Some Questions I have for Naughty Dog

In other scenes, there are various references to this invisible-to-all-but-their-defenders thing. Why is no one else getting their own army ready? If a town has 50 warriors ready to defend their homeland, wouldn't you assume they'd be ready to protect it? Or is that thing in Japan? Was this thing a big fake out? Is the Japan government just getting in their own bad books by failing to act on this supposed global crisis? What is the WLF going to do about the giant military machinery in Japan? We don't know. In a plotline as small as "what is happening to all the people", these loose ends seem ridiculous. They shouldn't have spent any time on this "event" when the point of the game was to finish Joel's quest.

That giant island thing is mentioned over and over again, but never answered. The entire subplot of rescuing a giant lady floating in the sky? It should have come up much earlier in the game. Why were the same soldiers who rescued Ellie in chapter 1 doing this? They have to know the only chance of success is the same people from the opening section. And why is the video being shown on television in every bar they go to? Is it there in the name of public awareness? Do they think the government is going to care about this anyway? They could've done better than this boring cliché. I don't think the player cares.

Ellie and Jesse still kiss after almost having sex, with their phones on the bedside table (there are some nice visuals here). Are they getting back together? This wouldn't make sense, as the context seems to suggest they're no longer a couple.

As if having them kiss was not disturbing enough, they end up in bed together a few chapters later. Yes, another whole day passes without anything happening between them.

The last fight scene with Nathan was annoying and rushed. They just seem to run around, hitting every pillar and boulder that's there. It's quite clear they were planning this fight all along, yet we only see it happen a few hours after

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Owen asks Sarah for a drug she doesn't have. In this game, drugs don't have real value. You can easily purchase one from all the different weed dealers you pass by. Why didn't Sarah just hand over the “totally high enough” drug she had on her? Was it a giant waste of Joel's and her trust to let them break in to her car to steal a "totally legal" dose of Ecstasy? I feel like this could have been avoided if Joel just took it from Sarah when she offered it to him instead of assuming she would give it to him for free. How dare she not make money off the secondhand sale of the party drug!

Owen, Sarah, and Ellie end up dying together after fighting off Ellie's creepy older brother, his insane psycho ex, his biker henchmen, his own psychopathic daughter, his former ward and her entire village of family, Ellie's high school sweetheart. Just to be clear, Joel isn't dead, either. If this is how dead people get treated in this game, you can be damn sure we'll have a huge sigh of relief when the second "all new happy faces!" save screen appears.

This is not at all surprising, given that the entire story of “Left Behind” has one purpose: to establish Joel as some kind of modern martyr. It doesn't matter if his actions in "the most morally sound war on record" weren't any more or less admirable than what Dina or Abby did. It's time for every real human being to just stop and consider what is morally justifiable and what isn't. Is "let's save a lot of people by killing a lot of people in the most dramatic and morally sound ways possible" really a moral choice? It's easy to say "It was right because they died" but I have a feeling that, in a lot of cases, this was not an ideal choice. Even in "Lust" we can argue that it wasn't an ideal choice for her to sleep with Mike while her boyfriend lay dying in front of her. Even if you think they had no choice in the matter, this doesn't make what they did morally better than killing or not killing.

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If it was okay for everyone to ignore the knowledge of another species and eat them like hamburgers, why was it not okay for Jesse and Ellie to ignore a single, extremely pertinent aspect of reality, human life? To call people who are basically sentient-hunting machines animals and eat them in broad daylight, would have at least been somewhat warranted. You can't see anyone else from over here, yet that's all that these two teenagers can muster for their survival? Are you serious, Ubisoft?

Ellie would like to thank Joel, and expresses that she hopes they will get to know each other in the future.

To Ellie, she can still be “a character she is familiar with.” It is as if she views Ellie and Joel as people she was emotionally close to, or once was. It’s like if you went to a party and your old childhood friend was at the party. They can't be all friends, but they can at least talk to each other, in a non-offending and respectful manner.

Joel doesn't really know what to say, and just smiles awkwardly at her. He doesn't have the chance to apologize, to be comforted, or even really to respond to her, as the game ends before he can. He has to remember everything he did in a state of shock, then eventually give a very off-handed "Good luck" before the scene cuts to black. She might be saying that out of fear, but he doesn't know that. Joel is more relieved that she didn't hate him than she might be.

After that strange trial in which the Brotherhood accuse Elliot of murdering Amanda... Joel steps in to defend her. Joel was once told by a judge that people don't forgive and forget when a person kills someone else. But the justice system never forgets either.

Just one more strange point to make about these characters, who we've come to know so well:

Both of these characters, by some great lapse of the judgement of the world's greatest RPG writers, are seen playing arcade games for entertainment while they wait for a bomb squad to destroy a radio transmitter.

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We know that Dina died from poisoning in Episode 2, so why did she have to die again from poisoning by Rachel's Handmaid’s Temptation in episode 4? Rachel’s Creme Temptation and St. Rita’s Love have both been classed as Love Motivators by many outlets, yet there is no explanation as to why they were suddenly evil? Also, I don’t recall Mario saying anything at all about Dina’s poisoning. Is he hiding the fact that he has feelings for Dina? He’s clearly been ignoring the death of Rachel’s aunt/Temptress for most of the series. I don’t recall him ever mentioning anything about Rachel, even if it is completely irrelevant to anything else.

The "Blind Ambition" end game only occurs in Episode 4. If you played Episode 1 and completed it, then did the icky retro multiplayer battle scenes happen after the raid, or in episode 4? There is a part in Episode 4 where someone opens up their dialogue options to make decisions. It was a neat plot point and gave us more insight into the motivations of one of the most-loathed main characters. It was nice to see a small part of Dina’s side story revealed. I was so excited to see the impact her character would have on the story, and the writers just throw that all away. I’m so disappointed.

That’s it for now. I could keep going on, but there is so much garbage, you wouldn’t even believe it. There are many little details that really go to waste in this ridiculous little series. Maybe they’ll have better stuff to do in episode 7. I really hope they don’t drag this out too much longer. If we don’t see another sentence on this, I’ll probably cry. It has to end soon.

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If I were to believe the narratives that do make sense, a level where characters are choosing whether or not to kill Joel seems like it would be, for lack of a better term, dark trippy. So what did they do instead? In the story ending, Dina appears with new dudes and sends Joel away. In the aftermath, it's mentioned that Ellie is pissed at the fact that she broke up with Joel but she doesn't have the power to go back in time and keep Joel. At this point in the game, I'm still waiting for a brief encounter where she visits Joel's grave and begs him to get up and stop fighting and come home. I'd buy that if the relationship was real, and that I can rewind the game and save the relationship and they would be together. And if that was the case, what does that say about the first six or seven hours of the game? This whole back story and decision point are so poorly written that the game loses all believability. There's no plot reason for Ellie to have feelings for Joel, so she can have an instant shot of chemistry with the same guy, that is less than five minutes in real life, in the game, after not having any connection with him for months? The moral/emotional quandary presented by the conflict between Ellie and Joel and the choice that she's presented with to either forgive or kill him is both weak and misguided. It just does not work. I can see how it could make for a very interesting character choice in a more narrative-driven game, but it's done completely clumsily in the space game this is.

It is totally insane that Nintendo is giving the Zelda and Metroid developers responsibility for a game like this. The Zelda games and the Metroid games are typically considered some of the greatest adventure games ever made. Yet they're giving those great game developers carte blanche to create whatever story they want and hand-roll their plots, plot points, and consequences. Is this the new model for story creation in AAA gaming? Because this is a total travesty.

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Owen is constantly shot in the back by impotent adversaries. So what? Who cares? Does the boss bear that sort of grudge? He's out-gunned, no weapons and no chance of killing his target. This was especially unfortunate given that the game's ending put such a major emphasis on just how cool is was for OX to wield a shotgun in a manner worthy of a wild west showdown.

When Toby kidnaps Ellie, how did the odds suddenly become so hopeless? Was she that much of a burden to this character? She seems to genuinely like Ellie and is all about doing whatever it takes to get her out of there. Even Toby seemed to care about Ellie. He seems to be struggling with this turn of events. But in the end, Ellie has no other choice but to jump into the burning ring-fire and play dead so he can leave.

To go through a 13+ hours game and find that your two protagonists have been horrifically abused by multiple people in an attempt to psychologically weaken them. Oh wait, those are still their closest allies. Hooray, I guess. Thanks Joel and Ellie!

Every character has an "Ending" you play through at the end of the game. Did you notice that Toby dies by being burned alive, the corpses of Isaac, Adam, Dave and Nathan all got killed, that when Dina sacrifices herself, Isaac has become... she? Whatever she is... Ellie and Toby get to go home to Dina. Toby dies because he refuses to turn into an undead! Wow. Okay then. Thanks to whatever chicanery in story progression this comes to, Toby's corpse makes his escape, Ellie and Theo take the injured man back to London, Danny helps Ellie reunite with Jesse, the new warlord over Seraphim Kingdom... Sorry... leader of XCOM... becomes Danny’s father, a mad scientist (!) steals the sample of plague bacteria and the world-consuming Super Genomex virus from this evil mad scientist's body and Ellie and Theo... get shipped off to Mexico to begin a life of crime. Maybe if you spend some time writing these episodes out of order they'd make more sense.

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The only information that we are ever given is, that there is still another plotline in episode 5. Did these storylines take up the story or are we just supposed to assume the whole situation with Joel and Abigail is an arbitrary addition to the already nonsensical plot? It was definitely weird.

What happened to Pizzabella's whole missing children storyline? It's literally just dropped off of the face of the earth. Who is this new prophet that we've been seeing for the past few episodes? Where is that "kidnapped" two year old now? Why didn't the first 12 episodes just focus on how Abigail took over the enemy plotline and had to fight them off, while giving Ellie free reign to deal with everything else she's dealt with for the past three years? Instead, they spent 6 or 7 episodes completely making up a random story line for one of the biggest secrets that Ellie ever discovered. It was ridiculous.

Who exactly was the reason to come after Quinn's boss? The plan was to take down Pierce and run, which would make it so Ellie and Joel wouldn't have to, and would allow them to focus on what was happening with Ellie's life and her child. It just made no sense to give Joel the directive to "find the mother" and then not explain what it was that they were actually trying to do.

Why didn't Ellie go and help Rachel with saving her son's baby momma from Paul at the waterfall? The reason they put that scene in was to give Rachel some much needed closure on Rachel being taken from her in such a way. But she never got it, and Ellie only helped at her last possible second. Maybe it was because it was Ellie's first mission and Rachel didn't know that, but why wouldn't Ellie go down to the base and save that little girl from an evil nurse who is planning on killing her mother? The fact that they could make Ellie wait for the nurse was one of the many major issues with the plot that I had with this game.

Anyway, thanks for listening to me rant. Let me know if I missed anything.

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>Are you serious, Ubisoft?
What is up with the BFG's death? He is the only one who knows where the kids are, and he is the only one who knows how to save them. Why does he just up and die? What was the point of his death?

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a game with so many glaring continuity errors. It is like the writers forgot that they were making a video game.

The most obvious of these errors is the "ghost" of Isaac, who appears in the game's ending. Isaac is the one who is the most crucial to the plot, yet he is the one who dies. This is the same game that has a talking dog, a talking tree, and a talking bear. Why does Isaac have to die? What was the point of his death?

The ending is the worst part of the game. It is so abrupt and underwhelming that it is hard to believe it is actually the ending. The last 30 seconds of the game are a giant cliffhanger that leaves you wondering what the hell is going to happen next. The game should have ended right there. The fact that it doesn't is just bizarre.

One thing I forgot to add:

In fact, what is the main purpose of Ellie, Noah, Owen, and Abby being there in the WLF hideout? I mean they could have escaped by boat or horse, right? They didn't need a fucking radio. What are they even doing there?

How is it the same game when it's completely rewritten in two days?

Joel doesn't even get his hand sliced off. The doctors make it look really easy, so there's no way Joel could have been a patient at Granny Annie's. He was a minor, and was sent there by his parents. They are clearly just doing a shoddy CGI fakeout of Joel's amputation to avoid spoiling that this is an alternate game and the cut scene had to be altered. Why didn't they do the whole finger cut off and then a nurse comes in and shows them how to bandage the finger back on again? The nurses were always so damn cheerful.

It's a mystery how Dina managed to kill Isaac in the hospital room with the giant needle.

If there is any justice in the entire history of mankind, Abigail "just kills" Joel.

okay op i have shit on you before, and i aint gonna read all this shit - but this is great. good job.

>The "Blind Ambition" end game only occurs in Episode 4. If you played Episode 1 and completed it, then did the icky retro multiplayer battle scenes happen after the raid, or in episode 4?

FINALLY, SOMEONE SAID IT.

To add to that, Joel does something so stupid. He lets Ellie go and gets captured. What is the point of having Ellie go on a suicidal suicide mission and risk her life for a dude who treated her like crap for 3 years? This was a major part of the plot and I thought it was clear from the start that Ellie and Joel were not a couple. Why would he do this? What did he think was going to happen? Why would he do this to himself?

Abby decides to throw away the knife she's been hiding since her brother's death and not use it to murder people. Instead, she spends the whole game trying to talk Joel out of his suicide. When he does finally go through with it, she refuses to let him kill himself and is the one who saves his life. Why is this?

Why is Abby the one who is in charge of making the decisions about whether or not Joel lives or dies? Why does Joel always defer to her?

If Joel was ever in a position to save Joel's life, why didn't he do it?

Why is it that Ellie always comes up with the brilliant idea to just shoot down the ship and get out of there, yet it is Joel who always tries to talk her out of it?

Why did the scene where Ellie saves Joel from being beheaded in the church end up with him kissing her? Why did this not happen when she saves him from falling to his death in the park? Why did they even have a church scene in the first place?

What the hell is up with all the bugs? I mean, they are cool, but why are they so many? And why are they after the little girls?

I thought the writer's made a point of how Ellie could've just thrown away the weapon and been fine, yet here we are, with a literal arsenal of weapons and she just runs away? She never picks up a gun. She never uses the other ones. What the hell is up with that?

Thanks man. I just think the conclusion is completely contrived. A foregone conclusion that the outcome was always going to be the same.

The finale of Dead Space 3 is, without a doubt, the most disappointing ending of any game in recent memory. The entire game is essentially a test for players to discover if they can go the entire game without ever encountering the WLF. After defeating Isaac and reaching the WLF island, it is a complete letdown to see that the game suddenly decides to have a resolution at the last second.

To sum up the last five minutes of the game:

A still image of the lighthouse fades in. The rest of the game fades in. A dramatic score begins. A face slowly comes into focus. We see the head of Isaac Clarke, he slowly tilts his head to the side, his mouth agape. A text box appears on the screen:

DEAD SPACE 3 ACTUAL ENDING

“YOU ARE HERE.”

The voiceover continues:

“ISAAC CLARKE, WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.”

>That giant island thing is mentioned over and over again, but never answered. The entire subplot of rescuing a giant lady floating in the sky?

I don't agree with everything you said but this part bothered me to no end. At the very end, you get a huge decision: Do you kill Abby and her friends, or spare them? If you kill them, Joel and Tommy will have no chance of surviving. They will all die in that boat with Joel and Tommy, and then Isaac will probably kill them. If you spare them, Joel and Tommy will probably get killed, too. You will have saved Joel and Tommy, but you will have destroyed their only hope of survival. Why is this choice even made? The only thing that would justify this decision is if Joel and Tommy somehow escape the island and go on a killing spree. I mean, if that is the case, why not make that choice instead? Why do we have to decide this, when we can just have Joel and Tommy be safe?

The world is an awful place. We are all just trying to survive. The story makes it clear that there is no point in fighting back against a monster that will kill you, no matter how many you kill. The world doesn't have any justice, and there is no point in trying to make it so.

It is important to remember that all of these choices were all presented to you in a game. This game is a series of video game stories, with branching plotlines, and you have to make the choices you think are best for your character.

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>Joel doesn't even get his hand sliced off

Are you actually fucking retarded? The good old forgotten or evaded detail "how does everything work? is probably pretty common with your typical medieval action drama of such escapist contentment with all the fluffy melodrama. The simple answer would be it never occurred to me and thus couldn't be an intentional line. Anyway, the unanswered or implicit bits do bother me a lot more than a complete deus ex machina conclusion.

Dude, come on. Isn't their post WW 2 government scandal in Seattle over? Why didn't we hear anything about all that weird hush-hush nutso Illuminati activity recently? Either something is still happening to the military in its wake, or something even more disturbing has happened.

Did they vanish to Brazil while Bob the clown burnt the jigsaw map on YouTube? To Buenos Aires, and learn carpentry? We never see Bob again after this game. Maybe this HUGE game is part of Ubisoft's tragic discontinuation series? Or, who knows, maybe they escaped into an I-have-too-many-patents scheme and form the Mom's Alarm assembly to mass market with safe seeds. Maybe all the randomly burning buildings and UFOs is really it, no big red flags... We just have to roll with it!

>muh WW 2 government scandal
Who cares, so long as it means you don’t have to see Them again. Just another shameless workaround to fuck with your players.

Why did Joel and Ellie immediately fly to the rebel camp? They don’t know any of the people there, so why did they trust in them to keep them safe when their own allies betrayed them? Why did Ellie trust Joel at all? Ellie never once showed any kind of respect for Joel. She had only one goal in mind for the entire game: to get rid of Joel.

>Did they vanish to Brazil while Bob the clown burnt the jigsaw map on YouTube?
Maybe all was good and beautiful until Billy spotted a newspaper describing the massacre at Port Bellevue as a bunch of drunken thugs were drunk as they got attacked by rogue survivors...and while that is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of that news, the creators seem hellbent on the humanist story for Joel's rise from power as overprotective dad Joel towards his emotionally-unsound 14 year old son. Like Joel and Isaac aren't abusive douchebags?

>He lets Ellie go and gets captured. What is the point of having Ellie go on a suicidal suicide mission and risk her life for a dude who treated her like crap for 3 years?
Of course there is the full conflict about fatherly and human behavior on Joel's part as compared to Joel's son/second son relationship with Tommy. The "innocent killing machine trapped in adolescence" route feels almost insulting when compared to the "bonded family" route.

And why does the WLF still exist? The reason the world was saved was because the Seraphites killed everyone. If the Seraphites are dead, then the WLF should have been wiped out. The only thing keeping them around is the money that is collected from their auctions.

OP is a HUGE faggot. What was the point of the WLF? They just show up and take all the money and leave. The only reason they exist is to generate money. They aren't a part of the world. They aren't a threat. They just exist to be an artificial reason.

You guys are making my fucking head spin. I guess it is a legitimate question, considering how many changes and changes of the plot I went through to make this coherent. There are so many ways to go in this film that can take the actual ending as our real ending. Instead, what we got was 20, 30, or more hours of pure dungulence, full of head-scratching misdirection and shady choices. If anyone who ever loved or played this game decides to look at this review after all the muck and go, "Fuck, there was a movie with the game ending in it," then you have only yourself to blame. It wasn't the players, or the Wold Lighthouse, nor was it the show-runners at Left Footed. It was ourselves, and all of us to blame.

>It was ourselves, and all of us to blame.
Dude, calm the fuck down and find them out of the best you can with existing characters. When Adam-Lucian ruins the final moments of TLG through pretty much never-ending amnesia thanks to the deus ex-nonsense "no body yet episode 2 at my hotel, fuck this now lets jump to Dizzy Falls for 80’s nostalgia reasons” the story was left half written. Nothing made perfect since in terms of story direction.

>The Adam-Lucian arc
Yeah, I guess you're right... but why? You know how sequels like “The Last of Us Part II” are infamous for adding unnecessary filler or missing important story beats in the later games? You just go “Hey, the rest of that second chapter was just ‘Let’s fight Nazis in Alaska’.” Not every little detail of the ending needs to make sense. Sometimes they should just happen. Like losing 1,000 kids.

>‘Let’s fight Nazis in Alaska’
Sure but their hideout still had access to machinery and had the expertise to produce amorphs. Maybe there was no good ending to the city and it was wiped out completely? No wonder my team of writers never really delivered a satisfactory conclusion.

>“ISAAC CLARKE, WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.”
If Ellie and Isaac are meant to be fated for the end of time, why does Ellie feel so much of an obligation to find a happy ending for Joel? Did the author just forget about Abby murdering the entire post-Warworld group? What the hell happened to a fulfilling emotional resolution for Ellie? Her “all is lost” storyline feels forced and shoehorned in for something that is clearly impossible. It feels out of place. Inconsistent. What happened to self-awareness?

Where did that whole Lydia pregnancy and birth thing go? We get two lines of dialogue in Ellie and Joel’s ending and a death screen... That is it? The rest of the game revolves around this conflict between Elliot, a man torn between his sense of duty and love for his family, and Isaac and Lily. The last thing Ellie does is watch Ellie and Isaac bury his dad in an emotional moment, while a different Ellie delivers the last “final” goodbye. The Ellie of the previous 30 hours, now powerless and grieving, says her final goodbyes to Ellie. But why? The real resolution is Isaac dies because of guilt over Lily’s disappearance, but Ellie feels obligated to make that all better? Not really my idea of resolution, even though they are meant to be fated for each other in the end. If they are destined for an eternity together, why couldn’t we see the progression of their romance?

I don’t think I am alone in thinking these questions.

>even though they are meant to be fated for each other in the end
I actually couldn't disagree more. What I would like to know is why there is no story consequence to Seattle’s imminent extermination. Is a lack of story rationale to one possible interpretation of Seattle falling? It could have been a last-minute cancellation or a loss of motivation. But instead, we just get left hanging out there.

man, fuck you, Larian Studios. this is what the game has come to: waiting for it to tell you everything about its main narrative. what the fuck are you waiting for? tell me already! you think I’m going to keep watching my 2 year old die over and over and over again if I can find a hint that it’s not over? sorry, dudes. the jokes are over. please make me into a mother fucking dad already. you’re going to disappoint me one day. I’m warning you. do you think that someone actually believed that a trailer would somehow spoil the story, much less how its supposed to end? sorry, it’s just never gonna happen. Larian knows what they’re doing. Let’s just pretend we’re getting a Mass Effect 3 and accept it.

I could keep arguing with you in this thread all night but the fact of the matter is, no questions have been given answers to yet. Like what would even make watching yet another irradiated slug count have to end? This need not have a goddamn video game. These fucking writers are going nowhere. Again, let me say that nobody here "agenda over power video games have lost all relevancy and appeal to generation of game fan.” At least Matt Parkinson acknowledges these problems and acknowledges such problems need a resolution and certainly have some concerns about our industry having evolved too slowly in our growth, it seems they "moved towards ensuring core development value of story elements, which included the scriptwriter status and how scripting supported production.

Look at this big brained motherfucker. It’s plain as day! Let me point out the ever relevant shred of humanity by directly imploring the immortal consciousness 'The Mind Reader" Bill: DON’T YOU MIND YOUR GAME SCRIPT ANYMORE?!?!?? DON’T TELL ME YOU GOT CAUGHT AGAIN KETTLE? I FUCKING WON’T HAVE IT!!!

There are 1433 [DATA PACK] players logged in. Many of them have wandered around half of Yakville before giving up. I am serious here! My sole character has more unused memories than credits in the goddamn GARURE!!! 1 MONTHS of spending hundreds upon hundreds of 10$ maxed stars chasing different missions and only recently reaching Yakville got people from Brazil to die multiple times so they wouldn’t have the experience wasting away.

>I'm very stupid and retarded
Oh come on, plot development through convenience always works best for games. That also explains the 30+ season players through Isaac because his physical condition quickly deteriorated after eating the odd cheese slice one time. Characters’ roles will change to reflect the same themes as the source material, for example Mac mentions her aversion to staying for hours after school but then gets thrown right back into another plane of existence without enough characters remaining to get all emo all up in everybody’s hairs again, they replaced 4th-person boss fights (XBH titles always handle these terribly) to gameplay options.If gameplay is as good as art assets-- good god, we would get 60 minute intro to the second sex scene. I don't want to live in a world where that exists.

>DON’T TELL ME YOU GOT CAUGHT AGAIN KETTLE?
lol this made me gurgle