All raising prices is going to do is force audiences to choose between games, meaning they buy fewer games.

maybe a shift of consumer indulgence to indie? I feel like this hurts mid-budget games specifically.

gamers debating whether summons are part of miyazaki’s vision is like abrahamic sects debating the canonicity of apocrypha but infinitely funnier because while the writers of the testaments are long gone, miyazaki is still alive and he has specifically said that they are

the reason this happens for FromSoft is of course Miyazaki, but w/rt Nintendo, it’s developed a Bell Labs-esque mythos around it that runs parallel to auteurism—not to mention the individual actors in the company that are ascribed that label to a degree, i.e. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma

the tangible answers are Nintendo and FromSoft

the broad answer is that anything that centers an ‘auteur’ in its promotion/development or has a solo/main developer is going to make a notable amount of people who like it parasocial to at least some degree. I’m also guilty of this, I give a lot of reverence to Toby Fox and I actively follow what he outputs, as his work has earned a level of implicit trust that whatever he makes will likely resonate with me.

I vaguely followed this like third-hand from the sloptuber churn. IIRC the entire time this guy was posturing the case to be spurious litigation against a well-entrenched cheating accusation, but it turns out it’s that he accused the man of causing another YouTuber’s suicide in a video because he saw a reddit comment about it???

it was always framed about the cheating scandal and nothing else. he crowdfunded for his legal funds with that premise

or just at this point

honestly I thought it was just a 50/50 mix of imperial glorification and fixation on high school. huh. TIL about the military schools

given your hand size you probably have a stuntman, made something negative, and took the hieroglyph (classic series of blunders) so that’d be 885 chips, should be enough to clear any blind in ante 1 (pre-purple) but I’d either drop that joker if it isn’t eternal (or this resulted from consecutive ectoplasms, even classic-er blunder, just hold R at that point if the engine isn’t set yet) or start pumping high card immediately

135 chips (base level, no modifiers)

Affinity in 2 is a general mess and annoying to parse. Doesn’t help that you have to actually go to the screen to unlock the new nodes and start progress on the next level (from scratch, IIRC, because fuck you for assuming its a passive unlock)

Also, Ursula’s blade quest, extremely tedious. so many fucking merc missions. stop

also I pulled everyone but KOS-MOS

oneshot criticism: i have to say goodbye to niko

Never had a Wii U, pre-ordered X DE! v excited since they kept talking like it’d never be ported because the codebase was apparently switch-hostile

Oh yeah, Xenoblade, let me piggyback off that.

1 is very very good, best story, but there’s a bit of a plot lull in the midpoints of each of the Titans that can feel like I’m going through the motions. Due to how extensive the areas are, it exacerbates the needed downtime a bit far for my liking. As well, too many placeholder quests that just serve as padding/easy XP. Also, if I have to look for Black Liver Beans again, I’m reaching through the screen and killing Juju myself.

2 has my favorite combat (I miss step-cancelling ;–;). However, even though I do genuinely like the story and characters–I’d die for Nia–it’s hard not to cringe recommending it to other people, especially people who aren’t desensitized to animeisms. A lot of moments that feel like they’re there to hit quota, a lot of things I think just feel awkward. Some of the character designs are just straight-up egregious (my go-to on this is Dahlia) and it sometimes has the aura of “we were making a gacha game specifically for that demographic but then Nintendo told us to remove the monetization so we just nixed that specifically.” I love this game but with a large asterisk on it.

3 is rather polished gameplay-wise and probably my favorite in sum but it’s a bit all-over-the-place due to having to accommodate both returning and new players from the outset in the story. It’s the most disjointed feeling one for me, feels like it kinda scrambled to tie up a lot of ends. It’s still a good story, It just doesn’t have the unfettered cohesiveness of, say, 1. Best main party overall in the series though, IMO. Named my cat Mio.

they should have given pokemon to david lynch, including game direction, just to see what he’d do with it. woulda been a good bit, if nothing else

am using SoH, but I chose Vanilla Plus preset since it’s my first playthrough. Not helping that I’m using an 8bitdo Pro 2, which mimics DualShock, which does not mesh well with the N64 design.

Autojump in 3D is just baffling to me, to be honest. 3D platforming is already hard to eyeball, I at least want to control when I’m doing it. My own personal barrier to entry for the Zelds

i’m first-timing it now and it’s really good. my only major critique is that in retrospect with what we have now for design principles I’m really feeling that funky camera control mechanism in a similar way to how I felt it in SM64. Lock-on can be a little wonky sometimes. First-person is unintuitive without a crosshair/focus point. Those quirks are just early 3D, I guess, so it’s not exactly bad design, just dated.

Also, give dedicated jump button, please god, there’s platforming and it’s 3D, please, I beg you, I can’t keep autojumping, please

Had to recreate this one because I refreshed instead of posting

For Undertale, I disagree with the final Chara scene at the end of No Mercy. It muddies the waters on an otherwise very-deliberate thematic overtone of the whole route (you are engaging in a gameplay strategy that is designed to be extremely tedious and grindy in a continuous slog of deliberate cruelty so banal that it’s probably for no other reason than wanting to experience everything). I’d honestly prefer that the game continued to specifically lambaste me and reinforce my culpability rather than give room for anything else.

Like, okay, let’s spitball. Chara is the only entity in the game that has enough natural determination to step in and override you. Instead of being just ‘evil child’, let’s have them be an entity that is generally non-interfering but wants to enforce ‘responsibility for deliberate acts’ to counteract the godlike nature of SAVE/LOAD. Maybe Chara is the intermediary who allows us to interface with SAVE/LOAD and/or Frisk, or maybe they’re just an observer of beings with high determination, or something else entirely. Instead of the consequence in Tainted Pacifist being ‘evil kill bad now spooky haunted’ at the very end, have Chara make a show of them seizing control in the middle of the ending sequence (at the most unresolved moment possible) and leverage the metanarrative elements of the world to inflict a depth of dissatisfaction that can only come from a game—back to title screen, save wipe. Instead of ‘you experience true pacifist but game haunted oh nooo’ it would be ‘you can never experience true pacifist in full again. live with your choices.’

Alternatively, let’s take another option. Don’t involve Chara. Don’t give a true ‘conclusion’ in that sense. Just end with a black screen after killing Flowey that persists until you manually go into the files and unfuck the save—i.e. ‘What are you still doing here? The monsters are all gone. There’s nothing left. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

Instead, it really just kinda serves to make talking about the route annoying (no Patrick, you were not possessed to do evil, you chose what buttons to press) and feels a little hackish in retrospect. ‘wow evil child monster haunts the game kill everyone and you too ooh wow’ is a bit of an eye-roller when tailing one of the most otherwise ludonarratively-consonant gameplay routes in an RPG, IMO.

Moving on, encounter and non-encounter area differentiation is a bit unintuitive. Pokémon solves this by having special encounter tiles, and Deltarune solves this with roaming encounters. Properly adds to the tedium of No Mercy, annoying elsewhere.

Speaking of Deltarune, you can feel the lack of a run button on replay. Rather annoying now that I’ve been spoiled with having it.

Lastly, I don’t really like Muffet’s heart mechanic. Idea is cute, but it feels like it’d give me RSI if played for a good bit.

ok, disclaimer, these criticisms are only refreshed as far as my last playthrough, which was late 2023, so they may be half-remembered

CrossCode’s level graph very much assumes you’re champing at the bit to do a good chunk of the quests in each area before you move on (or an annoying amount of grinding), which–especially in the early game–can be a bit of a slog due to the amount of backtracking and/or fetching you have to do. The justifications I’ve heard for this is that it’s supposed to be a part of the general satire of MMOs–however, if you make something that drags on purpose and I have to play it, I may or may not feel the purpose but I definitely feel the drag.

The bit after Red Area^TM and before Japan^TM honestly drags a little. I see the vision but it feels like it ballooned in scope relative to its importance to the story. Don’t get me wrong, after Red Area^TM you absolutely need to have downtime, but I remember a bit before you get to the temples feeling like we should either be getting back into the plot action or at least be in another area by now, and then there’s two temples. Cool idea, a bit much, especially on replay.

I think the puzzles are a design strength of the game, especially the final puzzle, but it very much constitutes a barrier to entry, especially the very long puzzles (including the final puzzle) where sometimes I just want to get back into the combat (the most fun part for me). It’s more in retrospect that I like some of those longer puzzles.

I don’t like the stealth sections at all. They’re insta-room resets (annoying), and Lea feels too floaty to work with it. Her fluidity is great for combat but it just doesn’t do precision. I’m glad that there’s like, two in total, but I think they should have nixed it. CrossCode is a very active game, and IMO it thrives most when it allows you Metal Gear Rising/Sekiro levels of pure activity in gameplay. It’s like if you were mid-Titanfall and they hit you with turn-based menu combat (shoot at options)–funny bit, kills the momentum, frustrating to control.

Lastly, platforming is generally fine but there are some bits where the isometric layering is poorly communicated, and it’s rather frustrating when that happens. Also, I’m generally not the biggest fan of auto-jump platforming (currently first-timing Ocarina of Time so this is rather fresh) but it’s implemented well-enough to not be annoying in a way that I remember.

your turn

I played 3.0, most people experienced it on 2.0. 3.0 is probably the more-accurate translation of the two? 2.0 has some notable errors in the final act that I recall that leads to some misinterpretation. YMMV, though