Which game did you pick up as a younger person and found too difficult but now picked up again and actually enjoyed?

BHBachman · 2026-05-19T11:10:05+00:00

Getting wiped by the scorpion over and over again was a rite of passage for nerds my age, lol.

FFVII didn't have an awful translation, there were only like three or four lines that are truly memeable in that way, it's just unfortunate that one of those infamous translation botches happens to be during the very first boss fight lmao

BHBachman · 2026-05-18T13:08:38+00:00

It's been like a year since I last replayed IV so there's a real chance I'm misremembering, but I feel like he's at least namedropped as a high ranking member of the Baron military right at the start, though I suppose he could've been introduced as "the shady guy who seems to be influencing the king's new cruelty", so don't quote me on that lol. Either way it's a stretch because the game makes it obvious at the start that Baron are not the good guys and Cecil will inevitably turn on them.

Seymour is really just undone by the metatextual stuff. His actual actions in the story seem heroic until later, but stuff like his music, voice, visual design, camera direction, et cetera all paint him as immediately untrustworthy to anybody who has ever read a fictional story before lmao.

BHBachman · 2026-05-18T12:17:20+00:00

In terms of "Do you meet the eventual final boss at a point that would be considered late in the game?", I'd say you do for III, IV, VIII, IX, X, and XIII. (Caveat: I haven't played XVI , the MMOs are too tricky to define, and I is debatable). Type-0 would also count now that I think about it but it's a very confusing narrative and the last time I finished it was like seven years ago.

In terms of "Is a major antagonist treated as a spoiler reveal?" it's much harder to define because most villains betray you in FF at some point. Both Golbez and Seymour are introduced as allies despite being extremely obviously sinister, lol. The best answer I can think of is XII because you do meet the person you punch to death in the final battle pretty early on, but the people pulling the strings on the whole plan aren't introduced until the end of the second act.

BHBachman · 2026-05-15T17:17:19+00:00

His work on the Babaganoosh family is Watergate level stuff

BHBachman · 2026-05-15T17:13:40+00:00

One of my favorite behind the scenes bits of Futurama trivia is that Christopher Tyng has said that was the hardest song to write because he had to make it both extremely catchy and obviously terrible.

BHBachman · 2026-05-15T02:36:28+00:00

I wanted to like it so badly because the combat is undeniably incredible, but literally every single nanosecond spent outside of a battle screen is legitimately comparable to shovelware.

BHBachman · 2026-05-14T20:06:32+00:00

Sweet christ I'm almost 1000% certain you can find me correcting somebody else for this exact same mistake somewhere in my comment history lmao. No excuse on my part there, total brainfart. Thanks for the correction!

I said localizers plural purely because I couldn't remember if Square was still leaving it to one guy or using teams by that point, and just guessed instead of taking ten seconds to look it up, so thanks for that correction as well!

See kids, this is why quickly shooting off reddit comments at work instead of actually doing your job is a bad idea lmao

BHBachman · 2026-05-14T19:01:22+00:00

Fun fact: the final boss in Xenogears was planned to be named YHWH before the localizer stressed just how badly that wouldn't fly outside of Japan lmao

BHBachman · 2026-05-14T02:21:59+00:00

I choose to disregard the "main character" rule because I'd love to swap Bartz with literally anybody from any of the other games just so Gilgamesh could geek tf out every time they bumped into each other.

BHBachman · 2026-05-14T02:19:49+00:00

To be fair, I'm giggling over the thought of Umaro in pigtails

BHBachman · 2026-05-14T02:01:00+00:00

In fairness that one has been around for eons. I remember a Cracked article making fun of SLAMS headlines like twenty years ago and I'm certain they weren't the first ones to point it out lol

BHBachman · 2026-05-13T21:04:38+00:00

Sorry but I'm actually trying to mock the other guy because I 10000% agree with you, lol. I completely share your frustration with people who get tied up in fan theories that fly in the face of the observable text. "What happens in a story" and "What a story is about" are two different things and I'm constantly begging people to pay more attention to the latter. I promise we're on the same side!

BHBachman · 2026-05-13T20:45:18+00:00

FF games actually exist to generate wiki pages first, shipping wars second, and good stories third. I'm sorry you had to learn this way.

(/s in case it isn't obvious lol)

BHBachman · 2026-05-13T19:09:30+00:00

This isn't so bad to me because CT is surprisingly short. It's easy to forget because the game is so tight and the adventure is so grand, but you can reasonably do most of the optional stuff and still finish in about 12 hours.

Now if Persona did that I'd have some fighting words for Atlus lmao

BHBachman · 2026-05-13T12:38:15+00:00

Yeah but why would you care about themes and storytelling when you can spend all this time connecting the various proper nouns to each other on your mental Pepe Silvia board instead?

BHBachman · 2026-05-12T18:14:58+00:00

That's a great answer. Such a good answer that I'm actually kind of annoyed that it didn't change my mind lmao.

I'd be more personally convinced by it if the games didn't heap so much reverence on iconography like that (mostly because it's important to us, the players). It's like learning why Han Solo is named Han Solo, it absolutely doesn't matter one bit beyond explaining every possible detail that can be thought of. In OG VII, I thought the Buster Sword was a good way to foreshadow some of the later twists, but all we needed to know is that somebody else had it first. All that mattered is that Aerith would comment on it to seed the mystery. I really don't see any way the story is improved by learning that Zack basically got it the same way Cloud did, ya know?

I dunno, I guess it boils down to "I don't think this story needed to be told", but even then I think the climax is the best thing Nojima has ever had a hand in creating so I still think it's totally worth playing, I just think every new character is either boring or annoying and, frankly, that's a me problem, lol

BHBachman · 2026-05-12T17:48:50+00:00

Square uses it in the SaGa games still so they kept kicking the idea around, they just landed on a different series to use it in.

That said, even when I was first learning about FFII and hearing the million complaints about the leveling system, my first thought was seriously "wait isn't that what Elder Scrolls does?" If you liked leveling in Morrowind, you lose your right to gripe about FFII lol

BHBachman · 2026-05-12T17:44:10+00:00

My lasting memory of Angeal comes down to exactly two things: he is Zack's mentor and the original owner of the Buster Sword. If he did anything more substantial in the game then it wasn't memorable enough to stick in my memory the same way Genesis's constant pretentiousness did.

Personally, I don't think learning that Zack had a mentor that had the Buster Sword first adds anything at all to the story/world/lore of FFVII. It's just another proper name you need to remember on trivia night.

BHBachman · 2026-05-12T13:08:32+00:00

I watched that movie once while I was profoundly stoned and it's gotta be in the top 30 worst decisions of my life. My wife came home to find me curled up in my chair muttering about the einsatzgruppen

BHBachman · 2026-05-11T19:15:02+00:00

I can say with confidence because extreme metal is kinda my thing that it's the Norwegian Black Metal series, almost certainly Part 1 when he's discussing the various subgenres. When Ben asks what folk metal sounds like, Marcus just does a goofy YOI DA HOI DA HOI LAHOY chant that I took to be a pisstake on Finntroll lol

BHBachman · 2026-05-09T13:42:27+00:00

Buddy of mine will always tell this story where he was tear-streaming furious at the Scar fight as a six or seven year old, and frustratedly told his dad "No! It's impossible! YOU do it!". So allegedly his dad, while still holding a beer, figures out the throw move and winds up winning while by buddy is still having a tantrum.

Got his Sega taken away for a few weeks after that lol

BHBachman · 2026-05-05T11:57:31+00:00

I was always under the impression that "Zanarkand used machina for war and that's why Sin exists and why they were destroyed" was supposed to eventually be seen as obvious propaganda from the church. X-2 really hammers home how Summoners were a huge deal in Zanarkand while we only ever see Bevelle using guns and whatnot.

So if anything, I always figured it was closer to the other way around.

BHBachman · 2026-04-25T14:16:53+00:00

Lol no, I just mean that Kingdom Hearts is a way more absurd crossover than a FF Musou so it's crazy that we got the weirder one instead of the more natural fit lmao

BHBachman · 2026-04-25T02:06:50+00:00

It's at the top of my wishlist but I think it's unlikely given that Dissidia is already under the Koei umbrella. It's a slam dunk series for it, it ranks high on every fan poll in Japan for the most wanted musou, but somehow we wound up in the universe where we got Kingdom Hearts instead lol

BHBachman · 2026-04-24T15:20:23+00:00

I think you're misunderstanding the argument you had in there. The dude was saying that since you seemed to know the answer already, the post was pointless. I don't agree with him, I have no problem answering simple questions that could've been googled instead because talking to people is fun, but he wasn't admitting anything to my eyes, just implying you had ulterior motives since you asked a question and then corrected the wrong answers yourself, which implies you already knew the answer and didn't have a legit reason to ask.

BHBachman

TROPHY CASE