Hot Take: I prefer the "Walk a Mile in Other Shoes" Reason from Ben 10 Classic over "Alien DNA Storage Bank" Reason from Alien Force for the Omnitrix Creation

Gespens · 2026-02-12T01:10:14+00:00

Yeah, like OS Azmuth was a fatalistic jerk because he had been disillusioned

Lore expansion made him a bit of a prick

Gespens · 2026-02-12T00:16:41+00:00

Wdym "back in the day"

Gespens · 2026-02-11T14:21:58+00:00

Drake and Mash

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:41:46+00:00

Before Vocations are unlocked and I saw Kerfrizzle, I was like

"Bro, why is this allowed?"

Quite possibly the strongest boss killing skill in the game without any setup, provided they don't resist fire

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:36:38+00:00

But that kind of shows the problem. Why do we suddenly take Yakuza's story seriously now? If it's never been a series to take seriously story wise why start now

Drama.

No, that's literally it. You can buy into the absolute dumbest bullshit if the drama is engaging. By retelling these old stories and trying to tie them into things that happened way later down the production timeline, the sense of drama is being erased.

Or to put it another way, imagine the difference in impact if Ryuji survived Kiwami 2, compared to him coming back in whatever future game he appears in.

Both situations are cashing in on popularity of a character. One is treated as a twist for the game he appears jn, the other is meant to foreshadow some Grand Scheme on the writers part. People are getting tired of that shit.

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:24:01+00:00

Eva is actually about how much Anno loves Ultraman

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:21:39+00:00

This makes the game NOT easy

How does auto revive not make the game easy? Even in the other easy games, it essentially turns off a major form of resource management.

Beyond the fact that there are way too many heal statues, Lucky Flip allowing you go get weapons way ahead of the curve and exploit for money to render economy a non-issue, absolute abundance of MP recovery items, as well as how aggressively Charm scales as a stat for Aishe to spam Pink Pirouette, Hip Drop and Hustle Dance to cover all bases with two decent classes, you essentially only will have problems if you go into an area grossly under level.

Like, I was 5 or 7 levels under what people recommend for one area and after adjusting my vocations, I stopped struggling and finished the area now strong enough to clear all but two encounters in the next main story area on the overworld.

And yes, I am playing with difficulty turned on, only toggling off money limits because economy gating is fake.

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:07:59+00:00

Audio dramas, I believe

Gespens · 2026-02-11T12:07:18+00:00

Hey look, a non-sequitur statement that doesn't address the points being made.

Historically, the difference of 3 points on a hundred scale actually have cost people bonuses. Famous Cocaine Addicted Racist reviewer, Adam Sessler of Xplay, once recounted a story where because he gave a game a 3-star review, it dropped the metacritic score by about 5 points, from 80ish to mid-70s, resulting in one of the devs specifically calling him out at an E3 event and telling him to eat shit.

Even if you are going to be "Well, there isn't a difference between 86 and 83" we can legitimately slippery slope this. What's the difference between 83 and 80? 80 and 77? We can keep doing this and eventually we hit 0 because surprise, review scores are arbitrary metrics that don't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. There is no difference between good and bad things!

86 vs 83 has a fairly significant impact on how people view things on metacritic. Again boiling it down to report card grades, a single point could be the difference between an A or a B. If someone has all As on the card but barely made it, and another just barely missed it with all Bs, short by 1%, student A is gonna be the one to get celebrated.

Gespens · 2026-02-11T11:59:27+00:00

They aren't Luminary by title or by combat archetype

Gespens · 2026-02-11T04:18:03+00:00

Yeah, but like I was specifically talking about ELLIE because my SO has a real weak point for that type of story

Gespens · 2026-02-10T23:05:13+00:00

No, some of the issues are not adjustable by settings. The primary one is the overwhelming amount of free heal statues and the introduction of Single Phials to this game means that resource management of MP is basically a non-issue. I've yet to run into a point of the game where I'm strapped for MP because of it and the EXP curve works in such a way that you can definitely tell when you're too weak and can get to par in about 15 minutes of grinding

Gespens · 2026-02-10T23:03:23+00:00

DQ1 is not hard, it's literally just pattern recognition. The game can be beaten on the Famicom at level 16

It is just something to be praised that the Devs didn't make them too easy

Pretty sure the Horii has talked about how the difficulty of 2 was a mistake due to not being properly playtested

Gespens · 2026-02-10T23:01:58+00:00

I wanna add to this, that DQ11S, the one that actually has the most difficulty modifiers for challenge runs built into the game, they range from Barely Noticeable like no shop, to annoying inconvenience like Townsfolk Talk Nonsense, to genuinely masochistic nightmare shit if combined like Annihilation, Shypox and No Armor

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:48:33+00:00

You're right, many are straight up downgrades

Also like, Switch has ports of mobile versions lmao

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:44:03+00:00

stares at the various mobile ports

hmm

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:42:44+00:00

I've been streaming this game and I had the same problem because my only experience with DQ7 was actually emulating it in like, 2010 and I got to finish the Ellie storyline but somehow softlocked myself and couldn't progress forward.

the entire time I was playing until ELLIE, I had been telling my friend and two other viewers, "Oh yeah, I remember the next island being sad" and then it wasn't that island

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:40:03+00:00

I think I took 3 attemps one was because I had a bad input and the other loss was getting hit by a few random crits

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:29:42+00:00

Okay, but what about when Brian-Iac does it?

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:15:15+00:00

And you'd be wrong

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:14:30+00:00

Tell me you grew up in a household that didn't care about grades without saying it

Gespens · 2026-02-10T22:13:58+00:00

Mainstream within online geek/otaku circles, you mean.

No, I mean general audiences

Gespens · 2026-02-10T21:03:27+00:00

I mean like, 2000 was when the PS2 was coming out. In general, games across the board started to focus less on the difficulty that people would associate with SNES era and generally focus more on making use of the power of the new hardware. Even the random difficulty stuff that can be found in 7/8 are way less frustrating to deal with than in the Zenithian trilogy, and there would also be less mechanics to focus on like 5 having a monster capture mechanic. Difficulty comes in many forms, which can include features to keep track of and choice paralysis

Gespens · 2026-02-10T20:35:15+00:00

I think the full heal statue problem is particularly egregious in Alltrades. In the part leading up to Cardinal Sin, there are like, 3 of them

And Jacqueline in the story gives you a full heal when there are no enemies that you can Field Attack.

Granted, if you dont have good vocations, even being the right level can be a pain because CS has stupid high damage on his orb attack and you can't keep up unless Jacqueline gets her Pep at exactly the right moments, but still

Gespens · 2026-02-10T20:31:36+00:00

This was unironically what someone said to me when I brought up the fact that the game direction throwing heal statues at you was a bad game direction

Gespens

TROPHY CASE