If my posts have told you anything, I love Osamu Sato and his works. My favorite is Eastern Mind. I've wanted to LP this game for awhile, However, I decided for a fun forum game, I would let you guys do the actions. Think Twitch Plays Pokemon, only not live.
— The leader Cookiewoodstock, in the original thread.
Dashnet Plays Eastern Mind is a forum game that was played starting on December 2nd, 2014, where a bunch of users from a forum called Dashnet were all playing Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou at the same time, sort of like Twitch Plays Pokémon. The forum game itself is simple; people input commands, and then they are done in-game.
The game has been going on since December 2nd, 2014, at 10:09 PM EST. You can find the forums the game is hosted on here,
and, more importantly, you can find it's original thread here.
Tropes seen in the Forum Game:
- Berserk Button: The leader gets annoyed with pointless interaction with the Chu-Teng symbol, which can be understood, seeing as it teleports you to the Central Mountain automatically.
- Buffy Speak: The narrator refers to characters like this, and will continue to until the Tong-Nou Book item is obtained.
- Butt-Monkey: Developous. He is the reason anything goes wrong. This is naturally lampshaded by the leader.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": According to the spoilers of this update, even though the author knows the names of the characters, he refuses to tell them in the threads (save for Fang-Shing, or any of them that give their name upon meeting them) until they obtain the Tong-Nou Book item.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Early on, not only was movement judged by majority rule as well, the gang had to confirm continuing a conversation. This was scrapped, mostly for the better.
- Epic Fail: Normally happens when the gang needs to answer a riddle.
- The thing that awoke King-Gyou (the Golden Flower) was thought to be Songbirds.
- San-a-mong was thought to be "Mr. Snugglepuff."
- A rather abysmal one was when the gang tried to get themselves killed, and they spent two pages trying to kill themselves at the entrance puzzle for the Land of Desire. [[spoilers:It takes them until they achieve the entrance puzzle for the Land of Time to actually kill themselves, one page after they stop messing around with the entrance puzzle for the Land of Desire.
- The thing that awoke King-Gyou (the Golden Flower) was thought to be Songbirds.
- Faux Horrific: As the leader has played Eastern Mind before, his scared reactions to any any every new character's appearance is typically this.
-
Follow the Leader: "Dashnet Plays" threads were made after the dawn of Dashnet Plays Eastern Mind, to varying success. - Have a Nice Death: The author does playfully mock others for death, as seen here.
- Insistent Terminology: A few instances.
- "Magic" for using HTML tags to make images link to videos
- "THE VOID!!!" for the location Sato's head is at.
- Interacting with things is frequently paraphrased to poking them.
- The Many Deaths of You: Surprisingly, even though the game has this feature, the gang has problems trying to invoke their own death intentionally, especially considering Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, to the point of being required to progress at one point.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The leader has an extremely excited reaction to saving, as seen here.
- THE VOID!!!
- Never My Fault: Even though the first person to request talking to the guardian of the water magatama for this update was iAMmincho, Developous 2 is the one whom got blamed for it. Potentially justified in the sense that the leader is actually afraid of the rambles he states on other parts of the forums.
- New Rules as the Plot Demands: Happened when the leader got the Tong-Nou Book.
- No Fair Cheating: Using alternative accounts to speed up the process is a surefire way to get your commands ignored.
- Inverted with walkthrough usage, which the leader does allow, and actually encourages for situations like riddles.
- Oh, Crap!: The narrator says this reaction when they die for the first time, seen here.
- Play-by-Post: Naturally, as this is a forum game.
- Running Gag: A few based on forum members, and in-game events.
- Shylight is a goddess of inputting commands.
- Developous is always the cause of something bad happening. Always.
- Any flash effect will be followed up with the "ahhhh" from Queen's song "Flash."
- Shout-Out: Plenty.
- The whole idea is based off Twitch Plays Pokémon.
- The sequence where the gang reincarnates as Byou and obtains the wrench (seen here) has a bunch of quotes from the Youtube Poop called "Pac Man gets Belated on his Birthday" by Geibuchan of The King's Epic Adventure fame. In the same post, the pre-update text references "Meet the Heavy.
- Stock Scream: The Willhelm Scream is mentioned here.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The leader may or may not have used HTML tags instead of magic to make the images link to videos in cases like this.
- Unreliable Narrator: Sort of? The narrator doesn't exactly say exactly what is going on, using Buffy Speak to describe things. Otherwise, he does describe things well.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Death.
- What the Hell, Hero?: The leader has this reaction when they kill Zen in the pathway to the Land of Dreaming.
- Written Sound Effect: Done frequently.
- You Bastard!: The leader says this when the group kills Zen..
