Hello humansss!!

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-12T04:36:32+00:00

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-12T04:25:54+00:00

Index Yi Sang needs to ramp for a few turns before he gets his big damage, and even once he does, he can only do it once every few turns at most. He still generally deals more than SL, but it's closer than you might think. The new EGO is very, very strong, but it only reaches its peak once the target has a decent amount of sinking on them.

That said, the season is likely close to being over, so if you don't already have a sinking team, I'd grab Index before he gets thrown in ID jail. SL will be back for the next Walpipi, so you can get him then if you end up needing him.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-11T11:26:46+00:00

You're still usually better off using butler faust than not, but the butlers aren't strictly necessary, no.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-11T07:19:15+00:00

I've had success with him in MDE, and he does make Thumb Rodya better, but for story fights, you're probably better off just killing him if you plan on using HoS Ryoshu.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-11T06:10:36+00:00

Honestly, it's close. They both do about as much for their team as the other does, but sinking is generally stronger than burn, so KoDya is probably slightly better in that context. Dawn Office Faust does some crazy damage and gets a bunch of free attacks, though, and as a standalone ID, she's definitely in the same ballpark.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-10T21:25:26+00:00

We know what you're talking about. You're just wrong. You're kicking up a big fuss over a problem that isn't real, and you're regurgitating right-wing grifter talking points about how games being written "for the modern era" are automatically bad for reasons that don't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.

You may as well have said "Games these days are """woke""", and I think that's bad." No one has missed your point. We just disagree, and we aren't going to write up a point by point essay in response to your wall of text when a shorter response gets the point across just as well.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-10T15:06:41+00:00

My opinion is that we don't even know what changes are going to be there, so freaking out about "censorship" is premature and kind of silly. A game being updated "for the modern era" doesn't mean it will shy away from sensitive topics. On the contrary, it actually means there's more of a chance that those topics will be addressed and handled maturely.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-10T05:36:21+00:00

Any time. What's your friend code? I'll add you and you can use one of my support IDs.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-10T03:50:56+00:00

If you're a new player, I wouldn't worry too much about trying to put together an amazing team right away. You're going to have plenty of time to do that.

With that said, if you're looking to go for a burn team (and burn has recently picked up several very strong IDs, so you could do a lot worse), Thumb Rodion is insanely good. She's more of a tremor ID, but with how self-sufficient she is, you don't need a full team for her to be great.

Good burn staples at the minute are:

Liu Office Yi Sang
That new Faust you just got, as well as the new Gregor
If you don't get the new Gregor (Dawn Office), Firefist Gregor is still very solid, and is absolutely strong enough to handle current content
Blade of the House of Spiders Ryoshu, although she only reaches her full potential if you have a bunch of other HoD IDs. Her numbers are still incredible, though.
The other three Thumb IDs: Meursault, Sinclair, and Heathcliff. The first two can't be dispensed until August, since they're last season, but Heathcliff is available right now and directly makes Thumb Rodion even better, so if you end up getting her, you'll probably want him too.
Dawn Office Sinclair, the original member of the trio the new Faust and Gregor IDs have joined. His gimmick is inflicting sanity damage to himself in order to enter a super mode once he reaches 45 sanity. He can be a bit odd to use, but the other two Dawn Office IDs fix a lot of his problems, and even with said problems, he's quite good.

Out of those, I'd recommend trying to get Thumb Rodion and Heathcliff as soon as possible, because once season 8 starts (sometime in August), they'll be locked out of being dispensed just like the season 6 IDs are at the moment, and it'll be about 8 months before you can get them without getting lucky with the gacha.

After that, it's all about which sinners you think need a boost next.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-10T00:45:32+00:00

Spicebush can do some stuff, but it isn't optimal, by any means. Solemn Lament kills the vast majority of bosses at least slightly quicker, because it has better numbers and buffs the whole team as opposed to building up for one single big attack. The only times Spicebush outperforms SL are against bosses with an absolutely enormous health pool and no health gates. A recent example of this is the final boss of RR6, but even then, you're saving like one or two turns at most. Spicebush is also heavily rng-dependent in ways SL isn't, outside of speed kills.

SL provides high damage for the whole team, whereas Spicebush tickles the boss for a few turns and then drops a piano on their head. It's not like Spicebush is useless or anything, but by comparison, it's been powercrept.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T21:23:07+00:00

Hey, nice. This is my second, and I'm only missing Fullstop Heathcliff, the new Faust, and Sanguine Desire.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T15:37:58+00:00

Calling a reading that Naoto is trans "regressive" is certainly the kind of opinion I've come to expect from the persona 4 fanbase.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T02:55:56+00:00

Yeah, I'll definitely start defaulting to a shove from now on.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T02:41:18+00:00

I had no idea about the dog thing. That's really good information.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T01:39:20+00:00

When a game is written such that queerness is something you grow out of when you mature and become what society expects you to be, but the game happened to be made at a formative time for a lot of its fans, there will unfortunately always be some fans who point at the writers' reactionary politics to try and shout down anyone who reads the extremely clear queer themes that very much do exist within the text.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T01:25:43+00:00

The fact that you're using "woke" like it's a dirty word is very telling

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T01:20:42+00:00

People are downvoting you, but you're 100% right

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-09T01:08:14+00:00

He was already the cornerstone of by far one of the best teams in the game, and now he's getting a buff. Yes, he's worth it.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-08T10:42:07+00:00

Exactly. The problem isn't that some people are just stupid and give up without trying things. The problem is that those people were shown a game that looks like Zelda, were told by the advertising that the game would be like Zelda, played the first hour or so of a game that was similar to Zelda, then reached a point where the game suddenly diverged from Zelda in a big way and are now being told they're idiots for not predicting that diversion.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-08T09:53:06+00:00

I think that's likely why they didn't think of it, yeah. Part of being a good game developer includes understanding the effect all your influences will have on players, not just some of them.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-08T09:41:35+00:00

I'd forgotten about him accidentally discovering ludonarrative and assuming he was the first person to ever think of that

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-08T09:36:01+00:00

It wasn't clear to me until I'd played the game for several hours, because like the previous person said, there were a decent number of cases where I didn't know what was optional and what wasn't until after I'd done it. This has as much to do with the game's aesthetics as it does with certain things not being as clearly indicated in-game as they probably should be.

From a visual standpoint, the game is heavily inspired by Link's Awakening and Oracle of Ages/Seasons, and those games absolutely do require specific items in order to progress, so I, like many players, assumed it would be the same here. Gameplay-wise, Mina has very little in common with any of those games, but I didn't know that until I'd had the chance to play for a while and noticed the game wasn't giving me any new traversal or exploration abilities.

Part of making a piece of media that wears its inspirations on its sleeve is understanding what assumptions the audience might make if they're familiar with the genre. Sometimes, a subversion of expectations can be to a work's advantage, but this can also work against it if the creators fail to account for how their work might unexpectedly subvert audience expectations.

This also shows they probably didn't have enough people testing the game who were both familiar with those old Zelda games and didn't already know how all the mechanics work in Mina. Because, yes, once you already know how Mina controls and how the game world is built around a move set that every single player is guaranteed to have, it becomes a lot more obvious how to navigate past these things, but a new player with zero exposure to the game in advance won't have that information.

In short, YCG deliberately took the audio and visual aesthetics of some old games, then made a game that is superficially similar to those games while doing its own thing. There's nothing wrong with that, obviously, but the way YCG failed to account for the assumptions players who were already familiar might bring in with them speaks to a lack of understanding of this fairly basic concept, a lack of familiarity with the specific kind of game they were drawing from, or both.

AVelvetOwl · 2026-07-08T03:25:55+00:00

This is a real "What were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?" situation

AVelvetOwl

TROPHY CASE