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[None]

Oh, it's not a problem by any means- it's just, I dunno, a barometer reading? I don't get a lot of those since I don't get out much, what with the plague and all. Not looking to fundamentally change who I am, just, y'know, maybe understand a little better where I'm at now, if that makes sense.

[McTraveller]

Yeah Roblox is interesting... my kids are snared by it at the moment.  Sad thing is, I knew I should've gotten some stock early when it went public but didn't.  Kicking myself.  The conversion of real dollars to robux is what I think should be illegal - things should  be priced in real-world currency.

My kids got $75 worth of Robux each for Christmas (thanks, grandparents?) - and they had it spent in about 2 seconds.

I don't know how big a cut of robux goes to developers versus the Robux parent corp.

Of course, I still don't mind that as much as I mind what Microsoft has done to Minecraft.  Mostly because Roblox doesn't try to make it sound like "we're destroying interoperability between Minecraft versions and forcing you to have a Microsoft account to give you a better service!" but is just "yeah we are microtransactions. Enjoy!"

[MaxTheFox]

I get misgendered all the time, using a boy's name in my online handle as a (tomboyish) female...

[heydude6]

but is just "yeah we are microtransactions. Enjoy!"

You should probably watch the first video at least. You'll be surprised. As someone who used to play Roblox myself when I was a kid, I'm saddened at what this company has become.

[JoshuaFH]

I've been playing Bravely Default 2 lately, as I got it for Christmas and I'd been wanting to play it since I heard about it, as I'd played the first two games and enjoyed them...

And I don't know if my memories of the previous games are old and rose-tinted, but this addition to the series just feels really boring. It honestly just might be that I'm thoroughly desensitized and jaded at my age, but I'd swear that the old JRPG's that Bravely takes inspiration from had much more interesting dialogue, and situations, and sidequests, and overall map and world design. Bravely is just so fuckin out in the open about absolutely everything it is; it knows you're here for a chill nostalgic rpg that pays homage to the Final Fantasy's of yesteryear, and it intends on delivering exactly that and it doesn't have a single ambition for itself beyond that it seems... and that just makes it kinda boring.

I'll still keep on playing it, cause the Brave system is fucking dope and I'm PISSED that other games don't have anything even remotely similar to it. In that regard though BD2 is a slight downgrade, because it removed the Za Warudo timestop feature that Bravely Second had, which was fucking cool; I guess BD2 just has to be a little lamer in that regard as well.

I also really don't like the difficulty curve that BD2 is rocking. Most fights are so superfluous that they don't require any thought or strategy at all, even on the hard difficulty setting. Then you get to a boss and it just whips your monkey ass because your team composition is shit, your equipment is shit, your skill setup is shit, you're just in for a shit time on this boss because nothing else poses a real enough threat to induce you to actually take the game seriously enough to make your team not shit, so you have to hurriedly un-shit-ify your team at the save point right outside the boss door. The bosses are interesting to fight, but it's always like getting a surprise exam that nobody told you about and you didn't study for, because everything had been a cake walk up to that point.

So the culmination of my complaints is that I know what BD2 is trying to do, it's succeeding at the thing it wants to do, and the resultant success is nice and polished and there's little to complain about... except that it feels sterile and shallow as a result, and leaves me bored most of the time, and doesn't have the bullshit or ambition that made older JRPG's interesting.

[None]

My brother ended up dropping Bravely Default like two thirds of the way through after hyping himself up on it with the complaint that it got stale and required your party to be full on ninja-classed or something- I forget the specifics because I kind of gloss over when he full-on whinge-rejects something he's been deep in on for a while. It's kind of funny- I kind of baited him into finishing the pokemon romhack I'd advised him on by telling him not to bother once the tirade of complaints on the first/second gym started (and there's valid concerns for that, there's just not enough 'mons encountered to give you a team respectable enough not to crash like the tides against the gym leaders), and being the contrarian he is, went ahead and plowed through against my advice anyways and beat the elite four.

I do wonder sometimes if the general refinement of genres and the resultant expectations of certain gameplay/reward loops have, in a sense, sterilized both the less-polished games of our memory and the launches of our time, or if this is just a problem we have since we know the genres we like so intimately. Was Legend of Dragoon really as incredible as I remember it being? Do I have the heart to sink into a JRPG like Final Fantasy if it had no prior precedent like that particular franchise had? Would modern Final Fantasy be the same if it didn't have open-world resource gathering/encounters/crafting? Was FFXs sphere grid actually any kind of liberating for character development if you didn't follow the rote, pre-aligned character progression routes?

Like, did Control need side-quests to slay mooks to get crafting materials to make mods for your character/gun at all, or do we just expect something similar to that in modern titles?

Lotta run-on rhetorical questions, sorry about that. It does kind of make me wonder if professional critics find themselves bored with most of the stuff they consume, or if the magic of a genre of consumable media is just impossible to pin down in perpetuity.

Mostly an aside here- but I really miss, like, quality spritework. The shift to 3d models between, say, Pokemon and Disgaea has clearly stifled in the variety of characters or creatures either is able to proffer, and I think the loss of variety isn't worth the shift in rendering.

[voliol]

Wait, Bravely Default 2 and Bravely Second are not the same game? That’s confusing.

I want to say something about roblox, though as all my info comes from the very same videos I don’t know if I can add anything. I don’t know if the worst part is that they are scamming children, or that the 19th work conditions they employ risk spreading to the rest of the digital products market as the legislation isn’t there to stop it.

[Frumple]

Was Legend of Dragoon really as incredible as I remember it being?

My memory of LoD was that it was a mediocre sentai jrpg (which, fairness where it's due, is a neat concept that had gotten very little play in english before and barely any more since) with a frankly miserable combat system (back when I played it, I'm pretty sure I eventually hit it with some kind of cheating method to make that bloody qte horseshit sod off). Like, outside the frustrating combat mechanic it was alright, but it wasn't incredible, t'me. One of the better 3D jrpgs, just in an era where most 3d jrpgs were remarkably shit for one reason or another, rather than being particularly good.

Mostly an aside here- but I really miss, like, quality spritework. The shift to 3d models between, say, Pokemon and Disgaea has clearly stifled in the variety of characters or creatures either is able to proffer, and I think the loss of variety isn't worth the shift in rendering.

There is a ton of just wildly beautiful sprite work of a wide variety of styles coming out of smaller/indie studios in particular and has been for a while. Rather than miss it, you've just been missing it

[Lord Shonus]

What the hell is a "sentai JRPG"? That isn't a term I've ever heard before, and Googling just results in Power Rangers-style tabletop games.


I very much like the Addition system (the "QTE horseshit") as a way of mixing up the fairly basic battle system, and the story was pretty solid if a bit obtuse in places.

[wierd]

while not the whole game, there was a story arc in Saga Frontier that would fit that description...

[Frumple]

What the hell is a "sentai JRPG"? That isn't a term I've ever heard before, and Googling just results in Power Rangers-style tabletop games.

Shorthand for a jrpg drawing significant inspiration from the genre power rangers came out of, basically... it's not common enough to have an actual term for it (at least that I'm aware of, so it probably wouldn't show up in a google search), but it's an easy way to describe the aesthetics and whatnot. LoD was basically a jrpg with heavy sentai/tokusatsu elements, right down to color coordinating the main characters and having regular transformation sequences.

... but yeah, I loathed the qte mechanic in it. It's not impossible to incorporate that kind of thing into a turn based game well -- the handheld super mario rpgs managed pretty solidly, and there's been non-smb franchise games more recently that have, too -- but LoD... didn't

e:

while not the whole game, there was a story arc in Saga Frontier that would fit that description...

Though yeah, other stuff involving that kind of design exists, and both pre and post dates LoD, but it's not exactly common, especially (officially) localized and outside the Power Rangers franchise specifically. Still, you know it when you see, heh.

[Egan_BW]

Hell yeah, the timing minigames in Superstar Saga were sweet, and radical. And made actually using the most powerful moves interestingly imposing since you have to press a bunch of buttons and not mess up. At least, it seemed intimidating to me when I played it.

[Iduno]

Mary Worth is a terrible comic that is still in newspapers. It's about a woman who teaches people that they should stay in abusive or otherwise toxic relationships (or how poor people are always bad), because abusers really just need a second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) chance. The current story is about a guy who threatened to kill his girlfriend's cat, and then got back with her by making a scene at karaoke and ruining her date with someone else. Previously he's gotten drunk (he's an alcoholic, but goes back to alcohol every time things aren't going his way) and spilled things all over people, and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He's pretty much the hero of the comic for the last few years.

Anyway, he got tired of her leaving every time he's shitty to her, and wants her to marry him so she can't leave. She said no, he got drunk again, and fell off a cruise ship. They turned the cruise ship around, and he's been in the ocean passed out for around an hour. Today, he washed up on a beach, despite the impossibility of him still being alive.

[wierd]

Mary Worth is a terrible comic that is still in newspapers. It's about a woman who teaches people that they should stay in abusive or otherwise toxic relationships (or how poor people are always bad), because abusers really just need a second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) chance. The current story is about a guy who threatened to kill his girlfriend's cat, and then got back with her by making a scene at karaoke and ruining her date with someone else. Previously he's gotten drunk (he's an alcoholic, but goes back to alcohol every time things aren't going his way) and spilled things all over people, and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He's pretty much the hero of the comic for the last few years.

Anyway, he got tired of her leaving every time he's shitty to her, and wants her to marry him so she can't leave. She said no, he got drunk again, and fell off a cruise ship. They turned the cruise ship around, and he's been in the ocean passed out for around an hour. Today, they saved him, despite the impossibility and all of the readers being happy that he was finally gone.

.......

Spoiler: It all makes sense now... (click to show/hide)

[dragdeler]

a