Lurker > Kenri

The mentions of complex controls have me worried, the controls were a big part of why I didn't like Samus Returns. If they're closer to that style than ZM/Fusion it's a deal breaker for me.

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7.5

Pretty solid. I like Squall and Rinoa, the science-fantasy setting, and even the weird time compression stuff at the end. I just wish the rest of the party got more development (Quistis is my fave but she does literally nothing). The plot also felt kind of rushed, like new things kept happening without letting the previous thing have room to breathe. But overall I liked it more than I thought I would.

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Weird how people get older in 12 years.

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Best: Auron
Worst: Kimahri

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From what I've heard the first is mediocre but the second is great. Not sure which version is best though.

The GBA game is also a surprisingly good SRPG.

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8.5 sounds right. This game oozes style, the characters are all memorable and interesting, and it really hits a perfect balance of taking itself seriously and having high stakes while still having a good amount of humor and levity.

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Lost In Thoughts All Alone from FE Fates, but not in a good way

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Best: Shadow
Worst: Water

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Looks bad Bamco

(Their old one is pretty bad too though ngl)

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Best: Bowling
Worst: Tennis

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Best: Mother Brain
Worst: Spore Spawn

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HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

I honestly don't understand Texas's obsession with horse cops. Well, aside from the obvious intimidation tactics and cowboy aesthetic.

I mean, it sounds like you understand it completely?

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LeonhartFour posted...

2-4 alone would put it above AJ, but AJ also has two cases worse than anything JFA has.

This is a remarkable (and unearned) amount of respect for 2-1!

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Best: Mothula
Worst: Moldorm

fuck moldorm, all my homies hate moldorm

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colliding posted...

borginian cocoons

These were stupid but there's so much to hate about 4-3 that I can't imagine singling them out as its biggest problem

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6/10

This feels kinda generous but at the end of the day most of it's still fine and at a level I'd put above the average video game story.

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Nightmare
King
Grimm

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masterplum posted...

I bet Papa John would rather be much less rich and happier

I bet he thinks he's entitled to both!

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masterplum posted...

Cancel culture doesnt discriminate based on wealth. Weve seen low class workers lose their jobs, but also high class individuals like Papa John who previously would have been nearly invincible due to their upper class wealth.

Papa John is still a billionaire, he didn't suddenly lose his wealth just because he lost his job. That's about as invincible to cancel culture as you can get.

(Also that doctor's coat should say "Vax the Antis" if it wanted to be provocative, "Vax the Arms" is kinda nonsense.)

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xp1337 posted...

I purposely parenthesize the "white" in white working class there because with perhaps one or two exceptions where he's mostly alluding to someone else's writings he seems to default to "working class" which just *claps* isn't *claps* the *claps* same. This has been a personal pet peeve of mine since coverage of the 2016 election liked to conflate WWC and working class as the same to explain Trump's win. Trump performed well with the WWC, Clinton still won the rest of it. Don't put this shit on everyone else. It's literally the "economic anxiety" shtick all over again.

I read this article weeks ago and don't remember it perfectly (and don't care to reread it) but this was my biggest take away as well. Straight up embarrassing how easily and repeatedly the author implies (assumes?) that all working class people are white.

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The combo is 100% the only one worth getting.

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KamikazePotato posted...

imo Karol is the best character in Vesperia who isn't Yuri and it's a shame they gave that story arc to an aesthetically unpleasing kid, dooming him to never be appreciated as much as the main character or waifus

He secretly drives most of the plot

Big vouch. I'll forever be a Karol apologist.

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skullbone posted...

Estelle is confusingly stupid/naive

To each their own, but I thought they struck a really refreshing balance by making her booksmart but sheltered. Honestly one of the things I liked the most about the game's character writing was that it didn't pigeonhole any one character as The Stupid One or The Smart One, but instead gave each party member their own areas of knowledge.

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KamikazePotato posted...

#1 - #7 are the entire Harry Potter series.

jfc

Congrats though, #9 is amazing!

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8/10

Definitely the best story of the three Tales games I've played, though admittedly most of that is on the back of great character writing and strong world-building.

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Yep, I traveled in June 2021 and after my return flight I was out with a cold for almost two weeks. That was despite trying to travel as safely as I could wrt to masking, hand sanitizer, etc. But I got tested and it wasn't covid, at least.

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Until literally the day I got my ballot and voted, I was under the impression that you could not vote for question 2 unless you voted "yes recall" on question 1, and even then I had to Google it to double-check.

Would not be surprised if other people thought similarly!

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Raka_Putra posted...

Here's what Domino's here tries to pass off as margherita.

smh they can't even do the bare minimum and put basil flakes on it, had to do parsley instead

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SpikeSetsFire posted...

Next, I want to try Fugu.
The fish Homer ate before being told he had eaten poison.

I went to a fugu specialty restaurant when I was in Japan and had it a bunch of different ways.

It's delicious. Not terribly unique compared to other white fish, but still one of the best seafood meals I've ever had.

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tcaz2 posted...

I think a lot of people in the US at least have never had a margherita pizza, at least outside of the major cities. I haven't, and I'm pretty sure most of the people I know IRL haven't either. It's just not on most regular pizza places menu.

It's not typically on fast food pizza menus but it's pretty common for "nicer" pizza places to have it as the default instead of plain cheese, I think. In my experience, any kind of brick oven pizza place probably has it.

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StealThisSheen posted...

So Larry Elder's campaign website has put up a form for people to report voter fraud, and is written in the past tense as if Newsom has already survived the recall and fraud was found in the final results.

Well Elder's anti-Newsom ads on Pandora radio start with the line "You remind me of the guy who stole my girlfriend in high school!" so him being a whiny loser is definitely on brand.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

there was a certain charm to the decision to make the entire story dialog-free.

Man, I can't disagree more. I'm not sure which decision torpedoed the story harder: the lack of dialogue or the bland original setting and OC bosses.

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XIII_rocks posted...

I like that they made the second pseudo-legendary totally distinct from the first though

Agreed but just looking at it doesn't make me think "ah yes, a Rock/Dark type"

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Dancedreamer posted...

Dear California [. . .] We know you're usually good on things

yeah unless there's a big propaganda campaign for 60% of the state to fall for, anything actually progressive up for a vote, or a dipshit actor running for governor

then we drop the ball consistently

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2/10

Waste of time and potential.

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Tyranitar could definitely have been Dragon instead of Dark imo

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I'll probably pick this up because I'm a sucker for Metroidvanias but combo-based combat and the visuals are definitely personal turn offs ngl

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Some shades are slightly feminine and some are slightly masculine, I'd say. I definitely see more men than women wearing grape purple.

For the most part if you go into a clothing store and buy a shirt from the men's section, it's going to be a color that isn't coded feminine. Because like... that's the point. We can debate if this is a good or bad thing it's bad but the moral of the story is, don't stress it.

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6 definitely isn't but 3 doesn't look like a crustacean to me either.

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voltch posted...

Though some pokemon confuse me with their dual typing cos they look like they could have 3.
Like Lugia not being a water type.
Feels like if it was created today they would just give it Water/Psychic with Levitate instead of Flying/Psychic.

Drapion, Flygon, and Solrock are pretty bad about this too.

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7.5 I think

I'll admit I haven't played this game in like... 15 years, so my memory about it isn't great. But it's got solid characters and dialogue, a few good twists, and a reasonably good ending. There's definitely some cheese but I'm okay with it.

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I never finished this but I wasn't very impressed with the first 50-60% of the story. It's cute, I guess.

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I think if I got to ride on the My Will ferris wheel one (1) time at night when it's all lit up under the softly falling snow, it would permanently fix my depression. I think it would just be like, poof, no more depression

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Axl_Rose_85 posted...

On an unrelated note. I'm about to start Fire Emblem Fates in a few days but seeing that those games just straight up lost to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Resident Evil 6 in story is really giving me a motivation crisis. And those are three full blown RPG plots so it is a huge time investment.

So I ask the people who played those games, are those just hyperbole hate bombs for ratings or is it worth investing my time in those games? I'm generally a gameplay > story guy but those two aspects are very close so story does matter a lot in a game to me.

I don't like the gameplay or story of them frankly but that's kind of a hot take. A lot of people like the gameplay, especially for Conquest. Lots of FE fans will call that the best gameplay in the series, even!

the story and writing are irredeemable tho

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Fukai Mori is a top anime ED of all time but honorable mention to My Will (should be called My Wheel because of the ferris wheel)

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I really need to play this game at some point.

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KamikazePotato posted...

People in Ivalice are shown as having desires that aren't related to the four kids. There's a society that exists outside of the main plot, and characters working to understand the nature of their world.

Granted, but as far as I can remember they're extremely minor characters; they show up for a quest or two and are never seen again. They certainly don't have any real depth of human emotion/motivation/history. It feels like a null tell to me since you'd expect a world based on a video game to have "NPCs" like that.

KamikazePotato posted...

The final boss is even stated to be made of everyone's hopes and dreams! The world is influenced by the kids' desires, but it's not controlled by them. Marche and the gang could all die and Ivalice would continue on.

The final boss is made up of "pure will" and of "the pure essence of every wish that makes up [Ivalice]", but it's very, very strongly implied that at that moment, in the final boss fight, it's literally just Marche and Mewt's wishes. Li-grim (the final boss) even states outright that the world is an illusion and that she'll do whatever Mewt wants.

Also, earlier in the game, Marche destroys the last crystal and Totema that was protecting it, and Li-grim shows up to tell him that even without the crystals holding the world together, it will persist as long as he and Mewt (and by implication Doned and Ritz) want it to. The kids are the *only* thing that keeps Ivalice around; even the crystals that supposedly do it basically just end up being set dressing without any real function. There's really no reason to believe that the world would continue to exist if they died in it, and honestly I'd question whether it's even possible for them to die in it (or at least for Mewt to).

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KamikazePotato posted...

And while the world was formed based on the core cast's subconscious desires, it's still a real world. The people in it have their own thoughts, dreams, and emotions.

I honestly do not think the game supports this interpretation. I'm way more likely to believe this about a setting like Koholint Island (old Zelda spoilers) than Ivalice. If Ivalice is supposed to be "real" in any meaningful sense it definitely does not show it, at all -- and it would make the setting way more inconsistent than it already is.

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The execution was pretty bad there, yeah. I have a theory about Ritz but it's death-of-the-author stuff, probably not what the writers intended. With Doned though, and the game makes this point very poorly, but it was less about being crippled and more that he felt he was missing out on life. The thing is, he didn't actually do anything in Ivalice either. He didn't lead a clan, he didn't try to stop Marche himself, he essentially just conned random people into fighting Marche for him. He had working legs, but he was still just as helpless and reliant on others as when he was in his wheelchair.

Then Marche says like three sentences to him and it's all fixed and once they're back in St. Ivalice he's shown attending school and making friends and stuff. Character development! Well, if we're very generous it is, at least.

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KamikazePotato posted...

Marche did nothing wrong if you're okay with him killing a bunch of people to get his old world back

Which is fine (although the execution of his motivations is trash), I actually have a much bigger issue with the nonsensical way the inhabitants of the world react when they learn of his plan

See this is what I mean about major details being hidden where the average player won't notice them! Almost everyone in Ivalice was just someone from St. Ivalice memory wiped and transformed into a new role based on how much Mewt liked them. His best friends and family became the ungodly powerful heroes and rulers, people he didn't care about became "NPCs", and the people he hated became monsters/outlaws for the heroes to hunt down and defeat. There are a handful of exceptions, characters like Babus (transformed from Mewt's teddy bear) and Llednar (just another aspect of Mewt). And even then I don't think either of them actually died because the game pulls its punch and Marche doesn't actually end up destroying Ivalice! The number of people Marche canonically kills is super low, if not zero!

The nonsensical reactions are weird if you think Ivalice is a fully formed world, but they make perfect sense if you consider that Ivalice is just wish fulfillment. It's a world created based on Marche's unconscious desires and explicitly modeled after his favorite video game. Of course the average person helps him with his quest. Why would he create a world where he's the hero but everyone wants to stop him? This is why the only real opposition is from Mewt and the other kids, and their allies.

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