Lurker > azuarc

So, out of curiosity, what's the point of separation between a "jingle" and a short song? Does it need to basically have no more than one melodic strain?

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

greengravy294 posted...

Opening a chest in legend of zelda

Which one, though?

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Hbthebattle posted...

The smart money puts Soda Dungeon 2 at #1

TheArkOfTurus posted...

I'm sure predictions such as Soda Quest 2 at #63 will guarantee me the victory.

Well, one of these things sure can't be correct.

Thank you for making a prediction. That one-quarter-finished list was looking awfully lonely.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

So far it's looking like Shonen_Bat will win the predictions by default.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Nanis23 posted...

There is one thing I do wish for
Give it Steam Achievements

The current trilogy doesn't have that because it was a Origin release

And ME3 never made it to Steam. Maybe some day I'll cave and play it anyway, but I had no interest in hopping platforms.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

If it's only been 5 pulls, then that's basically pure upside even if you don't use him.

Kaeya can be good if you commit, but I'm going to wait and see if I can snag Diona first. I'm not trying to create an all-husbando team, though.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

BlackMageJawa posted...

"They said making a new Mass Effect game after Andromeda's failure would be a suicide mission."

So they're remaking ME2?

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

One more terrible game. The "real" ranking begins with the next one. I hope you'll all consider starting some predictions before then.

.

65. Hand of Fate 2
Genre Tabletop-esque adventure with live action

Gameplay: 1
Rest of Game: 2
Engagement: 0
New to Me: 5
Playtime: 1

Total score: 9/40

HoF2 might actually be a fun game, if you were super determined to slog through it, but at its core its a narrative dungeon crawler (with card pulls and random dice rolls) that breaks out into live battles with clunky dodge-roll mechanics. The draw of the game is supposed to be the open-ended decision-making on the map, as the narrator offers you a variety of different storytelling options at each node, and I suppose the writing on these segments isnt completely horrible.

But the gameplay is sloooowwww. Its so slow, and the mechanics were disinteresting, and everything is bogged down by randomization that tends to go poorly and makes your open-ended narrative storytelling experience awful. A narrator reads all the lines in a dramatic drawl, artifically stretching your reading longer. The battles, rather than a highlight to break the monotony, end up being the pinnacle of the game's drudgery. My friend bought HoF2 for me, so I tried it in from of them, and we jointly agreed it wasnt very good. I bailed after an hour, with the impression that it probably wouldnt get any better.

The funniest part is how the voiceover in the tutorial brags about how every element of the game has been improved from the original. If this was the improvement, I shudder to think what HoF1 was like.

Should you play it?: I really dont think so, but if the premise sounds interesting, have at it.

Next: A game I played on a dare

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I wasn't too far off. I gave Arizona, NC, and PA to Biden; should have been Arizona, GA, and PA....oh, except I apparently left Nevada out. Never mind.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Harry Nilsson - Spaceman

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

If you're talking about the minesweeper-like game, your goal is to hit stuff that's the same. Neighboring stuff will pivot to another symbol. However, what isn't clear is that you don't actually have to reveal the whole freaking grid, just the part of the picture that has the thing you want. You can practically just peck away the remaining shards and click the background regardless of how bad the pattern is, once you recognize this.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Just had my first perfect game in battlegrounds since maybe back during its original vanilla period. Turns out +2/+1 on every minion every turn, plus a golden lightfang, plus an amalgadon, is pretty good.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Two? Why not three? Because if three people are left, and one gets killed, both people know exactly whodunit. Plus, it'll be a tie in the trial.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

dowolf posted...

Sophisticated Fight is too sophisticated for me, apparently.

I am completely unrefined.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I'll wait a bit before the next one.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Okay, time for a prod. Let's kick this pig.

.

66. fugue
Genre Puzzle

Gameplay: 0
Rest of Game: 2
Engagement: 0
New to Me: 5
Playtime: 1

Total score: 8/40

Fugue is awful. As a random game inclusion with the itch.io bundle, it didnt have a high bar to clear, and fugue failed tto jump. The artsy visuals are the only reason this game earned any points at all, other than being new to me. However, despite intending to bottom out at 0, 2 is also the lowest score I gave in that category, which means the only way any game could have scored worse than Fugue did would be if it was equally terrible AND I had played it before but inexplicably went back for seconds.

At its core, fugue is a numbers puzzle game. For some reason, these puzzles take place on sheet music, involving birds nesting in a city top, set to a very stark black-and-white aesthetic. The interface is super minimalistic, theres no tutorial or instructions, and you just have to kind of feel your way through the menus. None of that is bad at first, because it seems like all you need to succeed at this game is a very rudimentary understanding of arithmetic. But after the first ten puzzles, the game seemingly introduces new mechanics without explaining what they are or how to handle them. What began as pick the number that solves x + 4 = 9 becomes pick the number that solves x + 4 = 9 BUT ALSO solves x + 6 = 9. There was obviously some additional mechanic the game intended, and after twenty minutes of fiddling with the controls, I decided I didnt care enough to find out what it was.

Should you play it?: Absolutely not.

Next: A card game

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Hbthebattle posted...

That's robophobic!

Was gonna say, where's Keebo?

Inviso posted...

Honestly, aside from the plot twist at the end, 3-4 is one of the WORST cases in the series, in my opinion.

It's certainly not worse than 2-4, which is the closest analog.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

UshiromiyaEva posted...

I really like this case. Like, a lot.

I also HATE this case.

Agreed. The virtual world stuff is interesting and at the same time extremely obnoxious. But at least he's at the trial now, so it's just a matter of deciphering it all.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Not sure how you would cheat. I mean, if you know my proclivities, that's whatever. If you managed to hack my desktop and access my Excel spreadsheet that isn't available on-line, yeah, okay, that would be cheating.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I want to know more about Diona, but I am at least interested in considering her. I saw her actual abilities, though, and it sounds like she only heals the active character, and only via her ult.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

bump. Literally 0 predictions thus far, so I'm assuming I shouldn't start with #66 just yet.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

UshiromiyaEva posted...

DR2 is a very, very sting cast.

I'm trying to figure out what word you intended here.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Ibuki and Gundham are the 1st and 3rd best character in DR2 respectively IMO, lol.

DR2 cast is very weak to begin with, so that doesn't say much. I'm not sure your statement and mine are even mutually exclusive.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

ZeldaTPLink posted...

I agree she was uber obvious, though. But can't have everything.

As someone who clearly doesn't metagame the way you guys do, I did not find Tsumugi obvious. I should have, if I had spent an once of time thinking about it, because even if I had simply gotten to the point of "oh, there's a path from the girl's bathroom," that should have explained everything. Instead I was just, like, huh, how 'bout that.

I agree that she does exactly nothing the whole game, though. Plus she's a dip.

KamikazePotato posted...

Characters like Ibuki and Gundham didn't work for me at all because they felt like caricatures.

I didn't like either of these two. They weren't caricatures. They were simply annoying. Although I think a large part of that was because they didn't feel remotely real, either in the literal sense or within the context of the game world.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Hey, just because I logged over 200 hours within a 2-week window doesn't mean...well, okay, it certainly means something. But it's certainly not the only game I hit that hardcore for a while.

Totally not trying to throw you off the scent. Totally.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Maybe for 2021. I've had Factorio on my wishlist for a while, but it literally never budged from its base price over the last two years while it sat on early access. Something was fishy about Factorio that way, because it's the only game I've ever seen that didn't have a $x.99 price and was apparently immune to sales. I have a suspicion I'd get bored with it pretty quickly, though. I'm not a huge fan of sandbox games that lack clear objectives.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Ngamer64 posted...

* 81,659,865 votes cast for Joe Biden

former record was 65.9 million (Obama '08), that's now been bested by 15.8 million

* 74,549,050 votes cast for Donald Trump

he collected 62.9 million in 2016, so this is an improvement of 11.5 million

* 7,110,814 vote margin of victory

that's an improvement of 4.24 million over Hillary's 2016 margin (2.87 million)

Er, is this a projection or is the site I'm looking at way way way behind on totals?

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I voted depends on who she is up against. Then I realized that her competition would be a republican.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Outraged Twitterers gonna be outraged. Sure, it was even worse for the woman who died, but that doesn't mean it was bad for her.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Full list of games:

20XX
A Day in the Woods
A Hat in Time
A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Short Hike
Borderlands 3
Cat Quest
Celeste
Civilization VI
DanganRonpa V3
Disco Elysium
Dishonored
Dishonored 2
dorfromantik
DuckTales Remastered
Endless Legend
Epic Battle Fantasy III
Evoland Evolutionary Edition
Fallout 4
fugue
Furries, Scalies, and Bears, Oh My!
Gemcraft - Chasing Shadws
Genshin Impact
Globesweeper
Goblins, Inc.
God Eater Resurrection
Hades
Hand of Fate 2
Hearthstone
Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption
Hollow Knight
Kingdom Rush: Frontiers
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
Lenna's Inception
Minit
Monster Hunter: World
Monster Train
Muse Dash
Night in the Woods
OneShot
Ori and the Blind Forest
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice
Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations
Pyre
Renowned Explorers: International Society
Rogue Legacy
Sayonara Wild Hearts
shapez.io
Slay the Spire
Soda Dungeon 2
Stardew Valley
Streets of Rogue
Super Mario 64 (randomizer)
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Win the Game
Supermash
The Jackbox Party Pack (1-6)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Metronomicon
The Purring Quest
Trine 3
Ys: The Oath in Felghana
Z3R (A Link to the Past randomizer)

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my review of every game I played in 2020. Unlike in previous years, where I played a total of maybe 3 games total, one being Hearthstone or an MMO, one Civilization, and the third something dumb that I still managed to rack up a hundred hours on, I actually played a lot of games in 2020.

For me, anyway. I mean, shit, five games would have been a lot by those standards, right?

But no, I took it one step further and decided to start attacking my backlog. I bought a new computer last fall, and decided, yknow, maybe its time to start branching out a little. Like, maybe instead of Hearthstone, I could play Slay the Spireor Monster Trainor Card Hunteror Hand of Fate 2

And by the end, I had managed to chronicle a total of 66 games that I have in some way attempted to play, at least for a short time. I am now, for your benefit, going to rank them. I make no promises it won't be a terrible list.

Also, were going to do a prediction game.

Also ALSO, the winner of the prediction game will receive a game of their choice off the list (some exceptions apply).

Also ALSO ALSO, were going to be running a VGM guessing game Saturday night at 8 PM eastern with all the songs coming from titles on this list. Even if youre not a VGMGG regular, maybe youll want to attend just in case I say anything that might help your predix.

.

Great, so now that weve got that out of the way, heres some caveats and inclusion criteria:

1. This list will include a small part of last year, when I began logging my games. I wanted to include twelve months of time. But by doing this in November, maybe Ill help you pick out new games for the winter Steam sales.
2. This is every game I played in 2020, not necessarily games released in 2020. Moreso, not all these games are even first-time plays. More on that below.
3. I play exclusively on PC. There are three games on this list from the Switch because I played them at a friends house. Theres are two randomizers. Beyond that, there are no console exclusives. About ten of these came from itch.ios bundle for racial justice.
4. There were times where I lumped games together that maybe should have been separate. There were times where I didnt group games together that I maybe should have. I played several games via Sega Genesis Classics on Steam, and then for some reason excluded all of them. Im completely inconsistent here.

Ill list the games in post 2, but lets talk about how theyre scored. I had to create some kind of rating system or I would have never ever gotten anywhere, so I rated the games in five categories.

• Gameplay (/10) -- how good is the design of this game? How are the controls? How functional is the interface? How well-designed are the levels and the boss fights? Gameplay is typically the most important part of a game, hence why it gets its own category.
• Rest of Game (/10) -- everything else about the actual construction of the game. Visuals. Music and sound. Story. Yknow, the kind of stuff that I expect a lot of you will prioritize because this is Board 8 and we love our Phoenix Wright.
• Engagement (/10) -- regardless of the above, how much did I enjoy this game? Was it fun? Did it hook me?
• New to Me (/5) -- have I played this game before 2020? If no, 5 free points. If yes, this probably gets a 1 or maybe a 0. Some games might earn in-between scores depending on how much of the game I experienced in 2020. (55 of the 66 games earned a 5 here. This category is just to not reward games that Ive played extensively in the past.)
• Playtime (/5) -- a highly arbitrary category that reflects how much of an experience I got out of this game. If I played a game to completion and it wasnt obscenely short, this earned a 5. However, I also played a number of short games and a number of games I bailed on. (That will be a theme throughout the lower half of the list.)

Youre welcome to dispute the validity of those last two categories, but theyre worth less, and hey, this is all subjective anyway, right? With Gameplay, Rest of Game, and Engagement, I did my best to rate these on a bell curve, where 0 is the weakest game ON THE LIST and 10 is the strongest game ON THE LIST. I expected I would need to go back and re-rate a ton of these in order to adjust the curve, but surprisingly, I did a pretty good job on the first pass, so Im just going to stick to the numbers I made up on my initial gut reactions, and regret everything afterwards.



All values are rated in whole numbers, but I will split ties as I go.

Sample write-up:
1638. The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask
Gameplay: 1/10
Rest of Game: 1/10
Engagement: 1/10
New to Me: 0/5
Playtime: 1/5
Score: 4/40

Dawn of the final write-up. This game is awful. It met with a horrible fate.

Should you play it? Hell no. It deserved to lose GotD in round 2.

Next: Songbirds

.

Dont worry, that wont even be the worst opinion on the list. But hey, that means it might be all the more challenging for anyone to guess the order. So lets find out who can do the best! Follow the link below, claim a column, and make an attempt to guess the order. Ive never actually done a predictions contest with a ranking topic before, so this might end up being total garbage, but were gonna give it a try!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YyEqm_qProk42G-ok_To1wHTapKHtrWDPc2_J5Wb3CY/edit#gid=0

Basically, just copy the list, tinker with it until it's in the order you want, and then find an empty column and paste your results in, along with your name. Alternatively, paste in the topic and I'll add for you. You can do the entire list at once or just do a little at a time to keep ahead of the thread. But no going back to change anything retroactively, and no repeating games on your predix! Once a game is gone, it's gone.

Scoring: 2 points for nailing a position. 1 point for being within two spots. (Nothing awarded for post-reveal changes, obviously.)

Hopefully this won't be a horribly awful system. I can see it working fine as long as we're all cool with one another. If I've missed anything, please yell at me promptly. After I reveal #66, I'll try to keep to a pace of at least 3 per day. (Don't worry if you miss the very beginning. You can still get in on the predictions at any time. I will wait a little bit before putting the first one up, though.)

And now, if you'll excuse me I better get to my remaining 30 write-ups...

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

red sox 777 posted...

11k cut in Maricopa based on 62k votes counted. That's.....over 58%. Still on pace!

Isn't that pretty much exactly the pace, though? I thought 58% would lead to a photo finish.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I'd be willing to try World of Goo.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

NFUN posted...

p sure that was az, which we all expected deep down in our hearts

I would happily nuked Azure Arbitrator, too.

The Merciless Savior: 5.2/4.6
Azure Arbitrator: 5.5/5.8

The funny thing is that you can usually count on me to like boss music. Like, if I did a ranking topic, and you had no idea what to send me but wanted to do well, you should just give me five final boss songs and call it a day. Just make sure none of them are from Trails, I guess.

And now I hate myself for wasting 15 minutes listening to both versions of Azure Arbitrator that could have been spent doing literally anything else.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

StifledSilence posted...

The lead singer of Offspring wrote Gone Away about his wife that died.

You sure about that? I know The Offspring decently well, and while I admit I don't usually engage in that sort of trivia, I would know if Dexter Holland had a dead wife.



The album that song is from released in 1996. I'd be very impressed if he divorced someone in 2012 that died prior to '96.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

SockoressKnight posted...

I'm sure there is SOME reason why you use actual currency to purchase one virtual currency, which is only used to be converted into another virtual currency.

There's also legal reasons why they do this. It helps keep the gacha elements from getting labeled as actual gambling, and it prevents there from being a direct link between real world currency and game assets -- which is important to the gacha design both legally and psychologically.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I guess he's still got a long way to go.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Voted Gone Away because it's an important song to me, but I always interpreted it as a song about recovering after a suicide. I mean, I guess that's loss of a loved one, in a sense, but it's vastly different from a song like, say, Last Kiss.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

They substitute for primogems.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

MrSmartGuy posted...

hit one extra button, and it just gave me the sword with no confirmation or anything

There's a surprising amount of this in the game.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Yeah. I voted for Nader in '00 because I didn't want to support Bush or Gore. It wasn't that I necessarily liked Ralph Nader himself, but he was a semi-viable candidate that wasn't with the major parties.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Meh, I like the game, but I don't know that I necessarily like the character. Gonna go with no.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Goldfinger

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

I've been contemplating the pass. I'm nowhere near hitting 50, though. Gonna need a strong week and a bunch of stuff on Monday to finish that off.

I'm also generally F2P, though, and I can be a really stingy bastard. I did drop the bucks for the Welkin's Blessing (which has almost run its course,) but I hadn't intended on buying anything else. BP is basically the only thing I'd consider. It's a way better deal than $10 in pure primogems, but that doesn't make it a good deal. I need to decide if I plan on continuing this game, and $10 is worth it.

Funny how I fret over $10 here, but don't bat an eye when a plumber tells me I owe him hundreds of dollars.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Who would you prefer to Obama? Unless you're a Republican, there isn't really anything to point to and say he was bad in any meaningful way. I don't think you can really say that about any of the other presidents on the slate. (Maybe Bush Sr? I don't remember anything bad about him.)

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

Yeah, but when you fluctuate between 2G/1B and 2G/2B, that isn't that much of an upgrade. You're averaging 6-7 greens per run. Just 1 purple would be 9 greens.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

If you're not sure about that, you might consider developing the support characters a little more and what their goals are. If they somehow end up competing with the protagonist in some way, that might inform your decision.

Beyond that, the old adage is that pantsers start at the beginning, planners start at the end. Decide where you want the story to finish, then where you start (and how that's different,) and then subdivide the story into meaningful changes and transitions along the way.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

It's pretty situational. Skullbone's idea is solid, though. Are you more of a planner or a pantser?

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

no one.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour

And the easiest one, at that.

I'm really surprised he thinks Maki is the killer. For as much as he metagames, Maki is just too obviously sinister to be the R1 killer.

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour