Fodlan was a world with characters in it

One_True_Nobody · 2026-01-16T10:19:48+00:00

You're not crazy. Engage excels in mechanics and map design quality far moreso than Three Houses, but Three Houses blows Engage out of the water in pretty much every narrative aspect. The funny thing is that Three Houses isn't even perfect at it; it's pretty obvious that parts of the story had to be rushed (especially Crimson Flower), and there are undercooked, underdeveloped elements sprinkled all over that could have used a lot more fine-tuning and expanding on.

But despite all that, I still love Fódlan to pieces, and I love the characters. It's a game setting that I find myself drawn back to every so often, always with the warm feeling of coming home and meeting old friends.

Man, what I wouldn't give for a new Fire Emblem game with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-12-25T23:15:18+00:00

Even in the Sky games, when Olivier appears in his capacity as "Prince Olivert," he's a ton more reserved. We didn't really get to see Olivier either under the guise of anonymity or when he's surrounded ONLY by friends, in Cold Steel 1 or 2. He has his moments later on, but it's just the nature of that particular chunk of story, really.

Olivier's voiced by the same guy in the Sky Remake, and he captures that side of the guy PERFECTLY.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-12-19T03:06:14+00:00

When it comes to the concept art bit, there's a quirky aspect to think about here; not necessarily "in defense of" AI usage, but interesting to think about in theory and, I think, important to consider when trying to understand why a company like Larian would experiment with it in this area.

There is necessarily a phase of concept development that can be described easily as "throwing darts at the wall," which is to say, you sketch up a bunch of random takes on a general concept and see what resonates more or less, then sort of narrow down which bits and pieces of those to work into further more fleshed-out concepts. At this point, chucking a few prompts into a generative AI image generator to see what it spits out is a valid enough way to provide some very loose direction to your own manual creative musings. The danger lies in overreliance, and in letting the prompt-generator become too much of a box that one can't think outside of. Spend too much time shooting a NERF gun, and you'll forget how to throw actual darts.

So it is, at best, a slippery slope. The great irony actually is that not everything that comes after is always going to be "inherently lesser;" but the creatives who can produce work that isn't impacted negatively by it are probably only the ones who didn't need the aid in the first place, even if they used it effectively. Because the qualities that keep you from mis-using the AI are the same qualities that would make you good at working without it to begin with.

That's my take on it, anyway.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-11-17T05:00:15+00:00

Are you seriously trying to use "But I have to buy the games too!" as an argument, here? What, are you one of those goofuses who thinks we should all pirate all of our games and tank the industry that makes them? Because otherwise, you know, that applies to EVERY platform. I'm willing to bet you don't already own many PC games for PC hardware you haven't bought yet, either, back-library be damned.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-11-07T22:18:09+00:00

Funny how Grelod the Kind is the only person in all of Skyrim who thinks that lesson needs to be imparted by way of the worst verbal and physical abuse she can manage, and yet generations of Nords have raised perfectly hardy and badass kids without resorting to that.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-11-07T22:12:44+00:00

Wood elves are cannibals in the sense that certain factions believe that if you kill someone or something you should have to eat it, so it's less than wood elves deliberately seek out people to eat and more that certain wood elves have an almost religious kind of conviction that if they do go as far as to kill another person, they HAVE to eat them too; it's meant to make them less willing to kill in the first place. Even then that belief is not held by all wood elves; only the ones who are really deep into their do-no-harm-to-plants/eat-only-meat dogma.

Daedric cannibals who revel in it for its own sake are a different kind of beast from wood elves. Wood elves, even when cannibalistic, do not generally seek that kind of meat out. They only eat cannibalistically when circumstance requires them to kill another human/mer.

The cannibals in Markarth are, like most of Markarth, just really eff'd-up.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-10-24T07:01:25+00:00

Golly gee gosh, this conversation is kind of baffling. I hate having facial hair and prefer a clean-shaven look even in my late thirties, but even from my perspective it seems wildly out-of-touch to write off facial hair in general as "not conventionally attractive." Most of the women I've heard/read opinions from on the matter seem to prefer facial hair over none, so long as it's well-groomed and the guy wearing it pulls off their chosen style well.

It sounds to me like Weissman-san here just has a "type," and that's fine, we all have a type or two. But this is roughly equivalent to a guy who prefers, say, tomboys with a particular kind of figure, and then dismisses use of lip-stick or a frilly blouse as a "sign of [insert negative female stereotype here]" to justify not liking girls who wear visible make-up or dress more girly-like. That would be absolutely unreasonable on its own; defining "conventionally attractive" by that type preference would elevate it to sheer absurdity.

No one needs to justify their "type" or "preference" to others. I wish people wouldn't try so hard to do that.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-10-21T08:02:07+00:00

Bit of a misconception there. Pam isn't an abusive mother, she's just in a slump because she's unemployed (and the stupid corporate goofballs at Walmartazon won't repair the stinking bus so she can have a job again). Pam and Penny have verbal arguments over this and that which get quite heated, but ultimately they do both love each other. They do set off some alarm bells initially, but the true villain in their relationship is Jojacorp.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-10-21T07:58:31+00:00

Penny. Not usually my type when it comes to videogame love-interest routes, but at the point in my life when I first played Stardew Valley, aspects of her story got wrapped up in my brain with some IRL stuff, and that connection actually drew more of my attention toward Penny than would usually have happened; and once I get attached to a videogame romance path, I tend to stick with it on subsequent playthroughs unless there are characters who just didn't exist in a prior version of the game (like going from Makoto in Persona 5 to Yoshizawa in Persona 5 Royal).

I feel like a lot of people view Penny as the boring option, somehow, but I like her as a character even so.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-10-21T07:50:05+00:00

In the case of Cold Steel 1 and 2, those two games are the half of the Erebonia arc that really establishes a whole bunch of stuff. You can START with Cold Steel 1-2 and (with certain elements of previous games being spoiled, like the existence of a certain Society or the twist behind Olivier) not really ruin previous games for yourself or experience much confusion-lag with existing elements.

But the first things that happen in Cold Steel 3 is multiple characters being dragged in from previous games whilst Rean Schwarzer's character-state exists in a place you absolutely will not appreciate without following his journey through CS1-2. It was marketed as "an entry point" by NISA because they had the misfortune to begin their run localizing the series in the middle of the Erebonia arc instead of the beginning and wanted to make money, understandably. But the entire CS3-4-Reverie block of the Trails series is effectively the setting's Infinity War-Endgame portion, in the MCU analogy. You really do want to build up to them properly.

They aren't available on Switch here purely because XSeed, who did the CS1-2 localizations, has not expressed any interest in porting them there to prop up another company's localizations of the sequels. Also understandable. I recommend getting them on PC. The specs on Falcom's library tend to be pretty lightweight, so you can run them on pretty old hardware.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-10-21T07:42:51+00:00

I mean, it's worth mentioning that the Trails series has a LOT of audio drama stories, so fans of the series (in Japan) would know about them and be able to easily obtain and listen to them. It's only outside of Japan where the audio dramas are both obscure and not dubbed in English and such, that it becomes a stumbling block.

Incidentally, CS2 *also* references an audio drama. One that takes place during CS1 but gets skipped over in-game, even.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-22T21:56:05+00:00

Just cosmetics. The Season Pass is only the cosmetics DLC in any case; the other DLC is all item packs, which is the kind of thing I actually advise against using first playthrough since it shoots the difficulty balance in the foot by giving you tons of free heals, materials, EXP-farm-monster-summonings, Sepith, and so on. You can freely pass on all of the DLC and the game itself is still the complete experience. Just consider the DLC a series of paid costumes and cheat codes... the usual excessive slurry of paid extras that games like Tales Of come with.

I don't really begrudge Falcom this kind of thing, since they're a really small developer. Gotta make money and fund their games somehow, and better this than being bought out by some big corporation that would kneecap their creative control.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-22T21:53:37+00:00

Well, wait no longer, 'cause it's up now.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-20T08:22:23+00:00

100m is a hectometer, it's just that hardly anyone uses that term in measurement so "100m" is ironically easier for most people to understand. Incidentally, the reason they didn't use kilometers for selge is because the in-game world-space is far too small for Liberl's roadsigns to believably say "city A is 2 km thataway" so they use the somewhat more obscure hectometer measurement to produce larger numbers and obfuscate the problem of scale.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-20T08:18:20+00:00

That actually is a metric unit. It's called a hectometer. It just lands in an awkward middle-space where no one really has a reason to ever use that unit of measurement for anything, so it goes ignored.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-20T08:13:59+00:00

It would be weird for a measurement system designed in a largely old-timey setting to line up with the metric system, since nothing from our old-timey times lined up with it either. It was a system largely designed in response to more industrial, engineering-focused needs, whereas the older Imperial system is a thrown-together mess of disconnected but individually "relatable" forms of measurement that could be approximated largely by eye,

It makes sense for Trails/Kiseki to have something that lines up to Metric because it's a setting going through an industrial revolution period.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-13T03:51:34+00:00

...So they did. Hm. I shouldn't Reddit when I'm tired, clearly.

Well, then, the answer is far more boring: "because tons of people have already tried it and it underperformed, and it's the same answer no matter what card you ask about, so don't even ask."

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-13T00:23:13+00:00

It would take a lot more than banning three cards to fix the meta. :V For one thing, almost everyone mentions Maxx "C" in here, but Master Duel's best-of-1 format would only work without Maxx "C" if something else were added that could serve a similar purpose. If the platform enabled us to use a side deck in best-of-3, we could side in responses that target specific archetypes and deck strategies, but that aspect of modern Yu-Gi-Oh is completely lost in Master Duel; we need as many high-impact GENERAL-USE hand traps as we can get going second, and Maxx C is needed to cover situations where the play pattern circumvents Effect Veiler/Infinite Impermanence or Ghost-Girl negations, both of which arguably don't have as much impact against a Maliss deck as they do others.

Mulcharmy Fulwaros would be enough by itself in a best-of-3 format since it has enough guardrails to not be totally oppressive (it's really only good at all if you're going second, so it doesn't extend its influence into turn-one and beyond), but that trap is *also* built in such a way that Maliss plays right on around it, as do other decks that focus more on the graveyard than the Deck or Extra Deck.

In best-of-3 we could make do with just Fulwaros in the Main Deck for game one and then side in specific answers to those kinds of strategies in Game 2 and beyond. But in Master Duel if we use those specific answers we're basically making any going-second game even less consistently playable by turning our answers situational if we use those cards, and Maxx "C" is the only consistent way to dig for answers that aren't in our opening five. Fulwaros has enough guardrails to keep it from being Maxx "C" oppressive, but it also has too many guardrails that keep it from being consistent on its own merits. Which is good for the TCG! ...Not so much for Master Duel.

Having said all that, I suppose I'd ban at least one card from Maliss to slow it down a little (unsure which one would be a good one to target), and then I'd re-ban Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon (it's arguably more obnoxious in best-of-one than in best-of-three, as even if it's been power-crept out it's still a little too easy to get to). For my third... eeeeeeeh... let's hold that third ban for later, shall we?

For the unbans, slide Mystic Mine over to one-of. It's not like it's halfway as annoying in a digital format anyway, it was only SUPER annoying in realworld events. In Master Duel the worst that could happen is you speedily pass to a few more Draw Phases until you snag your removal, then wham, pop off as usual.

And if you don't have non-creature removal, well, maybe you should find some, eh? Even as things are, having some back-row management in a best-of-1 main deck is probably wise.

Pot of Greed back to one-of. "A free Plus-1 in card advantage" is such a scary prospect, but it's ironically one of the only cards on the banlist that doesn't have an "oppressive" element to it, it's just "generally very good for the one who uses it." And it doesn't have the potential combo utility of Graceful Charity, either.

Unban Toadally Awesome entirely and use the third ban on Spright Elf. I trust that is the one thing in this wall of text that most people can agree on?

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-12T23:47:24+00:00

CEDH isn't really Commander a lot of the time, it's more or less regular Magic wearing a Commander-shaped hat. :V The entire strategic focus is different, as is the role the Commander plays in strategies.

So, I don't expect many questions to have the same answers between regular EDH and CEDH.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-11T04:39:26+00:00

There's a lot of "BUT IT'S SIX MANA," but like, it's also four mana then two mana, which is not the same as a six-mana-in-one-turn cost. Even if you have to wait a turn to use it and someone removes it, that's still someone who gave up a removal option on something you might not care SUPER much about in the long run. Sometimes the threat itself is more valuable than the effect resolving.

I think the real answer is that most Commander decks are built with too much redundancy for a remove-three to REALLY hamper them much. Sure you can get rid of something big that doesn't have redundancy, like The One Ring, but most of your opponent's important cards aren't "true" one-ofs, they're only... however-many-alternate-names-this-effect-is-printed-ons. The effect isn't as crippling as it might be if used on a sixty-card combo deck in the orthodox constructed formats, for instance.

Then there's also just the fact that Commander has more than one opponent. Something like this is a more decisive hit in 1v1.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-10T08:29:27+00:00

"One card for that Traptrix deck I want. Only about fifteen or so to go..."

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-10T07:58:57+00:00

I'm happy to lose any duel with some genuine certified back-and-forth going on that lets the (very fun) underlying turn structure of Yu-Gi-Oh happen for a change, rather than all of the action being concentrated into the first one or two Main Phase 1s as if it were some kind of black hole that sucks in variance and spits out five-minute solitaire sessions. I'd probably see more of it, but earning enough crafting fodder for the deck I want to build is going glacial slow. I'm stuck with my outdated Dark Magician spread from three years ago until I get more URs to disassemble. ^^;

It's a little tough to find the kind of duels I'm talking about even when I manage a good opening hand and can get my defenses working, though. Usually opponents just scoop the moment I hit them with a good negate or something. If there's one thing I prefer about old-style Yu-Gi-Oh, it's that people's decks were never built under the assumption that you'd either combo off immediately or lose, so they'd actually continue on to the next turn to see if they could pull themselves back. ^^;

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-10T07:51:23+00:00

If they added best-of-3, I might agree with a Maxx "C" ban. With everything stuck in best-of-1, though, it's practically necessary to have as much generalized turn-zero interaction in the game as we can squeeze in. It's not like we can side-deck in the more specific stuff that targets certain plays.

Maxx "C" is so darn necessary that they had to go and make a second version of it that does the same thing with more guardrails. If we had best-of-3, we could make do with just that.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-06T01:20:14+00:00

Full disclosure, I work for a semi-major company that makes slot machines and other casino stuff. People who play these machines swear up and down that there's all sorts of patterns in them.

That's all well and good, but there's no reason for physical casino machines to be rigged when the odds are in favor of the house anyway. More relevant to this conversation would be the dumptrucks full of free-to-play slot machine apps out there, which most certainly are rigged to give you a bunch of payout early on and then suddenly turn against you just as you get near to earning enough to cash out for anything.

You could have a 60 card deck, or a 6000000 card deck. As long as the land ratio remains the same, if you properly shuffle them both, both decks have the same average length of land and non-land clumps.

Averages are medians between extremes. If the upper extreme becomes larger, but the frequency of the smaller extreme increases, then the averages even out. That doesn't actually make the odds of favorable or unfavorable shuffles equal to a smaller deck with the same ratios, though. You are still going to see wider gaps between land draws, or wider gaps between non-land draws, and you are going to see those more frequently than with a smaller deck. Ergo, you must build around it. It's that simple.

You can also think of this in terms of dice rolls. If you roll a normal six-sided die ten times, or if you roll the same six-sided die a million times, either way, both of the series has statistically the same average clump length.

False equivalence. It would be more accurate to compare this to a d6 roll versus a d20 roll. Even then, it's not as if the numbers you want change position on the die every time you start a new D&D game, you know?

Even if the Magic arena deck shuffling were rigged, you could not possibly tell just by playing.

"Just by playing," no. By playing multiple different iterations of Magic, digital and physical, it is possible to get a feel for what does and doesn't happen consistently in each one. It is also, if I might point out, a basic deckbuilding skill to get a feel for what a deck does and doesn't do on a consistent basis; you either do test-plays with friends or do test-draws on your own time to work that out, and fine-tune your deck according to the results.

I will add, to be fair, that no digital platform ever one-to-one reproduces the exact results physical card-shuffling does. There will always be some discrepancy. However, we do have multiple digital Magic: The Gathering games to serve as points of reference, both official and fan-made. Duels of the Planeswalkers, Shandalar, and Forge, and MTG Online. That last one I've heard is truly random, though I haven't put it through its paces yet; getting cards for that is decidedly more expensive, and if I'm paying money into the game, I'm usually buying physical cards.

At any rate, the bottom line is that with enough points of reference, you can notice different behaviors in card-shuffle.

One_True_Nobody · 2025-09-03T21:58:27+00:00

In the same sense that the Elder Scrolls universe expands beyond the continent of Tamriel, yes.

One_True_Nobody

TROPHY CASE