UrsineApathy [any, comrade/them]

“this UI and overall art style looks cool as fuck” and then hearing good music

The level of polish on the games is really what makes it shine. For me, I have a tough time finishing jrpg’s in general because they get pretty tedious after pkaying a while, but the music alone made me want to continue to play. It’s just so good.

If you really like P5R and want to try the others, a remake of 3 was recently released, called Persona 3 Reloaded, and another one for 4 is coming out in the next year or two. That helps make it not feel like you’re missing out on quality of life improvements if you want to go backwards in the series. Except for common themes, all the games have distinct story’s so you don’t need to worry about missing out on plot on anything.

Hope you like it!

If you already know you like the jrpg genre you’ll almost assuredly like the games. They’re wildly popular for a reason. The aesthetics and mechanics are pretty satisfying and well fleshed out, respectively. All the games are structured in a way that’s split between downtime and dungeon diving. During your downtime you build relationships(kind of a friendship simulator) with the story characters that affects your combat and gives you bonuses. The player has full agency to determine who they want to build relationships with. And if you didn’t know, the games are long and you can easily hit a 100+ hour playthrough.

The story and themes can be a little cringey, idealistic, and juvenile, but all the games do have high schoolers as their main protagonists so take it as you will. They touch on some adult themes(sexual assault, suicide, general societal assholishness, etc.) but don’t usually portray it in a satisfying way or explore them in a way beyond ‘this happened and I’m mad/sad about it’. It’s still good story for a major studio release, but some people do take issue with the way it’s done. If you want more overall adult themes you can look into the mainline SMT series which is where the Persona games are a spinoff of and are very similar in quality and gameplay.

In terms of where to start: The Persona series as everyone knows it starts with #3. There’s like a decade between each games release so there are massive quality of life and graphics improvements between them. I’d say start with 4 or 5 personally, but they’re all good in their own way and have a remaster/remake at this point. If you only plan to ever play one of them, go with Persona 5: Royal.

As a side note, Atlus always releases an updated version of each game a year or two after its initial release that features an expanded story, easier gameplay, and updated qol. Persona 5: Royal is the updated release version.

It’s cool if you just want to complain, the game’s frustrating, but don’t make a post titled ‘help’ if you don’t actually want help.

By the time the endgame approaches, I tend to have my base divided into walled off compartments

This is the proper way to do things, if the map allows for it. Granted I never did, but that’s just because I suck at eco management and my resources were always scarce.

There’s a technique you can do called a “scratching post” by the community. It helps to deal with the “single zombie ruining everything” situations.

If you have an isolated building, like a sawmill or cottage, or a space at the edge of a patrol where zombies can still get through if the timing is right you can place a single wood wall down just between the structure and the horde. Zombies will always prioritize attacking nearby walls over other structures so it will give you an extra moment to get some troops to the area before things get out of hand. Just keep in mind that zombies slapping on a wall will make noise that attracts more zombies over, but it it will buy you an extra moment to react.

I got clammed up on a run when I got to the level where the ‘zombie’ chainsaw mechs are the only enemy the spawns

It’s been a few years since I did my playthrough so don’t remember a lot of the later campaign missions, but mutants(the big chainsaw guys) are where the game really starts to punish you for the noise mechanics it never explained in the first place.

Oh you decided to make a miniscule amount of noise halfway across the map from a mutant? Shame. Now he’s already stomping his way to your base and bringing every single zombie on the map in his path with him. This game is such a cool and unique experience but boy does it punish you for things it just never bothered to teach you about.

I abandoned my first campaign and restarted when got to Coast of Bones. I had prioritized efficiency and soldier upgrades and I had no farms and no towers and it was just absolutely brutal.

Same, friend. I severely underestimated how tight you had to keep your patrols in the beginning. One stray zombie turns into a hundred instantly.

I legitimately needed to put the game down for a month or two in the beginning because the learning curve was so frustrating for me.

If it’s your first time running through the campaign, don’t do the tech tree blind. I’m not an amazing rts player and I genuinely needed to abandon my first two campaigns because I just prioritized the wrong techs and made the missions unwinnable.

You will be severely punished on quite a few missions if you don’t have the Ballista and Tesla towers unless you have god gamer status micro abilities and apm or know what to expect in the mission. Both towers have aoe attacks that can single handedly hold waves back if they’re placed strategically. Also, the train resource techs are insanely powerful because it’s just a free resource drop every in-game day and you can get things like iron to make soldiers without needing to secure a resource node. Later in the game, snipers are better than soldiers in every way. Get a deathball of them and win.

Besides standard eco/expansion rts advice, one thing the game doesn’t necessarily tell you is that there is a hidden “noise” value of actions that attracts zombies. Rangers make very little noise and soldiers make a lot. Noise accumulates on a per-tile basis so a military unit that is standing still will slowly accumulate noise(even if they aren’t firing), but if you set them to patrol a few tiles there will be little to no noise accumulation. Besides that, just make sure you wall up and maybe have a few fallback points you can defend at because this is a game where if a single zombie manages to get through your patrols you lose the entire mission. It’s really rewarding to play, but also super frustrating (and time consuming) to learn.

Yeah, that’s not a valid notation I’ve come across in my music journey. I’d agree with you that it could be a placeholder symbol in that context, but I don’t know why they wouldn’t just restrict the pages instead. It could also be a unicode or file type issue like slatun mentions too, but overwhelmingly, unless you’re working in a specific music softwares ecosystem and expect to be able to edit it, sheet music is just given as a pdf or image file and it shouldn’t matter.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat. For every game that I actually own that’s on the list I’ve at least played it enough to find out it’s not quite for me or I got halfway through and put it down with the intention of coming back, which is just a bad habit for RPGs in general for me because I tend to burn myself out on them. I had to stop playing Witcher 3 halfway through because my brain hates me and I need to find and clear every map objective.

The only actual exception is Dwarf Fortress and that’s only because I have over 1500 hours in Rimworld and I know how much of a learning curve there’s going to be when I start it. I’ve just never had the mental fortitude to devote the time to it yet.

I looked at the piece you linked, but I can only see the first page, not sure if the notation you’re referring to is beyond that page. Can you clarify a bit what you mean when you say “dotted capital I’s?” Are you talking about the symbols that look like this 🎶 but with a dot next to them?

I was watching someone’s playthrough and I genuinely had to turn the stream off after like a dozen hours because I knew I had to play it. I mostly gave up on the survival/crafting genre because all the heavy hitters just didn’t do much for me. I always play solo and they all quickly feel like they devolve into housekeeping and inventory management sims.

The only one I ever really enjoyed was Subnautica, specifically because of some of the non-thematic reasons you mentioned for this game being so good. The survival aspects are actually really well done without making the game feel like a chore (it’s so weird how effective adding a tiny little mini game to things just makes it feel less obnoxious), the setting and story is interesting and well crafted, and most of the tedious aspects of gameplay are given intended solutions in the crafting trees.

The setting and storytelling is just so masterfully done that it always keeps you engaged. The combat is a little bit lame, but it’s mostly because of AI being kind of dumb. I’m playing on a lower difficulty though so maybe that’s the reason.

I am currently finishing up the manufacturing sector. I’m playing solo and I’m not excited for when I get to this part. It’s not going to be a fun time with how low visibility underwater is in this game.

As a side note, I very rarely buy games new or even like survival crafting style games, but holy crap this game is so good.

I think a lot of the community pushback is for that exact reason. People expect a different game when a 2 is attached, not a shinier version of the same game. I really don’t know if any IP that’s done this well from a marketing standpoint. Maybe OW2, but that’s also been a trainwreck.

I don’t know that I agree necessarily with your second point though. A big selling point for a lot of the live service games going through this process is a changeover to a newer game engine. You’d be surprised how limiting in terms of features, graphics, and performance it is to be on an engine that’s over a decade old.

This is the perfect time for character reworks imo and they’re trying at least. As long as they keep the original design intent in mind this is the most efficient time from a dev standpoint to tweak unbalanced and broken characters.

I agree that releasing a live service sequel is tough though. I don’t think I’ve seen one try that didn’t receive an astronomical amount of hate for it.

It’s early access development. I’m not even sure it’s a beta at this point.

Ahhh, thanks for the clarification.

Smite 2 has been bombing? I wasn’t aware it was even available to anyone yet? I’ve been looking forwards to it.

It goes 24/7 open alpha at the end of the month and they’ve had a handful of closed alpha weekends and marketing tournaments over the past few months. The game suffers from some weird design/map choices and they’ve only ported over like a dozen or so gods so far which is a big sticking point for a bunch of people. I’m sure it will be fine eventually, but it’s rough around the edges right now.

I can’t really find any good information right now. Is this a beta still or this a sneaky release? If it is still in beta a lot these points will probably be adjusted soon, especially 2-4.

I know the Smite community has been excited for the release since Smite 2 has been bombing so much at least and it also is receiving similar criticism.

I had the same thought when I saw Conan on the list too. I always thought it started in film and TV.

The biggest ones that come to mind for me are The Witcher and anything Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. I know the SMT series was originally based off the Digital Devil novels, but kind of developed its own identity pretty quickly.

There were some interesting names in this list from Wikipedia I found.

I finally got a chance to give it a listen and I really enjoyed it overall. The jazzy song structure of the first few tracks (chorus-instrumental improv-chorus) was a little off-putting to me, but after about halfway through I was really everything they were doing. I don’t know why but every time I hear an upright bass organically mixed into a rock track it gives me a nice fuzzy feeling. I haven’t heard anything of theirs since Contra released and they’ve definitely come a looong way in terms of mixing and composition.