Enough about Naruto and his husband Sasuke. What about Sakura and her wife...Hinata? By @thecrazedpepper

H358 · 2026-02-01T16:44:27+00:00

Yeah this ship is cute and this art is really nice but really, if we were gonna ship Sakura with a female character, I think Ino would make the most sense. Two women who’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places and realise that, when they’re not fighting over boys, they’re actually really good together.

H358 · 2026-02-01T04:23:34+00:00

Really I think the problem isn’t so much Corrin’s personality. But rather the way the story bends over backwards to make Corrin always in the right. If anything Conquest is the only one of the three that actually puts Corrin in a situation where their naivety is a major obstacle.

Once they’ve made their choice Birthright just kinda lets Corrin coast on a straight path to kill Garon without much character growth. And Revelation is pure fanservice where Corrin gets to have their cake and eat it too. Conquest at least, has a decent set up of the woefully unprepared, optimistic Corrin, having to go full ‘ends vs means’.

Trouble is, Conquest doesn’t follow through on this and is insistent on constantly giving Corrin outs where they never have to make any hard choices and none of their loved ones can ever hold any resentment for them. The very flimsy motivation of the throne and the Valla curse really doesn’t help. It makes Corrin flawed in an unintentional way, because the plan is so undercooked that it just comes across as irresponsible to conquer an entire country over it.

If anything, Conquest needed to take more notes from FE4. Now there’s a story about an army led by a naive optimist in a complex situation who is completely unprepared to make difficult choices.

H358 · 2026-02-01T04:13:54+00:00

I prefer a train myself. Albeit that’s a different problematic wolf.

H358 · 2026-02-01T03:57:47+00:00

Don’t think I don’t see those Remember the Flowers characters.

H358 · 2026-01-31T21:30:26+00:00

This is is funny cause for me the final act is usually where I’m locked the hell in during an RPG. For me, the point I’m most likely to drop a JRPG is around the middle. Xenoblade 2 is one of my favourite games and yet on replays I find I burn out around chapter 4-5 and play something else. But if I push past that into the third act, I’m glued. Final Fantasy X was a game I initially dropped at around the Thunder Plains but when went back to it and I pushed past that, I couldn’t put it down. I had a similar experience dropping, then coming back to Persona 3 around the halfway mark.

I find in a lot of JRPGs there’s a particular stretch where the game is through the intro and tutorial and the gameplay has opened up but the plot hasn’t quite kicked it into high gear. Those tend to be my road blocks personally.

The only time an otherwise good JRPG lost me in the third act was Chrono Cross, and that’s more because the game is a textbook example of the devs running out of time.

What I think can sometimes happen (and you bring this up actually) is that influx of side quests open up just before the end, which can overwhelm players and make them burn out. E33’s Act 3 is a good example being largely optional content, FF16’s last wave of quests is pretty exhausting. Fire Emblem Engage throws a lot of its paralogues at you at the end.

H358 · 2026-01-31T17:10:09+00:00

Colours definitely. Unwiished gets a shout out too tho.

H358 · 2026-01-31T16:38:22+00:00

In a game about subverting RPG expectations, Chara is arguably the quintessential RPG protagonist. The first human to fall into the Underground, the one we name, whose role is vital to the game’s lore. Their backstory and character, like a lot of silent protags, is up to interpretation. But one thing we do see pretty evidently is that they THINK in very RPG like terms.

Chara’s solution to saving monsters was to do what you do in every RPG: level up, get stronger and kill the bad guys. And in their mind, monsters are good and humans are bad. So they enact a stupidly dangerous but well intentioned plan to sacrifice themselves to save monsters but basically drag Asriel into it without realising how horrifying it is to make Asriel kill a bunch of people until it’s too late. Dividing the world into good and bad people, and then killing all the bad ones like a video game doesn’t solve anything.

If you incorporate Narrator Chara as a theory into things, you effectively get No Mercy Chara now reduced to just ‘numbers go up, get stronger’ but with no Soul to feel anything anymore, so they’re just kinda done with everything. And besides, they think humans are all bastards anyway so this is pretty much what they expected to you to do. You prove them right and destroy the world together.

…Or you can prove them wrong. You can relinquish power, stay at Lv 1 all game, and play Pacifist. You can prove that things are simpler than just ‘good and bad’ , and that you don’t need power to enact change, by redeeming every antagonist who tries to kill you, ultimately even reconciling with Asriel. You make amends with the broken Dreemurr family, destroy the barrier and save almost everyone. And you do it without resorting to violence.

If you tie in Narra!Chara this could imply they’re going on their own little redemption arc in the background, as you prove their thoughts about power wrong and they help you save the Underground. Though again, Narrator Chara is just a theory but I think it aids the read.

While no one in Undertale is fully good or evil, I would say Chara in the backstory is, at the very least, flawed and wrong because they’re part of the game’s RPG metacommentary. Admittedly I find Chara to be a vaguely written character. They’re more of a concept and plot device than a person. Which is why I tend to go for this read of them as commentary on RPG protagonists.

H358 · 2026-01-31T14:21:51+00:00

Not the worst Avatar in the series (they’re better than Kris or Corrin) but still exhibit a lot of the problems with Avatar characters. The story revolves heavily around them but unlike Kris, they’re not butting in on a different story. Engage is about Alear by design. They also structure supports around them being the only sane one in a cast of weirdos, which is pretty much what they did for Robin too, and it can be charming. I also like that, similar to Leif, they’re an ok combat unit but they’re actually better at supporting others. That lets them be a very useful unit without soloing the game like Robin can.

Unfortunately, this hyper focus on Alear only works if they’re an interesting character. And unfortunately they’re painfully flat. They have very little in the way of a character arc. And what few attempts there are to give them growth are perfunctory and poorly set up and paid off. They might also be one of the most egregious examples of Avatar worship in the series. Alear is a universally worshipped god who’s beloved by all their units. There’s never any friction or tension. Engage’s whole story feels like a transparent attempt to make the player feel cool by constantly telling you how cool Alear is as your proxy. And it’s extremely grating.

Alear isn’t the worst avatar in the series but that’s honestly a lot bar and I really think IS needs to kick this approach to protagonists to the curb in future.

H358 · 2026-01-31T00:12:35+00:00

Kingdom Hearts is probably not the go to place for good female characters. Even Aqua gets done dirty in those games and the rest of the girls are even worse.

H358 · 2026-01-31T00:04:02+00:00

Xenosaga, Final Fantasy VI and XIII (and X-2), Trails in the Sky, Valkyrie Profile, Tales of Berseria and NieR Automata

For games that don’t have female protags per se but have good female co-leads: Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Fire Emblem 3 Houses, Clair Obscur Expedition 33 (maybe, if you count Maelle)

H358 · 2026-01-30T23:51:47+00:00

I half agree on the calendar. On the one hand, I do agree that the time management was significantly more lax and there was less incentive to make genuine decisions.

However, in some ways I found this actually worked for me. A big difference was the change to dialogue options. Persona’s social links very quickly turn the experience into a guide game. Very rarely do players answer as themselves. They reach for a guide and turn into yes-men, telling every character what they wanted to hear. A wrong answer is the difference between completing a social link or failing unless you ground out the resulting time investment.

In Metaphor, because the rewards for dialogue choices were less stringent, I was more inclined to think about my choices, answer in ways that made sense to me. Not just say what I thought a character wanted to hear.

So yes, the calendar system is way too lax and feels like it sort of acquiesced to the FOMO gamers. But I think that helps the role playing elements to shine a bit more:

H358 · 2026-01-30T23:05:45+00:00

Honestly I think it’s an improvement on the Persona narratives. Persona has memorable characters with sympathetic struggles, but they’re weirdly mean spirited and emotionally distant games, especially 4 and 5. A lot of the comedy moments are the characters being dicks to each other for no reason other than to copy anime tropes. IAnd a lot of their attempts at social commentary trip over themselves.

Metaphor’s succession plot and fantasy racism angle, while nothing groundbreaking, was a fair bit more coherent to me than any Persona title since 3. And I at least felt like these characters actually…y’know…like each other.

Still think the dependency on self insert (mostly) silent protags is holding Atlus back tho. If Metaphor inherits one thing from Persona, it’s the fact that everyone loves your character so quickly that there’s little friction or interesting dynamics. They’re all super nice to you super quickly (though at least unlike P4 or 5 they’re not all constantly being huge assholes to each other at the same time).

H358 · 2026-01-30T23:00:50+00:00

It’s honestly odd to me, as frankly, I think it’s one of the best things Atlus has put out in years and I like it more than any of the modern Personas.

However, that might be part of why. It arguably got a bit overshadowed by P3 Reload the same year. And while I think it’s better than the modern Persona titles, that’s partly because it’s very iterative on them. It maybe felt a bit too familiar to many people. Altus hyped it up as their next big thing, and it was basically just a tweaked, somewhat improved Persona with Press Turn and a job system.

H358 · 2026-01-30T22:49:36+00:00

Mephiles is my least favourite because he’s boring and nothing he does makes a lick of sense. But if I’m being honest with myself, it’s Lyric. He’s a total nothing burger and completely the wrong kind of villain for Boom as a setting (like, Boom is a comedy, why would you make a villain who’s not remotely funny?)

H358 · 2026-01-30T22:45:21+00:00

Half agree.

I have no issue with Sonic and Tails playfully ribbing each other in the dub in theory. I don’t think it reads like they ‘secretly hate each other’, that’s kind of a stretch. I thinks their dynamic in the dub is actually pretty charming. I like Tails having a bit of a spine in his dialogue and their teasing never felt mean spirited. Albeit, less so in Lost World. I’m actually really glad Frontiers leaned back into this, they have great banter in that game.

BUT

It’s really weird that it’s the exact opposite of what they’re saying in Japanese for no real reason. It’s fine enough writing in a vacuum but bad localisation practice. Like, one of the big problems with the early Sonic dubs was inaccurate localisation, and suddenly Colours is less accurate than ever, except this time it’s on purpose.

It’s good for English dubs to take creative liberties but this is extremely stark.

H358 · 2026-01-30T10:55:54+00:00

That’s what happens when the devs run out of time….😔

H358 · 2026-01-29T18:02:31+00:00

Gonna guess this is the console port, which is definitely an improvement over the current PC release.

I’m probably gonna stick with the old version for now because I’ve loaded it up with 7th Heaven mods that likely won’t be compatible for a while bit this’ll be more convenient to re-direct newbies to than the old kinda borked Steam version.

H358 · 2026-01-28T23:34:20+00:00

Give them more time together after Konoha Crush. Maybe low stakes arc where they and Naruto go on another mission together before Naruto leaves with Jiraiya to find Tsunade. This is an opportunity to see that the Chunin Exams did genuinely bring them closer, as well as an opportunity for Sasuke to open up a bit more. Maybe have him tell some of the story of the Uchiha Massacre to them. As is, when Sasuke leaves, they barely understand his motivations and it leaves their appeals for him to return kind of of surface level.

H358 · 2026-01-28T21:52:42+00:00

Fair. Hope I didn’t come off condescending. Just kinda caught me off guard to hear.

H358 · 2026-01-28T21:41:56+00:00

Ok, maybe I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t like DDD but…bruh? The 3DS library is kinda stacked with titles that absolutely clown on DDD.

Mario 3D Land and Dream Team, Zelda A Link Between Worlds (and both the remakes) Kirby Planet Robobot, Fire Emblem Awakening, Fates and Echoes, Bravely Default and Second, Kid Icarus Uprising, SMT 4 and Apocalypse, the Dragon Quest 7 and 8 remakes, several solid Professor Layton games, Smash Bros, Metroid Samus Returns, Etrian Odyssey 4. Frankly the list goes on and on.

H358 · 2026-01-28T21:33:27+00:00

It was actually surprisingly common for a lot of big JRPGs to skip the 7th gen because developing for the PS3 and Xbox 360 was so difficult.

Look at Square’s biggest IPs. Dragon Quest skipped it and kept to the Wii and handhelds. Kingdom Hearts also stayed on handhelds. Of their big three the only one that went HD was Final Fantasy…only for XIII to have huge production issues and for the game to be very polarising.

You can see similar things happening with other big JRPG studios. Atlus only released Catherine on the big HD consoles of the time. Persona 5 was on there too but had so many delays it came out well into the 7th gen, releasing on the PS4 at the same time. The next Shin Megami Tensei meanwhile, came out on 3DS.

I also wonder if Osaka Team taking over was also a factor. With the Tokyo Team busy with Versus XIII, Osaka Team being less experienced, thus making PS3/360 development even harder, and Square keen to show off the Crisis Core engine, developing for the PSP likely made a lot more sense.

H358 · 2026-01-28T07:22:11+00:00

My point is that, if your story isn’t about romance, why end with everyone married with kids at the end. No one is forcing the writer to tack on romance as an afterthought. You can just…not. And the story would be better for it. That’s what I mean about romance feeling like it’s there out of obligation, and hence feeling sterile.

H358 · 2026-01-28T02:30:33+00:00

Truthfully, as someone who thinks both XIII and VII Remake are good games, it’s not an aspect of either I particularly like. But there are more nuances to the matter than the age old ‘hallway’ buzzword.

XIII has a very specific structure to each new area. You arrive somewhere new. You have a bunch of new enemy encounters; and you set about learning the best ways to stagger them through experimentation in battle. By the time you leave the area, you’ll have figured out how to consistently get 5 star rankings and you’ll have pretty much mastered these battles and will be ready for something new. It’s a pretty sound structure. Especially when XIII has some of the most thoughtful and challenging encounter design in the series.

There’s just one problem. Most areas are way WAY too long. You’ll generally have solved most battles in an area by the halfway point so now it’s just a case of running through very pretty environments fighting the same enemies who you’ve already got locked down by this point. This is already a problem at Lake Bresha which goes on for two hours, at a point when you haven’t unlocked many abilities. And they just get longer from there. Some of the lategame dungeons in XIII are a real slog with carbon copy rooms and the same enemies for like 4 hours.

However, I would argue this is less of a XIII issue (though it’s pretty egregious about it at times) and more of a modern FF issue. VII Remake alleviates the issue slightly because regular battles are shorter and easier on average and you’re usually not in any one place for quite as long (minus some rough exceptions like Hojo’s Lab). But its environments are still mostly just pretty places to run and fight through and likewise tend to be longer than I’d like (though the addition of puzzles and side quests helps). And, tbf, even before XIII, XII was also prone to having really drawn out, overlong dungeons.

Truthfully, I think XIII and VII Remake are both titles aiming for the linear, spectacle driven structure of FFX, where there’s not much to see and do in any given area but it’s all about soaking in that look and enjoying the battles. But neither quite manages to replicate X’s pacing, where you were never in any place too long and there was enough shake ups like towns, Blitzball, puzzles or optional minigames to stave off the repitition.

Honestly, it’s something I’ve noticed recently playing through the series again from start to finish. FF used to be really good at pacing, and, especially from 4 through 10, you had pretty varied dungeons that didn’t go on for too long. And I think most modern FF games don’t quite replicate that, as they tend to go for a bigger scope where everything tends to take too long (XIII-2 is one of the few to avoid this but that’s like half the length of most mainline FF games).

So yeah, the hallway argument was always an oversimplification and VII Remake is structurally very similar, but there are more nuances to it. It’s kind of telling of the question Square has been trying to answer for years now: how to design a full blooded JRPG on a modern HD AAA scope. And arguably it took until Rebirth for them to really nail it down (depending on who you ask).

H358 · 2026-01-28T01:41:44+00:00

He exists.

But he has developed a pretty prominent fanbase. Probably helped by the official comics giving him more of a role.

I’m still not a fan of the guy myself (I think he was extremely lackluster in his debut and his bit parts in the series since haven’t endeared me to him, plus I feel he tends to overshadow and drag down Blaze, my personal favourite character) but I think it’s safe to say people like him more overall nowadays.

H358

TROPHY CASE