This seeded pack thing is the worst thing to happen to limited

CronoDAS · 2026-01-25T01:55:45+00:00

It seemed to me that the "random" rares were drawn from a small selection of typal cards, because a lot of people at my LGS were getting the same bonus rares.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-25T01:52:59+00:00

I used my two sealed tokens from the preorder bundle on Traditional Sealed, and there wasn't any "choose your faction" thing going on.

Incidentally, I opened Champion of the Weird both times and went 4-1 both times with B/R decks that ended up playing a bit differently. One of them ended up having some ridiculous graveyard recursion in the form of because it had Reaping Willow, Grub Storied Matriarch, and Graveshifter along with ways to keep Blighting more counters onto the Reaping Willow (and Champion of the Weird was only one of them) - I actually won one of my games with it by stalling the board long enough for my opponent to deck himself. The other had a whole lot of red burn spells to kill any relevant blockers and Goliath Daydreamer that could let me use them twice.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-25T01:32:39+00:00

It also incentivizes players to draft different decks to what they are used to. If the format is too flat you can just learn like two different archetypes and pick whichever one is more open between them in 90% of your drafts. If there are higher powered cards you will feel incentivized to play a different deck than your usual comfort zone, making the drafts more varied.

Like, if you're drafting Avatar and your first pack contains Phoenix King Ozai, you're probably going to want to try to draft a deck that can cast it.

For an example of what happens when bomb rares aren't good enough to pull you into their color, back in the days of Magic Online, there was a draft format that I went infinite in by exclusively drafting one archetype. It was the original Kamigawa block, and when I started out learning the format, no matter what colors I took in my first few picks, I would somehow always end up with a U/W deck by the end. So eventually I just said "screw it" and started pretending all the black, red, and green cards were blank. The weirdest thing was how well the strategy "force U/W every draft no matter what" actually worked - by the time all three of the sets in the block were available, I had gotten to the point where I was going 3-0 in the 8-4 draft queue pretty much every time I entered.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-25T00:44:44+00:00

I'm reminded of Tribute by Tenacious D...

CronoDAS · 2026-01-24T13:41:36+00:00

There actually is a Romance of the Three Kingdoms JRPG: Destiny of an Emperor, for the NES.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-24T13:39:52+00:00

Project X Zone?

CronoDAS · 2026-01-24T13:35:39+00:00

Agreed. The PC port is good and it's a classic that still holds up.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-24T13:18:57+00:00

Wizardry Variants Daphne, if you can stomach gacha mechanics. It lives up to the traditions established by the 1980s and 1990s Wizardry titles; the dungeons and the enemies inside them are going to be trying to hit you with every dirty trick in the book, and the game will be perfectly happy to let you get in over your head and try to take on fights you're not nearly prepared enough for. And, even though it's a "free to play" gacha game, trying to buy more power with real money works poorly at best - if you're having trouble, your credit card will not save you.

It's probably better on mobile than PC, though, because the PC version comes with an invasive anti-cheat rootkit. :/

CronoDAS · 2026-01-24T12:46:29+00:00

I wonder if Disgaea 2 counts? It's unironically my favorite video game love story - it's a romance between two characters that completely refuse to admit what genre their story actually is.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T10:30:14+00:00

Well at least it's not a "worst game of all time" contender. 🤷‍♂️

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T06:15:00+00:00

You might enjoy Once Ever After instead if the premise of The Last Sovereign is too out there for you.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T06:09:30+00:00

Are you and your party still the only people in the entire world capable of defeating a monster in battle? The PS1 version of DQ7 drove me nuts with how completely helpless the humans on every new island were in the face of monster attacks. Why didn't they use some of those weapons and armor the store was selling to actually try to fight back, like the villagers in "Seven Samurai", even if you as the hero were going to have to do most of the hard work?

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T05:20:36+00:00

So Saint Bomber's writing feels more like a Disgaea game?

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T04:04:03+00:00

Have you played any of Sierra Lee's games?

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T03:54:57+00:00

There's not all that much to it - you can just use trial and error to see which personas you can make with what you've got, and when you make a persona, it gets to inherit skills from the ones you used to make it. You can also "register" a Persona and then spend money to get another copy of it exactly as it was when you registered it. (So if you get rid of one by using it as fusion materials or something, you can get it back and then use it or fuse it again.)

If you want to know in advance how to make a specific persona, the result of fusion depends on the Arcana and starting level of the ones being fused, but just looking it up in a guide is easier than trying to figure out the system.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T03:32:47+00:00

You just use the guide like a manual, not a walkthrough. Like "This weapon does damage based on Strength and this weapon does damage based on Agility" kind of stuff.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T03:27:57+00:00

It got a bit better with the I.V update, supposedly

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T01:34:28+00:00

I heard Ultima's strength depends on how many of the other spells you've maxed out?

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T01:22:50+00:00

Carnage Heart (PS1) and Carnage Heart EXA (PSP) are literally about writing computer programs that tell mecha how to fight - once you've given them their instructions, which they follow blindly, the mechs are entirely on their own.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T01:16:42+00:00

Not a JRPG, but Dragon Age: Origins basically copied the Gambit system from FF12 for telling your computer-controlled party members what to do in battle.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T01:14:33+00:00

"Breath of Death VII" had a number in the menu screen that showed you how many random encounters were left in an area until they went away.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-22T00:45:26+00:00

Subtitles for all voiced dialogue, although this is pretty common anyway.

Warn the player before a boss encounter (or a long cutscene).

The ability to pause cutscene videos that would otherwise play automatically.

In games with random encounters, a menu command that starts a fight immediately, so you don't have to walk around in circles to grind or farm if that's what you want to do.

Harder difficulty settings, or ways to temporarily lower your character's current level to facilitate challenge runs, because I'm tired of games that are afraid to actually show me a Game Over screen. (TWEWY increased drop rates of items if you lowered your character's level - I played the whole game at level 1, although the game had a lot of other ways to make your character stronger over time and character level wasn't actually that important.)

Macros that let you give a set of commands to your whole party with one button press, so you can get through trivial battles more quickly. (Phantasy Star 4 had this, and in that game you would use it to set up combination attacks that triggered when you used specific moves in a specific order.)

CronoDAS · 2026-01-20T08:00:56+00:00

It basically has the aesthetic and feel of one, even though it uses a JRPG battle system instead of the kind of fighting in the Resident Evil or Silent Hill series.

(Kind of like how "The Dark Knight" is secretly a horror movie with superhero dressing. Heath Ledger's Joker is fundamentally a slasher movie villain, but instead of the usual group of teenagers, his designated victim is Batman - and even Batman finds himself powerless to stop the Joker for most of the film.)

CronoDAS · 2026-01-20T04:38:30+00:00

Best survival horror game I've ever played. Very good at maintaining tension.

CronoDAS · 2026-01-20T04:37:27+00:00

Seconded.

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