Lurker > MariaTaylor

same for me. demon's souls in general changed how I view gaming completely.

my favorite areas now are probably

DeS:
Tower of Latria (3-1 and 3-2)

DS2:
Brume Tower
Shulva, Sanctum City
Eleum Loyce

^ I think these three are among the best straight up dungeon crawls the series has EVER produced.

Bloodborne:
Yaharghul, Unseen City
Nightmare of Mensis
Forbidden Woods

^ I feel like these three actually say a lot about my taste in Bloodborne, and souls games in general.

people HATE the Yaharghul gank squad, it's one of my favorite moments in the game.

people HATE frenzy, I love it.

people really don't like forbidden woods, they complain about getting lost. I think it's a master class in area design. for example; you start at the top of the level and gradually make your way down toward the base. even if you don't realize it, as long as you're always moving downward in elevation you're not really lost... because you're actually going in the right direction. eventually you reach the river. the natural instinct of humans is to follow water, and the river leads you right the boss. seriously amazing design.

also there aren't really any specific areas in dark souls 1 that stand out to me, aside from blight town for being pretty bad.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

I like the Valley of Defilement but I'm a huge Demon's Souls apologist. a lot of my criticisms of Dark Souls 1 apply to Demon's Souls as well, but I still love DeS to this day. though I will say part of that, for me, is the fact that you can use the arch stone to warp between levels and the order you can do the levels is pretty open from the very beginning of the game -- something no other game in the series has really replicated except dark souls 2 to an extent.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

as others have said

1. there is no risk of jail
2. just try calling them and talking to them directly. tell them you never got any notices. it's possible they will accept just the final payment and not any of the fees, because they know they won't get ANY money otherwise.

3. if they are difficult about it, just ignore them. your credit will be negatively impacted but oh well. if you can't pay, you can't pay.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

bloodborne is the best game, but it has an insane learning curve. definitely the highest in the series. in my opinion you have to beat bloodborne at least two or three times before you even start getting good at it. this partially has to do with the fact that blood vials are overpowered and can carry you through the game even if you're bad. it's still the one I'd recommend the most because it truly is the best.

dark souls 2 is the least cryptic game. if you want to have the least confusing experience, where you have a pretty good idea of where to go, start here. this isn't to be confused with a lack of options, however. dark souls 2 actually has multiple different paths you can progress down from early on and lets you play through them in mostly any order you desire.

play dark souls 1 if you're an art house hipster, then you can complain about the WORLD DESIGN of all the other games

demon's souls is pretty good but I'd have a hard time recommending it. the difficulty balance of the game is very wacky and while the bosses of the game were impressive at the time they feel really basic and silly after you've played bloodborne. the same is actually true of dark souls 1 to an extent but shh we're not allowed to talk about that. dark souls 1 is a MASTERPIECE.

never play dark souls 3 unless you have no other options.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

it makes absolutely no difference. the good weapons are good and the bad weapons are bad. the rapier is one of the best weapons in the game. if you think the % of scaling you get from the relevant stat is the only thing that makes a weapon good or bad you clearly have no understanding of how the game mechanics of dark souls 2 work.

what is the base damage of the weapon? what % scaling do you get? how does it scale when infused? what is the poise damage of the weapon? how fast does it attack? how does the move set look? can it be buffed? what is the offhand moveset like? does it have unique power stance moves? with what weapons? how are those?

there's literally like 20 factors that go into whether a weapon is good or not in dark souls 2, and most of them are usually really good at least for one build or another.

weapons that give a low % return from the stat usually have solid base damage and high attack speed to compensate for it. most of the high attack speed weapons (such as the rapier) are already amazing. if they had similarly high % scaling to the mace they would be absolutely broken.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

it's long been known that dark souls 2 is a legitimately great game. pretty much anyone who says otherwise basically just outs themselves as a misinformed gremlin following mob mentality and basing their opinions on dumb and largely inaccurate memes.

the only "legitimate" criticism is the 'world design' meme and I use the term legitimate very, very loosely here. imagine being such a lame ass art house hipster that your source of pretending to be intellectual is pointing out how "muh elevator doesn't connect" and it's just impossible for you to enjoy the experience because this affects the gameplay so much!!

I can't believe the B Team made an elevator that doesn't connect properly!! now mainstream critics will never consider video games to be art!!

and of course my favorite classic (and completely inaccurate) meme is the TOO MANY ARMOR DUDES meme, when dark souls 2 literally has more non armor dude bosses than dark souls 1 had. or the SHRINE OF AMANA SNIPERS meme, which was a thing for literally all of 4 nanoseconds before it was patched. but everyone wants to seem like they are the intellectual sage sitting at the top of the mountain who personally discovered all of these issues (some of which don't even exist) and make sure everyone knows that they weren't happy about it!!

I mean god damn who puts an ELEVATOR that DOESN'T CONNECT into their game!! it's a travesty!!

how am I supposed to have fun during the other 60 hours of gameplay with this ten second segment ruining "muh immersion"
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

I think people loving Brotherhood is pretty common, and the original FMA to a lesser extent is still also considered very good by a lot of people. although I'm in the same boat. I never got into it all that much. it's very different from the kind of series I typically enjoy.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
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yeah I don't know why they chose to go with "When They Cry" way back when. should have just kept "When the Cicada Cry" and "When the Seacats Cry." they sound so much better and also differentiate better, while still being clear that they are related.

I guess they thought western audiences were too stupid to understand.

anyway, probably won't get this until the entire story is complete or at least the first four episodes. that's assuming ryuukishi is still doing the 4/4 structure.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

my waifu is an anime character
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

will I play today?
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

persona Q sucks. it contains none of the elements that make etrian odyssey good, and it fails to really "get" a lot of what draws people into the persona series.

really good answer.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
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I'll probably watch it, and I might even like it a bit

but somehow I'm not happy about it
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

why wouldn't you just take his money and not vote for him?
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Eerieka posted...

Group 3 (moves to the right): Sabin. Yes, Sabin is a group all by himself.

I believe it!
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

I might need to try that and see if it works, yeah. I don't think my controller likes doing the semi circle. although, weirdly, aura blast works. so it should be possible.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

shadow is cool, but similar to gau I find him to be a little unreliable for my playstyle. if there are more sections where you have to use multiple groups at a time I'd be interested to use him again and see how he fits into different teams. but for what I'm setting up now I don't think I'd pick him.

a new tool for edgar does sound pretty tempting. what does it do?

also if I can figure out how to get rising phoenix to work then I'll have AoE with sabin as well.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

alright I'm considering the following formation:

locke
celes
sabin
cyan

obviously locke is there for story reasons, despite being one of the weaker members available. maybe he can actually steal some neat stuff now. who knows? celes is there because I want to have a dedicated healer that doesn't rely on my finite potion stock (and can group heal by simply pressing L).

for the remaining members I sort of went back and forth weighing the pros and cons.

yeah, if I bring edgar, he can two turn most enemy groups with auto crossbow. the thing is, if I'm bringing a high damage single target character anyway... okay, so... most enemy groups don't have more than 4 enemies. if sabin and cyan each kill one enemy per turn, then they will also defeat any enemy group in two turns -- same as edgar. the big difference is that having two big single target damage guys will be more useful against bosses and other large enemies that require lots of big hits to bring down.

this also means that sabin and cyan get to adventure together again.

also I thought about it, and this means that edgar is sitting back in narshe babysitting gau. what a sad fate for him...
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

having chased kefka off, the somber group returns to check on the status of the esper.

after kefka's battle theme I am very aware of the lack of noise in the following scene, probably for dramatic effect. there is only some mild background sound effects but no music track.

this makes it all the more amazing when the esper starts singing and the epic music track kicks in.

god damn what a great scene.

I loved how all of the characters moved around and acted in different, dynamic ways. it's amazing how much character and life they could convey with just 2D sprites in a cutscene with pretty simple blocking and framing. seriously, modern game designers could still today learn a lot from studying what I am seeing here.

the esper resonates with terra and I literally just sat there listening to the music as the two shared a moment, before finally I was ready to advance the scene. the others are rightfully concerned as terra seems to be more and more taken with the overwhelming power before her.

finally the esper seems to release some of its power to terra and I absolutely did not expect what happened next:

she turns into a naked monster lady and then flies off into the air screaming.

the stuff with her flying around the world map was pretty great. once again, with just basic 2D sprites and a pretty low quality rendered map they managed to do something pretty cool and memorable. a lot of big games now don't even have a real map and only render what the player is looking at at any given moment, so this is one advantage of having one large world that is all connected in reality. we can see terra flying around in naked monster lady form.

celes says it best: "she turned into a ... something... and flew off."

that line made me chuckle.

locke seems to be taking it pretty hard.

the group convenes and concludes the following: terra seems to have turned into an esper, or something similar, and reports all say she has gone westward "over the sky." that's such a cool way to say it. ha.

anyway, one group will go track down terra while another stays here to protect the esper. I don't know if this is a thing where both groups will actually be expected to do stuff or if this is just a way of the game making me choose an active party, but I decide to try and balance them out at least somewhat. I learned from my lesson last time and decide to have the party of locke, sabin, and celes go after terra. locke will be the party leader for story reasons. sabin can kill any enemy group in two turns, so no need for pure damage dealers. celes is supposed to heal the party and keep them from dying.

the secondary group ends up actually being the guys from sabin's bizarre adventure. what a coincidence!

let me know if I'm right about my suspicion that the "away" party won't actually do anything. if so, I can add one of the damage dealers to my main party.

I found a little treasure room with a bunch of relics and some other gear items, but I didn't explore much else in the town yet. it's been quite a while before the game lets me save again so I decide to do so now, and that will be it for today.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

interestingly the game made celes, locke, and terra into the party "leaders"

this might just be because of the order I selected them on the party screen. anyway, this is the same as the mog defense battle earlier, only now I have a full roster of player characters available to use instead of just moogles! I quickly swap through each of the parties to make sure everyone has the right gear equipped (and everyone is in the back row lol) and then send people out to start defending each of the paths.

it was kinda funny to see just how wrong some of my impressions were.

terra was probably the WEAKEST of my party members. her area of effect damage wasn't high enough to really be worth using, and even her single target fire wasn't enough to one shot enemies, making it a waste of MP. her only function was to heal Sabin while he absolutely obliterated everything. I think Sabin was my strongest party member. I unlocked Rising Pheonix at some point but I couldn't get it to work for some reason? maybe my controller? someone mentioned there were shot cut inputs for the blitz commands... if someone could tell me how to do Rising Phoenix that would be useful, since I could make it actually work.

gau and celes, which I thought would be a weak combination was pretty solid. although cat scratch as a little unreliable so gau wasn't as good of a damage dealer as sabin. celes basically filled the same role as terra -- just keep healing gau so he can kill things.

the other party was solid and went about as expected. although honestly having cyan ends up being pointless when edgar kills everything in two rounds. I should have moved cyan over to terra or celes' group so the single target guys could kill more things per turn. oh well, lesson learned.

my formation was a bit wonky -- terra was too far back and slightly out of position, the other two groups were too far forward. this resulted in my other groups getting CONSTANTLY attacked, so quickly that I had no time to reposition terra. when there was finally a lull in the combat I just moved her group forward and had sabin start destroying all of the enemy groups so terra could get some EXP.

at the end it was just one soldier running back and forth in front of kefka. wary that this might be a boss battle, I realized none of my team comps are particularly good for this. locke's group has no dedicated healer, celes group is vulnerable if she goes down because gau is unable to use a pheonix down to bring her back up.

terra and sabin seems like the best group to handle this although I'd have felt better if they had three members. and if I could get Rising Phoenix to work!

sabin fires a few kamehameha into the hell's rider and then suplexes his brains into the snow. then, it's on to kefka. this battle was pretty great but man did it leave me feeling like I wished I had placed terra in a three person team. the lack of a third member was REALLY apparent in this one.

terra was matching kefka spell for spell at first. if he cast blizzard on them, she would heal them both in return. if kefka targeted one member, terra would defend and wait to heal them all at once. I learned the hard way that Meteor Strike can actually miss.

kefka then one shot sabin with a higher level spell and cast Confuse on terra before she had time to react. luckily, confuse missed. that would have been game over for sure. I bring sabin up with a phoenix down, but he gets knocked down again before I can heal him. this is where a third party member to help with healing/item usage would have REALLY helped.

I bring sabin up again.

sabin gets confused.

sabin punches himself so hard that he cures himself of confusion.

finally terra is able to heal and stabilize, but she's out of MP. I have to resort to item healing. sabin blasts kefka a few more times. terra gets knocked down. sabin barely manages to win with a final aura canon. kefka flees for now.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

terra: heal, damage, AoE
locke: damage, items
celes: heal, AoE
cyan: damage
edgar: AoE
sabin: damage
gau: damage

I know gau could technically do more if I bothered to learn how to use him, but he'll be a cat scratcher. with a lot of characters who seem to be primarily focused on single target damage I quickly realize that I actually can't have AoE and healing in every group -- there's only three characters with area attacks, and two of them are the only healers. if I put edgar with a healer then there isn't enough AoE to put one in each group. of course I don't know how important healing or AoE is going to be before I make the teams. I'll have to use my own judgment here.

I decide to have terra, celes, and edgar be the captain of each respective team. this ensures every group will have some AoE. this means locke should go with edgar by default. he's the only real character that I can have spam potions and healing items without losing too much in combat, and that's the second best thing behind having a third actual healer.

why isn't bannon helping us fight???

cyan is a good unit to round out this formation, simply because it needs a high single target damage dealer and I thought it would be more interesting if the brothers split up. this gives us edgar, locke, and cyan for group 1.

celes feels like the weakest of my AoE and my healing, so I decide to pair her up with gau. cat scratch should make up for her lack of damage. this leaves terra and sabin as the remaining group. sabin feels like a solid attacker, but terra is probably one of the best units on the field. just having a second person with her that isn't locke seems good enough.

I now feel like celes and gau might be a little bit weak, and locke/edgar/cyan might be a little strong... but it's probably too late to go back on my plan now! if my teams end up sucking and I get a game over then I'll try something different. for now, I'll go with my first idea.

1: edgar, locke, cyan
2: celes, gau
3: terra, sabin
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

it's really just the final stretch of the game that is terrible. the rest is pretty mediocre, with the best sections being in the middle. keep in mind I've beaten bloodborne and dark souls 2 around twenty times each, probably even more.

at a certain point if I want to play something similar that isn't playing the same exact game again I need to either set up my PS3 (which is a pain) or go back to the endless cycle of 'well, let's give dark souls 3 another try and see how it goes.'

(I don't own Dark Souls Remastered, but I would probably buy Demon's Souls Remastered if they made one)
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

MZero11 posted...

...you've done 3 or 4 playthroughs of this game and it's your biggest regret? >_>

no, my biggest regrets all have to do with things that actually matter in the real world.

buying dark souls 3 at full price when it was released is just the most recent video game purchase that I've regretted. and the fact that I paid full price is a big part of that, since it's something I don't usually do.

Aecioo posted...

I'm pretty sure it's an Ulti/blizzard type of situation.

In that they're both crazy

not really. I love from software. bloodborne is my favorite game. gaming has never been the same for me since I played demon's souls for the first time. I just thought dark souls 3 was disappointing, rushed, full of design flaws and I regret paying full price for it.

I don't think being disappointed with one game in a series is "crazy"

also the reason I've played it so much is just a mixture of... not really having that many similar games available to play... and making a few good attempts at giving the game a fair shake, but still being disappointed every time I come back to it.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Aecioo posted...

Dark Souls 3 is great. You're nuts

eh. I like it a little bit more than when I first bought it, but I would definitely never call it great. the first half of the game is piss easy, and the level design is passable at best. this is actually the part of the game that is the most fun. you can actually enjoy yourself a little bit if you come up with some kind of unique build or strategy that you want to rely on, and force yourself to survive using that. the levels are still not fun to explore, at all, but the game mechanics are good enough that you can enjoy this.

the back half of the game is a complete travesty. poorly designed levels and a complete escalation of every single encounter in the game. it basically tries to force you to use the optimal strategy of rolling around everything in light armor with a straight sword, and restricts your ability to use those alternate builds that you could have potentially had fun with in the first half of the game.

every single time I've done a playthrough of dark souls 3 I usually start off using one specific type of build or idea (I'm going to use magic, I'm going to wear heavy armor and tank everything). this strategy usually works up until about you get to pontiff sullyvahn, then, after that, I always end up just switching to either a short sword or a long sword for the rest of the game after some point when I hit a wall.

here are some of my quotes about Grand Archives from my third or fourth run of the game, about 8 months ago:

"did miyazaki start drinking or something? did a completely different team design this part of the game? this is absolutely a low point for dark souls 3 and probably the franchise as a whole."

"the very first thing you come across is a locked door with the KEY SITTING RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT. this should be throwing up massive red flags that the people who designed this level have no fucking clue what the word 'exploration' or the phrase 'dungeon crawler' means."

"thankfully they made one good decision when designing this level; they put it near the end of the game. that way the fewest people possible would ever see it. and besides that, by the time you finish navigating this mess, it's very unlikely you'll want to continue playing dark souls 3 for much longer."

I stand by every single one of these statements. I'm not gonna copy and paste my entire review into this topic but I was just reading through it again and I agree with pretty much everything I thought back then, and I've played the game two more times since.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

dark souls 3, although it's kinda my own fault.

I almost never buy games when they are released and usually wait for the price to drop and/or to make sure that I'm able to do research on whether the game is something I'd like or not. considering the souls games have a pretty good track record for me, and I was coming off the very high experience of Bloodborne becoming my favorite game of all time, this was the first game in a really, really long time that I bought day 1.

it's not my fault that the game fucking sucks but it's my fault for letting myself get duped into buying something just because it has some specific words written on the box. going against my own policy one time and it turned out to be a huge mistake, but at least I learned my lesson. have been a lot more strict about waiting on games since then, and haven't felt disappointed with another purchase since.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

yeah, I'm still here. I just couldn't keep up with my pace of playing and updating every day. I will say in the few days I've taken off this project I got a ton of writing done for the book I'm working on. so that's something.

anyway I'm expecting once I get in the mood to play this again (sometime in the next few days) I'll actually play quite a bit more, and have a nice substantial update to post!

still very excited to see what else this game has to hold. I think at this point I'm about 10-20% through the game?
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

buy me groceries
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
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ultra 64 will NEVER be released
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

I don't pay much attention to game news and I try not to get my hopes up about much of anything really. I haven't heard too much about this game aside from that I know it's a thing and I might have absorbed one or two of the memes passively just from browsing reddit.

all that being said...

Xiahou Shake posted...

The "gameplay" all just seems like an incoherent pile of "wouldn't this be cool" mechanics that Kojima probably pulled from his dreams or something.

this sounds exactly like the kind of pretentious bullshit that immediately makes me more interested in a game than I would otherwise be.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Brayze_II posted...

Guys it's Canada, are you forgetting that our national shame isn't black people or east Indians but First Nations? If it came out he browned himself up, wore a headdress and leathers, and whooped around a campfire yelling about scalping, THEN he'd be done

Get your marginalized peoples straight, yeesh

he's actually done this too, IIRC.

the guy loves his costumes
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
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guffguy89 posted...

Because it's a left politician, it amazingly doesn't bother you at all. I wonder if it would have if it was a right politician. I guess we'll never know.

this is like really, incredibly inaccurate. I've spent about 100x as many posts criticizing the left on this board than the right. it's not my fault the right is acting really, really dumb right now over this trudeau thing.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
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foolm0r0n posted...

and trying to force people not to care is...

definitely a waste of my time. although, from my perspective, I'm not trying to "force" them. I'm just sharing my thoughts. I've been very critical of the left on this board, and I certainly wouldn't let anyone on the right get away with the same level of stupidity.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Yeah that whole missing the point intentionally thing won't work on me. Stick with people like KP if you want to try that bull.

okay have fun in a week when everyone, including you, has forgotten about this and you can go on pretending that you never acted like it was a huge deal.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

UltimaterializerX posted...

Trudeau deserves criticism

criticize him if you want. although I think it's stupid to criticize someone for doing blackface if you're supposedly okay with people doing blackface.

the issue is when you demand that people on the left also criticism him.

nobody likes annoying control freaks telling them what to think or do.

the world is not gonna end because some guy put black paint on his face. somewhere in the world there is a four year old child curled up in a ditch, slowly dying of starvation, in extreme pain, and with no one or nothing to help make the pain go away. he just has to endure that torture until he slowly perishes. nobody important gives a flying fuck about someone putting black paint on his face. it is completely inconsequential. solar rays from 80 bazillion light years away could randomly wash over our solar system and wipe out all life on earth before I finish typing this message. is it ever going to matter that some guy put black paint on his face?

trying to force people to care is an exercise in ultimate stupidity. especially if your entire point, your entire argument, is that you're mad about people caring about stuff that doesn't matter. um... okay then. in that case you are being just as hypocritical as the ones you are criticizing.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

definitely agree with that, yeah. the movie feels very boring and dated to me. this is at least interesting, on top of the cool puppet work.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

oh I saw this topic when it had only one post, I meant to reply, and then I forgot about it. I guess better late than never!

I've been watching this and I think it is really good. I'm not quite done yet. it does have some issues... I think the first episode does a good job of catching you, but I still felt a bit uncertain after watching it. whether this would really be a GREAT show or merely just unique and interesting.

it is definitely unique, pretty interesting and creative. the puppet work is very fascinating to watch.

there's a "making of" documentary for this already and I'm almost more excited to finish the series just so I can watch that.

okay so I think episodes 2-4ish actually are pretty great. this is when I started to get very into the series. about the halfway point, however, the quality starts to wane a little bit. there are some good moments but we start to see the introduction of a lot more characters and concepts that drag the story out, and there are some scenes that I felt pretty bored by.

so far at least I would say the first half of the season is significantly better than the second half. with two episodes to go, it might be possible that the finale is amazing and brings it all together, but i'd still say the middle-to-late section of the series suffers a bit.

interestingly I thought the series was at its best when the characters were all separated. once everyone joins together it feels like each individual character has less to do, and their characterization starts to become more defined by their relationships with other main characters rather than with the world as a whole.

I really can't stress how cool the puppetry is, though. that is the best part.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

foolm0r0n posted...

When 80% of your identity and existence is hypocricital, finding someone 90% hyprocitical is incredibly exciting and self validating and absolutely cannot be ignored at all. Even if that person doesn't exist and you made them up.

all humans are hypocritical. it's why we survived and made it to the top of the food chain. we do atrocious shit on a constant basis to every other living creature, including other humans, that we are competing with.

I would rather be that than have the life expectancy of a possum.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Nelson_Mandela posted...

MariaTaylor posted...

just ignore them. they have literally no power

Dude is the leader of a large country

by acknowledging his supposed power, you are the one giving him power.

in what way has justin trudeau impacted your life? I'm gonna make a safe guess of 'not at all'

MZero11 posted...

That may be true but I've definitely been modded several times for pointing out leftist hypocrisy

I'm not a conservative and I point out their hypocrisy just as much but have never been modded for it. The mods have a clear bias tbh

maybe, but I wouldn't say it's very definitive. it's also just as likely that the user base has a leftist bias, and/or the left leaning users are the ones more likely to mark messages. there's tons of evidence that would support either of those theories.

it's also possible that you subconsciously use different types of languages when criticizing different people, leading to your 'pointing out hypocrisy' coming across differently in different situations.

Nelson_Mandela posted...

A little confused by the slavish defense of Trudeau here. To me, a topic like this is the equivalent of a hyper-judgemental conservative Christian senator (let's say Ted Cruz) getting caught cheating on his wife. No, cheating isn't really that terrible of a thing, but of course if the guy doing it has made a career of moralizing against things that he got caught doing himself, that would be worthy of special criticism.

no it wouldn't. that's why your original topic was FUCKING DUMB

this one at least has more of a purpose because it's about censorship.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Nelson_Mandela posted...

Again, I'm offended by the extreme hypocrisy.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Double standards and hypocrisy are the problem, especially with elected leaders making PC culture the law of the land.

why though? who gives a shit what these hypocrites think or do?

just ignore them. they have literally no power except for the power that you give them.

UltimaterializerX posted...

If you want to protect pronouns under national law in Canada, fine, but it can't come from someone who dresses up in blackface. You're smart enough to know why that's just dumb.

I don't think it should be illegal to use the wrong pronouns or to dress up in blackface.

now you can make a case that both types of behavior are shitty, but I wouldn't make them illegal.

UltimaterializerX posted...

You're either offended by everyone making a joke or no one, you don't get to pick and choose based on whether or not D or R is next to a name. For the record I say let everyone joke about anything, but hey.

okay so then don't pick and choose. let trudeau dress up in black face if he wants and stop pretending to be offended by it.

Seginustemple posted...

20-30 years from now when an even more woke generation

please no
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

the justin trudeau thing is like the biggest 'who cares' on the internet right now. nobody is actually offended by it. you're mad about people pretending to be offended by stuff that the right does, and so your solution is... to pretend to be offended by stuff that the left does????

I feel like 'two wrongs don't make a right' is the logic that a 6 year old should be able to understand but then again I'm not sure what standard I should really be holding people to

no matter how low I set the bar I am always disappointed.

all that being said, deleting the topic was really, really dumb. I wish there was a better way to exercise your agency against internet censorship. this is an issue with modern society and there is no real clear solution on how to deal with it. I've only seen the problem getting worse. never better.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

don't worry, this topic is not dead!

decided to explore the mainland near this port town a little bit first. turns out there's basically nothing here. just one small peninsula that leads nowhere. which is fine. now on to explore the village!

there wasn't too much to see here, I picked up a few things at the shops, but since I ended up doing this route now a lot of the gear and equipment wasn't an upgrade over what I've already got. there is a scene in the pub where this dancer tries to get cyan to dance with her.

and now we're off to south figaro!

the three groups have arrived in narshe, and a decisive battle will soon unfold!

there are a few story scenes that I got through here as things move into the next act

sabin and company wonder if the others are safe while taking the boat to southern figaro

bannon admits to the people of narshe that the battle will be dangerous, and will cost them blood, but he thinks it is worth it because stopping the emperor is important to stopping the mistakes of the past from being repeated

sabin and edgar reunite, and edgar is introduced to the new party members

when the elder hears about how the people of doma were poisoned, it seems like he should want to side against the empire because of this. instead, it makes him more resolved to stay neutral. he thinks if he doesn't get involved, nothing bad will happen to him.

then locke shows up with the turnabout. think again!

the empire is already in position to attack narshe. whether the elder wants to fight or not doesn't matter. it's just a matter of whether they will be prepared for the battle or sit there doing nothing.

of course, once cyan sees that celes is there, he immediately challenges her to a DUEL

there's some discussions about morality, and people's past as willing or unwilling servants of the empire. either way, locke doesn't want to let celes get attacked by cyan after he vowed to protect her. base on their combat performances in the sections I played, however, I feel like cyan would be able to take on celes and locke. at least in this stage of the game. so it's not like locke could have stopped him.

the power of talking and understanding works much better, though.

kefka and his army show up, vowing to not show any mercy to the citizens of narshe. so the group heads up to the pass where the esper has been moved to make their final stand.

there are a lot of little character moments and exchanges between the party members as they travel up the cliffs. I really liked all of these little scenes. perfect example of how to do good writing, short and sweet. the one between terra and celes was good. when terra asks if it's possible for celes to love anyone. it leaves so much unsaid, but says so much, in so few words.

at this point I regain control of terra and I'm finally allowed to save the game again for the first time since before I left Nikeah. imagine if I had gone straight onto the boat! this game definitely loves having long stretches of playtime without the opportunity to save. ha.

it looks like I might be given the ability to choose my squad for the upcoming battle? hard to say for sure, I didn't test it out yet, but I see all of the characters are lined up nice and neat for me... if so, I have a tough decision to make!
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

Just Like Heaven is my favorite
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

no FF6 today, although I did get some Monster Hunter in....

and now for some reason I have to watch the 2017 power rangers movie, so I guess that's my plan for tonight.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

ah, it's too bad you didn't keep going forward. something BIG was waiting just ahead.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

yeah I did figure that out after playing for a while.

I seriously spent like an hour on this stuff and got barely anything out of it.

lol
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

alright I spent longer than I should have fighting random monsters in the Veldt, getting new skills for Gau, and testing them out to see what they do. I used the bed in the Relic Shop house to sleep for free. the owner doesn't seem to mind, and it saves money instead of going to the Inn.

I will say one thing that makes this easier. when you're selecting your action for Gau you can hit Rage to see the list of which ones you have already. if the enemies on screen aren't already on the Rage list, then I would do Leap. if they WERE already on the Rage list, I would pick a Rage that I haven't done before.

I noticed that most of them are around the same level of power, doing around 90-110 damage. which is about the same as Sabin and Cyan do with their BASIC attacks. meaning it feels like Gau is a bit weaker than them, because they are always doing way more damage with their special attacks that they can spam.

all that being said, it was still an interesting little experiment. I think I'm sort of starting to like the Gau stuff more than I did when I initially encountered it. it adds a really unique element to the game with a ton of depth. I don't plan to get myself very lost in it, but it was fun to experiment with it a little bit and still not even come near hitting the bottom of this well.

out of curiosity, what is so good about the stray cat? it didn't seem any better than the other Rage moves that I tried out. it would randomly Cat Scratch for higher damage at times, but this seemed random and unreliable. I guess it's good just for the raw damage?

oh, the most interesting thing about the Rage abilities... is that Gau seems to keep Raging infinitely after the first turn of combat? I actually didn't realize that at first because I was ending combat in one turn or less normally. but it's another aspect to consider when sending him into battle. once you select a move for him, he's going to keep spamming that one move for the rest of the battle. Hm!

all that being said, it's time to FINALLY make some progress!

actually as I was trying to progress to the next area I accidentally almost lost Gau. had to go back and get him. hah.

so we head into this cave where the Shiny is supposed to be. I like how there isn't just the diving helmet in here, but there's another scene you can trigger by looking in the wrong spot, where Gau plays a prank and Sabin gets annoyed with him. minor stuff like this make it feel like there is more going on beyond just moving to the next objective in sequence.

the next section of the game was... bizarrely difficult. there were these jellyfish enemies who counter your attacks by casting Gigavolt, which literally oneshots any of your party members. they will sometimes counter cast it even as they die. and since you can't use the menu between encounters while fighting in the current, this led to some annoying situations where I'd have a character start off dead at the beginning of the next battle. I was running low on phoenix downs. and the worst thing is that if you don't kill them quickly, they will stun lock your party with paralysis skills.

I honestly have NO idea how I got through this section in one try without needing to reload my save, but I barely managed to scrape through.

at this point I want to take a break, but the game dumps me in a town, one of the places where you can't save unless you go and find a save point.

first thing I do is go find the Inn in Nikeah, rest up all of my guys, and then go for the town exit. I'll save my game for now and worry about exploring Nikeah later. I did discover that the ferry here will take me right to Southern Figaro, so I'm basically ready to end this scenario and go reunite with the other party members as soon as I'm ready.

but of course I want to explore first!
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

redrocket posted...

Also, there is actually more that you can do with the wounded soldier.

anything interesting I'm missing right now? or is it just stuff that happens later?
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

I reliably stock 80 vials and 80+ quicksilver bullets just with the echoes I get from clearing the first area in the game, and I do that without dying. now imagine if a new player was doing the same thing. they might use more vials than I do, sure, but because they are dying a bunch they'd also be gaining more echoes. because they would need to fight the same enemies over and over again.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

there is no need to "grind" in bloodborne, ever.

anyone who thinks that is legitimately bad at the game.

it's one of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation about bloodborne. reason being that so many people who are bad at the game continually spout off information without realizing that their advice sucks.

you don't grind for bullets or vials. you literally just buy them with the massive amount of excess blood echoes that you get, rather than spending them on dumb shit you don't need. especially levels early on, one of the hugest bottomless pits.

what is better?

A. increase your damage by three points, from 170 to 173, making absolutely no god damn difference in your combat ability. also increases the cost to gain levels as you continue to invest down this path.

B. buy like 35 blood vials with the same amount of echoes you would have spent on three levels. by the way, each blood vial is worth 5 quicksilver bullets, making them the absolute lowest value and cheapest item in the game.

obviously DC is not claiming to be an expert, so I don't hold this against him. but yeah, anyone who thinks that they need to "grind" for quicksilver bullets of all things has no idea what the hell they are doing, and should be given much better advice than "git gud" or "yeah, grinding sucks man."
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

made it to the next village this time without running into gau, although I had decided I was gonna just run away from him if I encountered him again.

so there's a shop that sells dried meat, and the guy right outside tells you that dried meat is a good cure for being hungry. well damn. I'm glad erika and others had faith that I'd be smart enough to figure this out on my own. haha.

apparently there's a house with an injured soldier inside, but I decide to go and try to hunt for Gau first.

I talked to everyone in the village as well, learned some more interesting stuff. it sounds like, if I'm not wrong, that crazy guy at the house on the north side of this continent gave his son to monsters. so then, gau must be this guy's son, right? then he was raised by monsters. that, along with the crazy genes he inherited, is what made him into what he is now.

I go back to the field, fight a few more monsters, and gau shows up. after a pretty long cutscene he gives us a special SHINY item (I'm guessing the diving helmet?) and joins the group. to be honest... I found gau to be a little bit annoying? I don't like him so far.

also just got introduced to a new mechanic that is a bit overwhelming. gau is basically the blue mage of this game, having the ability go gain monster skills by using his Leap ability while fighting in the veldt specifically, an area where monsters from all over the game have a chance of appearing.

so after gau "leaps" the battle ends and you get no EXP or rewards. then you fight more stuff till gau appears again. when he re-joins the party, he will have learned the new monster skills. seems simple enough. now, here's the overwhelming part...

the number of monster skills is freaking massive. I tried scrolling all the way to the bottom and it took me like a full minute or two of scrolling. there must be like 200 monster skills or something, right? so that brings up two issues...

1. I could spend hours grinding here for monster skills and probably still not get them all

2. there's so many skills and I have no idea what any of them do or which ones are good

anyone have a quick/easy primer on which monster skills are worth using? just something to help me make gau useful without having to put too much effort into him. I did Leap a few times and pick up a few more skills, but I only did this for about 5-10 minutes before I got bored and went back to Mobliz.

here I decided to go visit the injured soldier which was... not what I expected at all. it's just this little scene about him receiving a letter from a girl in his hometown. sabin reads him the letter. and... yeah. that's it. definitely one of those small things that I love about this game. it still really excels in that world building aspect of having these unique, personal moments littered all over the maps.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg

yeah. I don't want to say you should "never" put your weight on both feet. it's more that it makes it easier to shift your weight up to the next rung if you were mostly balanced on one foot to begin with. the important part is that you should definitely never keep both hands on the same rung.

that foot you're standing on, along with your hand that doesn't move, is what stops the ladder from tipping.
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I saw the truth, I saw endless night skies; Understanding is pain.
https://imgtc.ws/i/OObNl5s.jpg