Finally, she becomes a massive doll; her own actress in her own epic Tragedy.

    She is her own Star. Sayaka and her friends are the Forces there to put an end to her Hubris.

    Finally, Walpurgis falls. The casualties in Mitakihara number in the thousands, but it could have been so, so much worse.

    Years later and whoops, I guess Sayaka's problems haven't all been solved by a fluffy epilogue.

    [=]​

    And that's Sayakaquest. There's probably something else I'm forgetting since I was basically writing the broad strokes from memory. There are a number of smaller jokes and punchlines here and there, but in general, SQ1 is Sayaka working against impossible odds to survive.

    And eventually, she does.

    She doesn't upend the system like Madoka does. She doesn't change the order of things, but with the help of her friends, she beats the impossible.

    SQ1 is about surviving a hostile system. Not solving, not even really destroying or dismantling it, but sometimes, it's enough of a victory to just fucking survive.

    SQ2 is about...well that's a spoiler, isn't it?
     
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  • Informational
    • The Laurent said:
    Okay, I want to, like, become her mentor-ish figure, or something, while voting for options that keep her from "meeting the parents" as long as possible, just so that when they finally "meet for the first time" it's just this complete disaster.

    Is that too much to ask?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Oh, boy, this is a great plan.

    [X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)
    TheOneMoiderah said:
    Wario Land: Shake It!
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    TheOneMoiderah said:
    WhambamthankyoumaamNight
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    TheOneMoiderah said:
    Waluigi Night
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    TheOneMoiderah said:
    Walmart Night
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    TheOneMoiderah said:
    WhataburgerNight
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    MY SIDES

    Edit: Also, you've got me hooked on this Land of the Lustrous soundtrack now, even though I don't like the way the show itself looks.
     
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    Finished my semester off after writing 20 pages worth of papers over the past few days, started planning my own quest, and then I open up SF today and find, of all things, Sayaka Quest 2 is happening now and has been since Monday. I seem to have a habit of being late with things.

    I feel like I'm drowning in nostalgia right now, holy fuck. The only thing missing is us falling flat on our faces at every opportunit- Oh god the dice rolls are just as bad as I remember them being, it's beautiful.

    [X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)
    It's good to be back.
     
    [X] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)

    TheOneMoiderah said:
    ​
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    ok Sayaka looks freaking badass, the music notes on her cape are a nice callback on how music played a part in her wish and I love how the sparkles near her cape and the blur by the sword give a sense of motion and the way she tips her head makes me think of a Knight in shinning armor. overall this really feels like the revel of a super hero in their first comic, and is just great.

    and if I read the runes right the witch is called Aspen and that's a very on the nose name.
     
    [X] "New in town?"
    -[X] Anyone give you Meguca 101 yet? The dos and donts?

    Sayaka is gonna be so pissed when she finds out this kid befriended her kid and now she has to deal with meguca shenanigans :V
     
    RecurringExtra said:
    I feel like I'm drowning in nostalgia right now, holy fuck. The only thing missing is us falling flat on our faces at every opportunit- Oh god the dice rolls are just as bad as I remember them being, it's beautiful.
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    Wasn't that the other one? I feel like SQ1 got some decent rolls when I was reading through it. Pricilla Quest, on the other hand...
     
    TheOneMoiderah said:
    Hot take it's one of the best directed animated shows I've seen period. It's a gorgeous series with exceptional camera work, a wonderful aesthetic and really interesting existential themes. I mean I'd gush more but this is a quest thread not a "moid is incredibly self-indulgent" thread.

    look i just love this series about nonbinary immortal gems okay.

    Also a fuckton of buddhist imagery but that gets more emphasis the further into the manga you go.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    It is absolutely on topic to talk about gembutts here because in both cases all the characters are rocks :V

    Also I regret nothing about convincing you to watch it.
     
    So, the armour is a default part of Sayaka's transformation now? Neat! And useful, considering her track record for losing body parts...
    TheOneMoiderah said:
    The rest of the quest becomes about gathering strength to fight WhambamthankyoumaamNight. It gets super meander-y here, but the general jist is that Sayaka now has to play mentor to new magical girls that are going under the same crash course she just went through. Sayaka is forced to grow up way, way too quickly, and she and Kyouko don't deal with it well.

    They don't collapse, but everyone's hurting. Everyone's suffering. And nobody has any idea if they'll survive the looming disaster.

    Eventually, Sayaka realizes that maybe keeping it between themselves isn't working. Keeping yourself isolated doesn't actually help; it just sucks. It sucks and it hurts and there's no benefit to it. So she extends her network.

    She lets her mom know about her status as a magical girl.

    Now, Miho Miki isn't just a random no-face person; she's a lot like her daughter. Strong-willed, kind of stubborn, and kindhearted at the base of it all. She's also nursing her own trauma after the death of her husband, even years later. She's also a powerful emotional support throughout a lot of the quest, even before Sayaka lets her know her status as a magical girl; she readily accepts that Sayaka is bisexual, gives Kyouko a place to stay, even lets Akane sleep on her couch.

    She also learns that her daughter has to risk her life in order to survive. Constantly. And she runs the risk of becoming the very monster she fights.

    She doesn't take it well, but she gets better eventually. It takes a lot of time.

    Sayaka and Kyouko keep this up. Each new magical girl they encounter (eventually coming to be known as The Ducklings) becomes a part of their roster of magical girls to help and train. Each one could be helpful at Walpurgis and honestly, they'll need all the help they can get to minimize casualties.

    Madoka's also been privy to all of this, too. There's no reason to keep her in the dark.
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    Minor note: Mikimom (and Hitomi) actually got let in on the whole Meguca thing accidentally, due to Sayaka running off to enter the barrier of Solar-system Witch whilst she was with them.
    Khona Moshr said:
    [] "Well don't just stand there. We have a witch to kill." (Accuracy 1)



    ok Sayaka looks freaking badass, the music notes on her cape are a nice callback on how music played a part in her wish and I love how the sparkles near her cape and the blur by the sword give a sense of motion and the way she tips her head makes me think of a Knight in shinning armor. overall this really feels like the revel of a super hero in their first comic, and is just great.
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    Sayaka actually has music-based powers here as well as her healing; not sure if I remember all of them, but I know she could summon music to boost herself in combat and broadcast mental music to fuck with psychic Meguca. I think she could also fire musical notes from sword hilts too, and there were also a few failed attempts at using music as sonar.
     
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