-Is it working?
It most certainly is! Thanks a ton for doing such an in-depth dive into Ferarum! It's seriously really awesome to hear your take on everything and it means a lot to me!!
I'll start off by saying damn! Like you're right on target, word for word, bar for bar literally everything you said was dead center even the "gravity of consciousness" which we could be here all day talking about haha but no spoilers, I promise :) Jojo was written to be a perfectly imperfect human being, same with Sven. Sure they have long moments of clarity but they both sometimes get caught up in their own thoughts and emotions and they always need time to think, so as witty as Jojo can be sometimes she's also pretty par for the course; she can't do math properly, can hardly drive, loses track of her own ideas, stuff like that. Seeing perfectly perfect conversations in media pisses me off because people are supposed to slur and mispronounce words, people aren't truly perfectly perfect. So I'm glad you found the conversations (outside some of the schizo-babble lol) relatable! Also you're right, I've had a few complaints that the initial cafe conversation doesn't seem to go anywhere, that you're not really given a 'goal' to work towards and it's been a constant point of contention since Ferarum dropped so I'll probably revise it someday, otherwise yes I really did pour whatever popped out of my head hahaha. When it comes to the animations and models and stuff, they're all prerendered. There's no magic involved just a helluva lot'a rendering in Blender and hoping like hell it doesn't come out crappy!
Version 14 only has a few new scares (I think? Can't remember) so you're probably not missing out on much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It's a good thing you're going through the files too, reading all that code is crazy commitment well done!, good players like you with a sense of discovery will ALWAYS be rewarded! That being said I'm not really sure what constitutes as an ARG these days sorry but if you feel like it fits the bill then so be it!
Nah that's fair, I wanna see more exploration too to be honest! Infact, the Tornado of Mega Death segments were supposed to have an early form of that, hence the minimap and all that really badly written unused Consola dialogue. All I know is the walk from the lounge to Jojo's guestroom is pretty far and Styx doesn't play fair...
Appreciation posts are NEVER stupid, I ALWAYS take them to heart <3 So thank you for writing this all out!! There's currently no Discord server, I'm too stupid to figure it out lol.
Thanks again and keep up the sleuthing!!