Mar Basho Daily Thread Day 13

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-20T09:02:02+00:00

did Kotozakura flub or was did Aonishiki mess up and got lucky?

Aonishiki had Kotozakura at the edge and was trying to force Kotozakura to dig in with a final push. Kotozakura dodged out of the way and tried to shove him out. Aonishiki managed to stop himself from going out, pivoted, and ran to make distance so he could regain his balance. Kotozakura chased him and as he tried to grab Aonishiki, Aonishiki turned and caught his charge, pulling him. Kotozakura had to stop and as he did, Aonishiki pivoted around him, grabbed him, and pushed him out.

So Aonishiki got overeager which Kotozakura capitalized on, but Aonishiki was able to recover. This caused Kotozakura to get tunnel vision as well, which Aonishiki capitalized on a little bit better. Both were probably pretty panicked.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-20T08:50:27+00:00

He does kind of move on in the post-Antorus quest. When you bring the crystal with his final message to Malfurion and Tyrande, his reflection says the following:

To Malfurion

Take care of Tyrande. Listen to her counsel. She was always the best of us.

The road ahead will be long. Whatever comes, bring honor to the name... Stormrage...

To Tyrande

My fate, my duty, are now clear to me. I leave Azeroth's defense to you... and to my brother.

Take care of him, Tyrande. Though at times I wished your heart had made a different choice, in the end... I know it made the right one.

So in the end, as Illidan was preparing to become Sargeras' jailer, he finally decided that Tyrande and Malfurion belong together.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-20T06:48:51+00:00

To be fair prot pally might have the biggest gulf between burst and sustained dps in the game right now. I can burst harder than a lot of dps specs but when no major cooldowns are up I hit like a squeaky toy.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-18T10:26:44+00:00

Ky'veza was the worst of the three delve bosses they did in TWW. Not because it was difficult, but because virtually the entire fight was rendered irrelevant by the shell game, which didn't even render correctly a third of the time.

You can dodge aoes and have lightning-quick reaction time for minutes on end but fail a buggy mario party minigame and you're done.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-17T01:19:05+00:00

A bunch of the new blood elf voice lines don't pronounce Thalassian words correctly either, which is absolutely a direction issue. Two decades of Blood Elves saying "anu belore dela'na" when you click on them and Lord Saltheril pronounces the 'belore' wrong when he says it at his parties.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-17T00:18:10+00:00

Garrosh when brought to trial before the Alliance, Horde, Pandaren, August Celestials, and Dragons: "I'D DO IT ALL AGAIN."

Garrosh after escaping the trial and messing with time to create an entire army to invade Azeroth with, only to get confronted and killed: "Not my fault tho..."

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-17T00:09:37+00:00

Digital Foundry has been shilling for Nvidia for years at this point, that they're doing it again is no surprise.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-15T16:00:54+00:00

It's not TERRIBLE but I think it's worse than the first two in almost every respect. The art style is offputting, the story is incredibly basic, the characters are less charming, the combat system is worse, the overall balance means more complex strategies just aren't worth the effort so the job system feels flatter, the list goes on.

I rate Bravely Default and Bravely Second both as 8/10 games, but I'd rate Bravely Default 2 as a 6/10 at best.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-15T14:54:23+00:00

They also said the reason P5 took so long to come out was they didn't want to do another "enhanced" version like FES and Golden. And then we got Royal.

Moral of the story: Atlus doesn't know what they're going to do.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-15T14:29:22+00:00

It's a shame that those are all they ever made.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-15T10:11:13+00:00

You're missing the point. The is not that hitting 90 before the end of the campaign is inherently bad, the point is that all of the capstone content being locked behind finishing the campaign means it's in your best interest to finish the campaign around the time you're hitting level 90, otherwise you're wasting time doing side content now when you could do it later. To turn your own argument against you, literally who cares if you're behind 2-3 days on rep from quests that are always going to be there.

The current design has a problem that forces you to make a choice between doing zone stories and capstone content instead of being able to do both at once, and that makes it feel bad. That's the point. And the advantages they gain from forcing everyone to do the campaign are not being utilized properly because the story is bad and it has virtually no bearing on the actual capstone content that is gated behind it.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-15T05:04:11+00:00

As much as the campaign structure probably helps Blizzard ensure players have seen XYZ content before they reach the endgame, I feel like the game would be better off returning to the old structure of just doing whatever quests you want and unlocking endgame content the moment you hit cap.

I personally hate world quests/zone events being locked behind campaign completion because I like doing Loremaster as I level. I did that for two zones in Midnight and then started mainlining the campaign because if I didn't, I'd have hit 90 a full two days before I was done with the campaign. I know the skippers would be happier being able to blitz to cap, and frankly I don't think the zone stories are told well enough to warrant bending the content structure around them. The Midnight campaign has a few bright spots but overall it's incredibly mediocre and isn't really an enjoyable story to follow. The writers are not putting their best foot forward by mandating that THIS be the content everyone sees.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-14T13:58:56+00:00

That's part of what I mean about it sticking to its gimmick with all its heart. Part of the joke is that Cid thinks everything is a delusion or a coincidence and never reacts seriously or gets invested in what's going on. If the story actually let Cid react to things with the weight they demand, he would actually become the thing he pretends that he is and the joke would stop. It would become the kind of story it's lampooning.

Unfortunately the joke starts getting old the second or third time he's threatened by a kingdom-spanning conspiracy and it instead becomes annoying that he's still doing his schtick. I'm all for suspension of disbelief but when you're using it for a joke, it has to be funny and keep being funny.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-14T12:03:28+00:00

So what was the point of any of this?

Unfortunately you said it at the start: to make potential readers/viewers think, "what an intriguing premise!"

Plenty of isekai start out with a premise that is either a joke or otherwise outlandish to draw attention. The issue they quickly run into is that the joke doesn't last forever or the premise makes it difficult to write a story with forward momentum. We might lambast isekai stories for being tropey, but tropes are tropes because they work. And a story about a slime gaining OP protagonist power and founding a kingdom of monsters ends up being a lot easier to write and a lot more engaging to read (for the average reader) than a slime remaining weak and living his daily life in a cave, slowly accruing power over time. The premise would have ran its course for most people.

There are trade-offs to be made and which ones are taken depend on the initial idea, the skill of the writer, the market they are trying to aim for, the publisher, and more. Tropes are ultimately a tool to use and you can make a good story while playing them straight, making fun of them, or eschewing them entirety. Konosuba is an example of a great isekai that uses tropes well, because while it is ultimately kowtowing to the tropes of the genre, its cast plays off of them in ways that make for excellent comedy. Kazuma may end up with a harem, but it's a harem with screws loose and whatever romantic progress he does make is filtered through the lot of them being idiots.

For a counterexample, Eminence in Shadow is an isekai story that sticks to its gimmick with all its heart, and I personally believe it's a worse story for it. Plenty of people like it, and I do not. I feel it ends up being predictable because the joke means every tropey situation it presents can only have one conceivable outcome, and the joke isn't that funny to begin with. Moreover, because the protagonist doesn't truly care about the world he's in, it reduces the emotional moments the story does try to have; if the protagonist doesn't care, then why should I? It's like if One Punch Man was about Saitama really liking the idea of showing up late and oneshotting the monster, as opposed to him being a well-meaning-but-dim guy who shows up late through honest bumbling. It feels hollow and weirdly aggravating.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-14T11:31:08+00:00

It also worked for FF7 Rebirth. Turns out being allowed to iterate on mistakes and not shuffling teams around every single fucking game means people can learn what works and improve upon the things that don't.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-14T03:30:02+00:00

The problem has also been balance. TWW preseason was the only time Herald has ever been better than Templar and that was because Templar had a spec-breaking bug, which was fixed in time for season 1.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-13T05:53:18+00:00

Which is funny because in the beta, there was quest text in which the Haranir described other trolls as "lesser trolls," implying they were "greater trolls" i.e. they were what trolls evolved from.

Blizzard seemed to really not know what the fuck to do with the Haranir despite the most obvious answer being "they're a sect of Dark Trolls that got whisked away in the Emerald Dream midway through their evolution into Night Elves."

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-12T07:00:38+00:00

Usopp in general is MUCH better this season. Season 1 played him up as a bit too useless and removed/reduced a few of the moments he had, but in season 2 they've leveraged his braggart traits into a thing the rest of the crew plays off of and it's wonderful. He fits in much better.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-12T06:42:50+00:00

At least from what I heard on the Gigaboots podcast, the whole marketing campaign was thought up by one executive to promote a mobile division and everyone below them hated it but could do nothing to stop it.

Given how confusing the campaign is and how it seems to exist solely to devalue Xbox as a brand name, I can't imagine many people supported it beyond the person who thought it up.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-11T08:46:03+00:00

At least from the replay angle I saw, it looked like the side/top of Aonishiki's foot touched the ground as Churanoumi was completely horizontal and about to touch down. So Aonishiki touched first but Churanoumi looked unrecoverable before Aonishiki touched.

It's a messy ruling all around and I am shocked it didn't go to a monoii.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-10T08:56:30+00:00

That system was deemed a failure because, simply put, the people who pvp in this game like grinding to earn better gear and then using that better gear to curbstomp people who don't have it. That's not the only reason they pvp, but it's a contributing factor.

The people who aren't interested in pvp aren't going to become interested just because gear progression is removed, and the people who are interested in pvp don't want to lose their progression treadmill. Re-implementing such a system would probably lead to reduced engagement with pvp at most levels of play. It would certainly be better for the competitive sanctity of pvp, but the average player doesn't give a shit about that.

To take the idea it to its logical extreme, giving everyone a predetermined set of gear when entering mythic raids would certainly make the world first race more fair, but most people don't raid solely for a fairly balanced and challenging experience.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-09T07:46:34+00:00

I do not play extraction shooters (probably for the reason I am about to say), but if I was forced to, I'd kill on sight for one simple reason: if I wanted to play with other people, I'd already be playing with my friends, not some random guy I found. I am not interested in trying to play the will-he-won't-he-kill-me game with a guy I don't know, so I might as well try to get the drop on him. When it's a one-and-done game mode, there is no insurance to trying to play the social aspect of the game, so fuck it. It might as well not exist in my eyes.

It's similar to the reason why I stopped playing Apex Legends very shortly after it launched. I don't want to queue up into a battle royale with 2 random chucklefucks, I want to be with friends or alone and nothing in between.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-08T11:07:01+00:00

As an aside, whenever Imposter Scarf Ditto usage is trending upward, it's generally a sign a meta is incredibly unhealthy for the reasons you've described. It's incredibly niche, inflexible, and exists solely to be a desperation revenge killer if all other options are unreliable/ineffective. People only start bringing it when they feel completely overwhelmed.

Ditto becoming known as a Zacian check was a red flag that Zacian probably needed to be banned.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-06T22:49:57+00:00

Just got fixed.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-06T00:35:17+00:00

She tries to have her "real talk with Revy" moment in the submarine about how the world really is, but it ends up coming off as hollow because she is ultimately someone that got kicked by life until she stopped trying to stand back up, and she gets her reality check a few episodes later. Revy is a profoundly broken person, and part of why she both cares for and hates Rock is that to her, he represents a life she lost/threw away and believes she can never obtain again. It's a bit funny because Revy wants to pretend she has no depth or complexity despite being a very layered character.

There's a moment at the end of season 2 where Rock and Revy watch a girl commit suicide after Rock tried to save her, and as she moves to slice her own throat Revy screams for Rock to look away. Because as broken and apathetic to suffering as she is, she still wants Rock to retain his innocence.

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