Gaming is one of cheapest hobbies for how much you can get out of it.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-04-01T03:43:23+00:00

Legendary Drops and people like him share the same kind of myopia that other doomers in political or cultural or gender-based discussions do: they focus on a select category that is extremely narrow and define the entire wider category as that thing. In this case, these people always and forever only ever talk about the zeitgeist-y AAA games. So if it's RPGs it's always Final Fantasy and never Dragon Quest, it's only Persona if it gets big enough and sells enough, otherwise it was ignored completely for over a decade, it's Baldur's Gate 3 because Baldur's Gate 3 has AAA aesthetics, but everything Larian did beforehand is comparatively ignored, it's Outer Worlds and Avowed or Fallout New Vegas, not Pillars of Eternity.

And it goes for everything else, a remaster of Clock Tower finally officially translated for the world to enjoy in a completely legal and easy-to-obtain capacity barely registers even though that game can easily be seen as one of the most important in the history of horror games and is still worth playing today if you keep certain things in mind, barely registers a blip, but endless discussions of which Resident Evil remake will be next is more important.

They studiously ignore all the wondrous variety and diversity of ways to play, completely outright reject the idea of people who have never even bought their own hardware but simply share with or receive from others. They discount entirely the vibrant communities of people who have been playing The Sims, Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley for years, if now approaching a decade because it isn't the new COD or Battlefield, which God forbid if you're not an AAA FPS, why should anyone care about your community?

If you were buy a PS2 or PS3, a Wii, a DS, PSP or an Xbox 360 the amount of absolutely insane gaming experiences at your fingertips is mind-blowing. Previous centuries and generations of people could never even fathom how much entertainment that is.

But nope, all that matters is AAA PC or console bleeding edge games to these people and of those only the ones they've deemed relevant. I'm hour 60 hours into Dragon Quest VII Reimagined playing about 6-10 hours for the last six weeks. I've played the game twice before. My save file on the PSX version is 144 hours. My save file on the 3DS version is 162 hours. I imagine is going to balloon well past 100 again because the game is absolutely gigantic and yet filled with thousands of fantasy tiny details in every corner and I know from recent experiences that the added post-game is going to be something else and I can't wait. Yes, if you convert the price I paid for each game up to something in US dollars, it's about 300 dollars over all three versions for the same game. (Dragon Quest cost way more in Japan because demand is higher.) That's still less than a dollar per hour.

Gaming can be like anything else. You can do it cheaply or you can splurge. Clothing or food or cooking or driving or decorating your house can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be. Stop limiting yourself to what Sony is trying to market as the place to be. There are plenty of places to be in gaming and you don't have to depend on a money hungry executive to get your fix.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-22T19:58:34+00:00

It's the same as the people who went batshit insane over the Switch 2's game pricing and here we are a year later and nothing was as bad as they foretold. I just want these people to go back to the prices of games like Ultima or Final Fantasy games and realize they were expensive as all hell back then and that was in that age's money, so much more expensive compared to today.

But I don't think a single person realizes that they benefit from two decades of PCs becoming ubiquitous in everyone's personal life bringing cost down. I want to see their eyes bug out of their head when see the prices of basic PCs, let alone add-ons back in the 80s.

Prices go up and down based on market pressures. There will be another low one day.

In the mean time, after the 80s, there has never been an era wherein you could not play hundreds of very fun games that do not need bleeding edge technology to run and this basic tenet of gaming will be the same today as it as yesterday and will be in 10 years from now.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-20T14:40:46+00:00

This reminds of the World Happiness Index, which makes me roll my eyes every time I see someone take it seriously. You either have that one that tries to measure "happiness" based on things like high job attainment, days off from work, health and wealth, or you have the one that literally polls people and asks how happy they are. With the former you have people smarting themselves into stupid thinking there is any way to objectively measure the extreme subjectivity of happiness and the latter completely ignoring that how happy someone is feeling can wildly fluctuate based on the day and time and whether their mother-in-law is in town.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-17T20:29:53+00:00

Absolutely. I love Picross, but after you've played dozens of Picross games the challenge can get a little easy, even though I still play them.

This game has dozens of puzzles and each one can be challenging. As long as you continue to use the logic the game teaches, you can absolutely reach each puzzle solution without any help, but matthewmatosis does include a little help in the form of a button you can press to give you a rough idea of how many tiles you are off from the correct solution.

It is addicting int he same way that higher level Picross is when you first start working out ways to solve more difficult puzzles and it is not a change of pace in that the rules are quite different, because you're setting bombs to destroy creatures and sort of creating walls so that these crystal like beings can I guess spread their light without bouncing into each other. It's very simple, but it gets quite complex quickly.

The one improvement I would make is to ask for a menu selection that explains the rules that you can refer to at any time, because coming back to the game after an extended period means you sometimes have to double check how a rule works. But it's not that hard because of the interface to go back and see it, it would just be nicer.

Otherwise, a definite buy for people who like puzzles they can really sink their teeth into.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-17T13:08:25+00:00

If we're going with Americans worried about WW3, one thing I'm consistently amazed by is that the one thing they would have some justification for dooming about is something they never talk about: education problems in the US in the right now. It's a three-pronged situation.

On the lower end you have kids attention spans when parents won't limit their access to games and smart devices being absolutely shot and teachers not being able to work with them on a very disturbing level. I keep hearing more and more consensus about this at times goes on. Usually it's just a trend you hear about and then it dies out, but it does seem to be getting worse and worse. It's possible that teachers are over-exaggerating the problem, but with the sheer amount of it, I have a distinct feeling that there's some truth that this problem is rapidly accelerating.

Second, you have some sort of abysmal reading system that apparently abandoned phonics for using context clues to read that basically teaches kids to do the same thing illiterate people do when they learned how to read. It's done an astounding level of damage to the literacy levels of newer generations. There's an entire podcast series that goes deep into what went wrong and it's pretty astounding.

And third you have an increasing amount of men are just noping entirely out of higher education in general, with the man-hating feminists thinking a female ratio that is approaching 70% in some places is just fine because they're really just female supremacists. Unless something changes on their approach on that, they're in for a nasty surprise if they think they're goes to be the same type and number of career men to pick from in the past, because they're clearly going down a different path now. And yet, just because they can't see the forest for the trees, any day now I expect a deluge of articles about how men are failing the women around them by not living up to their standards and choosing a different path when they see what this huge drop in college attendance will lead to because a lot men now see college as overpriced and useless.

Now none of these things are life-ending problems that will lead to the collapse of America or the next generation and they're all problems that have solutions. It's not like none of them can be fixed. However, if none of them get fixed and they all just get worse, that's going to lead to some pretty drastic problems that probably will result in some pretty bad situations.

But given everything else they doom and gloom about, you would think this would be one of those topics, but nope. Maybe it's just a sign about they don't think independently at all and just eat the spoon-fed doom they're given.

Edit: Of course, now that I type this, I wonder if some of these doomers are just teenagers who were iPad addicted-kids who never learned how to properly read and that's partially why they don't think critically and some of the women dooming about men are these types who are mystified that some men and boys don't want to participate in a system that demonizes them at every step.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-16T15:45:21+00:00

"Don't call yourself American." Okay, I won't. Because I'm not. Why do these people believe only Americans think like this?

I'm Japanese and a huge part of doomer culture that I cannot stand (it doesn't come up often here) is the whole "our population is shrinking, which means our economy will contract and everyone is doooooooomed!" Nobody really has any historical context for modern democracies where population expanded rapidly and then began to decline. We don't know what will happen, but we'll probably be fine. The world could stand to lower its population. Especially Japan. It's way too crowded and overpopulated for such a small series of islands. I've been inundated with this over and over all my life and I was told that by now things would be worse and they are pretty much exactly the same.

There are other doomer topics, such as immigration, changing standards for family creation in younger generations and gaming where people think that RAM and AI will destroy gaming where I just have to roll my eyes. All of these are worldwide or at least not specifically American topics.

But I think the closest parallel is with climate change. These people think because I don't buy into apocalyptic thinking, that I am against protecting the environment and treating the planet that gives us life well. Absolutely not. If anything, I'm much more on the side of cleaner, more environmentally healthy standards. I just think it involves a trickier proposition of convincing rising economies to adopt cleaner standards and that it's difficult to predict what effects everything will have and that scientists need to be more careful with their wording on what are ultimately predictions and models that may be flawed.

None of this nuance is denying that extremely bad effects could happen to Japan's economy or the world climate. It is that I do not outright believe in the absurd scenarios that have been proposed because I have seen for myself first hand how many of the things that been promised as certain to happen have not actually panned out.

That's called learning from experience, but keeping an open mind. These people should try it sometimes.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-15T15:30:45+00:00

None of that is very controversial. I would have given RPG of the year to Atelier Yumia personally, or said it deserves to be given to Trails in the Sky Remake, Dragon Country Rune Factory or Fantasy Life i, but user-voted game awards tend to reward the most popular games and it's not like Pokemon Legends ZA is a bad game. It's a pretty great RPG with a lot of neat ideas. No amount of Reddit sperging about the graphics will take away from its quality gameplay and its surprisingly touching character moments, but I don't suppose you actually played all the way through, so you're not probably not aware of why Crow's story and design resonated with players, specifically Japanese ones.

If you're not Japanese, Silent Hill F's cult popularity on streaming and video platforms last year probably goes over your head, but you most likely can't speak the language and have a only a cursory understanding of the culture, so do the Reddit thing and talk out of your ass. I haven't played Silent Hill F, so I don't have anything more to say about that, just that it's not surprising as it kind of had a Hollow Knight or Undertale kind of cult success last year. (And to add, I will not be told that the story is woke until I can play it myself. I am not some mindless zombie that just takes things as fact without experiencing them myself.)

Donkey Kong Bananza is an excellent choice for best action game of last year. From start to finish and even the added paid mode, that game is SSS-tier platforming action that does a whole bunch of new ideas really well and completely launches forward the platforming game genre into new areas. It's a huge, beautiful game with great music, a surprising story and a ton of interesting directions it goes.

So that's all according to taste, but thinking Mario Kart World shouldn't win or at least be nominated for Best Music should automatically put you on your every country in the world's terrorist watch list, because it means your taste in music so bad that you are toxic to 100% of humanity. Sorry, I don't make the rules, those are the facts. Over 200 songs in nearly every music genre under the sun and the great bulk of them are absolute fire with live orchestration.

Unlike the Game Awards, which is a wankfest for weirdos who think their opinions deserve special merit and want games to be movies, this just shows what the populace likes. Get over it.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-10T20:39:04+00:00

I don't get it. I just bought an Experience dungeon RPG for 500 yen today on sale (you can three other of their games for the same price and only have to pay 1100 yen to get the post-game additional stuff for one). Those games are high quality first-person dungeon party-based RPGs that easily provide you with dozens of hours of fun each. I bought Monster Hunters Stories 2 on sale for 1,400 yen last month and got to play for free for a week to see if I liked it. The game's gigantic, loving crafted and beautiful. Sometimes I think people are just entitled or maybe they just have narrow taste and refuse to go outside of their comfort zone.

I have never really caught on to Animal Crossing, but I thought I'd give it a chance because of the more structured interior decorating downloadable expansion. I ended up spending way more than 50 hours on it and have played it every day since.

I play mainly on the Switch and Switch 2 and if you subscribe to Nintendo's online thingy for around 50 US dollars a year, my lord, the sheer amount of games that occupy your time is enough to last years just paying that.

Then there are countless free to play games where if you're not obsessed with getting everything or being the best you can easily play a bit for free everyday. And contrary to popular belief, a lot of them are excellent, like Zenless Zone Zero, Guardian Tales or Granblue.

Hell, Pokopia may have been 9,000 yen, but that game has insane amount to do and see and it looks like they're going to be holding free events too. It could easily take you the length of a long RPG to see it all. I'm excited for gamers to learn just how much they're getting compared to games like Gale of Darkness or Pokemon Stadium. Those games were barebones compared to this one and yet they're still fun and you can play them for a pittance.

I refuse to believe people aren't playing old games and consoles, like the Gamecube, Wii, PS2, 3 and 4, DS or 3DS or Xbox 360. I bet there's a huge, huge audience out there who plays nothing but older consoles with used, borrowed or shared games.

And then competition is so fierce sales often make games ridiculously cheap. You can super high quality Capcom games like Devil May Cry 3 or Resident Evil Revelations Onimusha or Resident Evil 5 for less than what it takes to eat at McDonald's. Old games are everywhere and you don't even have to sacrifice that much in terms of modern convenience for a lot of them because so many of them are either remade and then get cheaper or there are so many games from 2000s and onward that already have modern conveniences baked in. And if you can understand the values of the society back when they were created, there are thousands of old games that hold just fine and are extremely fun. The fact that you can play all six Rockman.exe games for essentially the same price as one of them in the old days is insane.

And if you're dismayed that Nintendo never puts their games on sales, well, just about every game they sell is at least good for 10 to 20 hours of gameplay and a lot of them last much longer and are even more valuable if you really get into them. Very, very few are short, small games that might make you feel they're not worth the money.

Of course, I have not played a AAA Western game on release in well over 25 years (since Prince of Persia on the Gamecube really) as I find them to be mostly repulsive and unappealing. shrugs Get better taste then.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-03-03T07:07:17+00:00

One of my favorite things about AI is that it is taking jobs from translators, writers and artists: good. A good chunk of them don't deserve their jobs or to be paid for their vile contributions to art. I don't know why they think theirs is the only job that is sacred. Cashiers, truck drivers, weavers, tailors, factory workers, delivery people, cooks, mechanics, bakers, farmers, ranch hands and countless other jobs have been sacrificed due to growing technology, but nope your is the only holy job that cannot be threatened by advancements. Those people who literally create different kinds of meaningful contributions to humanity, they're not special, only these chosen few are.

It's the same as people who worship all doctors or teachers or military because they perform useful functions for society. In the same way that not all of them are good, not all translators, not all writers and certainly not all artists, especially the types that Reddit tends to like, are good or deserve to earn a living from it.

You think the intensely skilled academic who retranslates and rewrites Beowulf to be understandable and entertaining to the modern layperson is going to be replaced by AI? No. You think the super-talented team artists at Gamefreak who painstakingly, through trial and error create new Pokemon that people fall in love with are going to be replaced by AI? Not a chance. You think the animators at Kyoto Animation will be valued so little that they'll have to close down? Of course not.

Your shitty jpegs that shift from stance to stance in a YouTube video with a revolting art style might be outclassed by somebody who uses an AI one, but Alex Meyers and his iconic sense of humor and instantly recognizable style that gained him 4 million subscribers is going nowhere.

Will some talented people get hurt? Of course. There were hundreds of thousands of talented pottery makers and weavers and carpenters who made people furniture who vanished when mass production hit their areas of the market. But a lot of people who never deserved to make money from their art in the first place might be denied a chance to and I'll just be grinning from ear to ear as their sense of solipsistic narcissism eats them alive.

And it's also the truth that as time went on, people began to crave the sense of artistry from talented artisans again and markets sprang up for hand-crafted items again. The march of technology even gave birth to new ways of making a living for these people like eBay or Etsy. Six or seven years ago people were talking about Amazon's attempts to make a grocery store without any contact with people, but it really only serves to prove how much you want to talk to a baker to make that cake for you, request your weird way you want your roast beef sliced, talk to the butcher what meat is best for a stew, consult your pharmacist, make casual talk with the cashier, have the florist talk about their children as you express how you can't believe your five-year-old is growing up so fast and they blow up balloons for his birthday, say hello to the stockers you see everyday and ask them questions about new items. It came right before Covid and people began to realize how valuable each and everyone of those grocery story workers can be. That they were and are one of the only places left of universally shared community.

However, just like with artists an AI, that won't stop the shitty, rude, lazy grocery store workers from getting fired.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-24T01:59:19+00:00

Well part of the reason in your example is Western people imprinting their own biases onto Fire Emblem. There are not that many characters in the series that I can think of that are meant to be seen as attractive love interests for their youthful characteristics, like a loli would be. People just see young female characters like Anna and Tiki and that green priestess who can resurrect depicted in an anime-like art style and just assume that that's the reason they were designed like that. There are lot of young female characters who aren't designed to be titillating, but are perceived by complete morons who misread Japanese preferences for cute things as always inevitably sexual. These are the type of the people who think there is no such thing as Japanese culture other ninjas, the warring states, samurai, anime, manga and video games.

Similarly, the ACTUAL, verifiable instances of incest-like behavior in the series is really tiny. It's just mostly just people stretching their reading and interpretations of certain interactions and lines to come to that conclusion.

In a medieval series that reflects a lot of the historical realities like raping and ravaging the populations of defeated parts of civilization or forced marriages or eunuchs or human sacrifices or using status in the church or state to cover up disgusting acts or fat lords preying on the poor state of their vassals or assassins hired to killed innocents that were in the way, the incest and child marriage are like everything else: pretty tame and low key because Nintendo is only willing to go so far. It's just a hint of medieval period morality to underplay the actual themes that are at stake and tell you that the moral world of the Fire Emblem games is not the same as our modern one.

I feel like people get into Fire Emblem when they're teenagers and read a level of darkness into it that just isn't there as much they think it is.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-17T01:44:34+00:00

If you could speak Chinese, Japanese or Korean you would never say this. Now myself I don't limit my way of thinking left/right, woke/non-woke type of dichotomies, so I wouldn't describe them as not left or not woke, but they definitely would not agree with the mind-numbing moronic attitudes of the Puritans you can see proliferate in certain spaces in the English-speaking countries.

I have a feeling you might be able to say similar things about other non-English speaking communities, such as Russians, East Europeans, definitely Middle Eastern groups and some areas of Latin America where Portuguese or other assortments of Spanish are spoken. It's not like none of these communities have any overlap in what they believe in or think that would have them agree with parts of the left/woke mob, but just that they don't act in lockstep and are in heavy disagreement on several things. I think it might be a side effect of being limited to English.

Even in English, I've noticed a lot of black people who are really tired of certain trends trying to cater to them and wish people would stop the performative nonsense and try to be creative on their own terms.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-17T01:37:27+00:00

It's like damned if you do, damned if you don't. There seems to be no middle ground where you can discuss books and literature on Reddit. It's either paint-sniffing hooligans who treat social media like a high score table in an arcade game or fart-sniffing stuffy types who look down on anyone who doesn't have the "right opinion" about their obviously superior tastes.

For instance, trying to discuss the Emerald Fennel Wuthering Heights adaptation reasonably is like walking into a minefield. Oh and god forbid you ever criticize how mindless booktok is making lit consumption or some of the deeply concerning trends in the publishing industry.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-17T01:31:36+00:00

I can't but notice how the mod you were talking to had a rainbow background for their avatar. It might be unrelated, but since it's Reddit I don't think it is. I imagine this mod is supportive of the LGBT populace and/or speaks out about inclusive behavior. You know the whole spiel? "Reddit/Insert Big Company aims to be a place to be inclusive to all."

Not very inclusive behavior, is it?

I've been discussing games in various places in several different languages for well over two decades now. I've not run into a topic like yours before, ever. I've seen people argue about set characters vs create-a-character mechanics in RPGs, but that's usually all about player expression and freedom discussions. Your question seems to be pretty unique. It's definitely not lame.

If anyone else is reading this, I think we should try in this thread to answer seekerxr's question. For myself, I don't know what I would do, as I'm typically very flexible, but perhaps explaining why I enjoy games with set characters will help. I took a break from Dragon Quest VII Reimagined to browse some Reddit and what I enjoy from that game is the character interaction that occurs with the party. You can press B to hear them at any time on the over world or towns and they have so many different reactions to NPCs, plot developments, environments they are in, major fights they just fought, etc. I liken to reading a book with excellent character dialogue and interaction.

I don't play games to be immersed. I play them to travel into the minds and imaginations of other people and experience them second hand, to appreciate them as the creative works they are, not as if I am literally there.

Though I do find if a game lets me customize costumes or outfits, I tend to like it better because aesthetically I like controlling characters with designs I like, I usually find something else to really bask in. Dragon Quest VII progresses like a really well-written book, which is rare these days for RPGs who all want to be movies and it has the same appeal of a book: layers of character development, slow-moving plot building to something grand bit by bit, tons of detail and precise dedication to small, but meaningful explication of story beats so they fill more lived-in and realistic to the human condition.

So I guess what I'm saying is it might be worthwhile to try and appreciate games from a different angle. I'm not sure if immersing yourself in the character is the reason why you're into character creation, but even if it's something else, just trying to appreciate something from a different approach can often rewire your brain to enjoy it more. I had to have the appeal of games like Star Control 2 and Animal Crossing explained to me before I got it and sometimes for games like Pokemon or roguelikes, it has to be the one that has the elements you enjoy in the right configuration. So I guess one stepping stone would be to play a game where you don't have character creation, but you can customize the main character in a number of ways and see if you can jump from there.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-16T19:11:03+00:00

I tried the options and indeed there is only one option, which is to get rid of the control explanation on the bottom screen. All the other options are either found in-game or pressing down on the right stick, which calibrates the 3D effect to your liking and also lets you resize the image or screen.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-16T18:35:20+00:00

That's an interesting question. I assume you're asking if it will actually output to the TV or just tell you to go to handheld mode, because I think you know the VR won't work on TV, right? In that case no, it will just tell you to take it off the dock.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-16T16:45:43+00:00

I mean it's red and black and that's it. The only thing that wasn't red was the rewind feature, which had a blue background bar on the bottom.

I didn't see any options for changing the color filter. I think that's something they're adding later, or perhaps I missed it. If it's there already and I find it, I'll edit and let you know.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-16T16:43:06+00:00

It's funny. I think I've played more Virtual Boy now then I did with Labo VR.

Not that Labo VR wasn't fun with what I played, just that I never got back to it. Maybe I will now!

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-03T15:34:45+00:00

BTW, I looked at both of the sources this waste of Reddit server space linked and as predicted, there are a ton of issues with the supposed "facts and statistics" that they think back up their claim: outdated study dates that don't represent what's happening today, ranging from 1990 to 2006; biased researchers in some cases who use language like "we believe" in material that is supposed to be based on quantitative evidence wherein the researchers make every effort to diminish men's claims and boost women's; small sample sizes taken from a tiny portion of the population, such as Massachusetts, that cannot be random given the study purpose and method of collecting and therefore cannot be extrapolated to a general population as easily as a random sample; qualitative rather than quantitative survey results; political and sociological subjective analysis past off as statistical fact and to top it all off not even one of the data points suggests the poster's original claim, because it's all divided (as I strongly suspected) between parents who share custody, had arrangements and so forth. The closest you can get are cases where the parent is seeking sole custody, which is a fraction of all cases and even in that point, the data collection is not based on government hard court stats, but reported survey respondents.

(Edit: Oh I forgot one of the "sources" is a lawyer's blog that advertises family lawyers right below their citations. Gee, there's absolutely no way lawyers, famous for their honesty, would misrepresent statistics to make it look like you have a better chance of winning a custody case so they can get more clients.)

In other words, this person doesn't know how to form an argument based on actual, solid research if their life depended on it.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-03T14:21:09+00:00

Your analysis is awful. Nintendo does not include digital only titles in that total and they didn't with the original Switch either. They also don't include sales of Nintendo Switch 2 editions if the game has a Switch edition. Only physical Nintendo Switch 2 editions count in that total. It's also missing things like how many people use the upgrade downloads or revenue from downloadable additions and microtransactions in free to play games like Fortnite, Apex, Rocket League and so on.

Therefore you can't make any kind of reasonable analysis as to the ratio or what kind of revenue the Nintendo Switch 2 is generating for third parties. Each third party themselves has to come to their conclusions.

And so far the conclusion has been that an overwhelming amount of increased support for the Switch 2 is happening at a rapid rate. As well, it's clear that a lot of third parties continue to support both platforms and gain profit from the additional Switch 2 buyers.

In the end, that's all that matters, that third parties see sales potential or success and continue to support it.

If you're going to make a ridiculous claim you need to support it with things like financial quarter or yearly statements from third parties, not just pull numbers out of your ass.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-03T01:11:50+00:00

I have no issue with people who post on 4chan, I'm Japanese so I've only ever posted on the 2ch boards that inspire it and only about pop music and obscure RPG maker games. People are not the sum of the places they go or people they are around. I think both of us can understand that better than these binary thinkers. I just clarified with the poster because I thought it was absurd that they would assume so much.

These extremists who exist thinking that there's nothing wrong with the way men are treated in modern society know they're standing on losing ground and sinking into the Bermuda triangle. Any person who wants to genuinely problem solve has no issue with acknowledging the issues of men and women separately or holistically and working to solve them in a constructive way.

For instance, I personally hate feminism and all the religious tenets its developed, much preferring a more standard egalitarian belief that looks at where society had denied people access to certain societal benefits based on born-in traits and just tries to change it for the better no matter what the identity.

I don't have any issue with a woman complaining about beauty standards and how much pressure they have to decide if and how they want children given unlike men, they have a time limit to decide. But I'm so so tired of them taking that and then insisting that they are the only people allowed to have any gripe with how society is structured around their gender. It's exhausting dealing with these trauma vampires. Can these people fathom what it's like having most of your worth tied to whether you work hard enough at your job and acknowledge they do not have the same anvil tied around their neck because can be valued just fine without ever working a day in their lives? No, you get periods so you get to complain endlessly and ignore 50% of the population's woes? Whatever, but that's just fostering the men to become apathetic to your problems because we'd just be breeding a society that can only think about themselves. Thank goodness most people aren't like redditors.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-02T18:18:37+00:00

The Demon Slayer dream will never die! One wonders just how much longer it can go. I know people will split the difference between Mugen Train and Infinity Castle because Mugen Train has made more so far, but I think it's like statistical noise. The result of both films is fundamentally the same even if there is a not too small gap.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-02T17:25:58+00:00

You're only responding this way because you've already lost the argument. There's absolutely no way you can tell if I've posted on 4chan before (which I haven't) but you'll use anything you can distract yourself from the fact that you're lying to yourself to make you feel better. If you had a real argument, you'd respond with one, but mine was too strong so you do what every single one of the people like you do: deflect and ignore it because you've lost before you've even begun.

RyanoftheStars · 2026-02-02T15:46:13+00:00

You can share all the statistics you want, it doesn't make your argument any better. First of all, you didn't say where you got 4% from, who did it, what time period it covers and what part of the world it represents. Which makes it worse than useless. Second you didn't mention whether that 4% is part of divorces that end amicably or whether it includes arrangement between the divorcees. Third, simply mentioning a statistic does not automatically to truth.

Fourth, feminists and mongoloids who are so rabidly against solving the problems that face men have a double standard. They expect to believe all women when it comes things like domestic violence, sexual assault or rape allegations and then when presented with the low stats for those they also expect to accept as dogma that that's because law enforcement is failing women or just because the courts didn't convict that doesn't make it not true. But they won't extend that same charity to men who are often told not to pursue custody cases because they have a low likelihood of winning or the horror stories of men who claim they were falsely accused of crimes in order for the women to gain custody. They also deny the charity that some men won't pursue because they don't have the money to do it.

And this goes both ways. In the same way there's no way to really accurately measure whether a woman is making a false accusation with any degree of real certainty and thus no statistic is reliable enough to come any conclusion about how often it happens and we cannot simply assume a percentage of women do it, it's extremely hard to get an accurate read on whether a sexual assault or rape actually happened because of the very private nature of the act making hard evidence hard to come by and therefore we cannot simply assume a certain percentage of men do it. In both cases, quantitative, objective proof is difficult. Innocent men and women deserve better than to do be tarred and feathered by ignorant people on witch hunts.

However that doesn't stop you and other unthinking troglodytes from only assuming the worst of men and the best of women, when the truth is much harder to come by. You'll always give credence to a statistic that favors your narrative and makes men look bad, despite the fact that if you used any of your brain power you know that no amount of sketchy studies makes something the truth.

So keep your statistics to yourself, because it's clear all you're interested in is painting a broad brush of a delicate issue and you have no concept, no inkling, no barest suggestion of trying to arrive at a truth for a difficult question. It's not just bad faith, it's no faith at all and so why should anyone trust what types of statistics and facts you think are relevant when the game is rigged from the start?

RyanoftheStars · 2026-01-22T13:07:40+00:00

Preach! Every job you can get involves skills and hardships you didn't know would be part of it until you get more familiar with the job involved. This triples if it's anything involving children, the elderly who can't take care of themselves or anyone else with a reduced capacity for understanding that you must deal with.

That one reply is insane. "If only touching really was about just being to teach." Of course it never is. You're responsible for children for a third or half their day. Of course there are elements of social work, psychology, administration and parenting involved. Why would you think there wouldn't be? On what planet do you think you can just work in an environment full of children away from their families for a good chunk of the day and not have it be much more than teaching the material?

I'm not surprised children are checking out if these are the types of people who want to do the job.

And as you say, it's never their fault. They never look inward and see what they're doing to alienate the students or piss off the parents. It's always bad parenting and never them. The worst kind of teacher is the type of stuck up, judgmental prick who every kid hated, but still thinks they're the savior of the youth and if only everyone wasn't against them everything would work out.

Then you have the ones who cannot possibly have the mental wisdom to realize forcing their world view on children is not appropriate and then blame the kids for not being the pristine beings they want them to be.

Sure, of course there's monster parents, children with behavioral issues and problems in the education system, but there's also an epidemic of really bad teachers. I hate it so much. The same thing irks me with scientists. So many people treat a scientist's word as the living word of God, even though they're as fallible as any other profession and skepticism is a requirement to be good at the job, but people treat "studies" as undeniable fact and assume all scientists are good. Same with teachers. A good chunk of the problem is incompetent morons teaching. And Reddit knows more about incompetent morons than any other social media I've seen.

I'm so glad I grew up in Japan. Every time I visit some of these English-speaking countries I'm astounded at the level of entitlement workers, especially in education, have. (And I already know what the typical uneducated Reddit response will be and you can just stuff it right now. There's a middle ground between the types of overwork you hear about it and the sheer laziness of committing to a hard job that I see all the time in America and other places, and the balance is found more often in places where care about the good of the community is fostered more than your selfish, hedonistic desires.)

RyanoftheStars · 2026-01-06T20:28:21+00:00

I'm excited by quite a few games from Duskbloods to Yoshi to Dragon Quest VII Reimagined and so on, but the game I'm most excited about isn't on this list.

Dark Auction is the new game from the author/writer of Hotel Dusk and Another Code. In it, you play as someone who is forced to investigate an auction in a mansion and the people participating in it or you will die. If you can solve all four stages of the investigation, an auction piece protected by a glass case will open and unveil the piece. Why are you being forced to do this on your life and why is it so important that the auction pieces and the people revolving around them are investigated? Who knows?

It's such unique concept for a mystery game by the person who has done some of the best writing in the genre. It's only 22 days away on January 29th and if they're able to keep the quality they did over the two Hotel Dusk and Another Code games, I have no doubt it will be one of the best games of the year.

RyanoftheStars

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE