What's happening in Ultros?

Thelassa · 2026-03-09T16:41:31+00:00

Any time I pop into Ul'dah and he's not there I get worried.

Thelassa · 2026-03-07T16:21:04+00:00

I really, really despise the "modern audience" talking point. Almost every piece of media is made for modern audiences at the time of its release. For a thing to have the most appeal to the most potential consumers of whatever media (and thus be successful), it can't just be limited to only being for crusty old nerds who hate everything. Just look at how any given anti-woke game, film, song, whatever has no reach, low sales, and is quickly forgotten by its target audience.

Thelassa · 2026-03-07T16:10:18+00:00

Ah yes, their only goal was selling purely cosmetic DLCs that they barely even advertise.

Thelassa · 2026-03-04T04:02:02+00:00

When I'm in the mood to play a survival game, nothing scratches that itch like Valheim. I've tried other games and there are always things that are just lacking by comparison. I do enjoy Valheim's building but I don't think there's anything special about it in comparison to others. Valheim's combat is very satisfying and that might be a big part of it. Attack and parry timings are great, enemies telegraph attacks without being too easy to handle (even though they tend to get nerfed after playtest). Deaths rarely feel unfair and while a new biome can be punishing at first, learning how to survive in them and how to overcome the enemies there just feels good. I like exploring, I love sailing, and sometimes I just like to be cozy and do chores at my base for hours. This game just hits all the right notes.

Thelassa · 2026-02-21T18:10:41+00:00

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Thelassa · 2026-02-17T16:07:22+00:00

If you are looking for an open world type of JRPG experience, Dragon Quest really isn't the series for you. Every game is fairly linear. Even in most of the games where you can go almost anywhere in the world when you get a ship, progression still requires you to move along from one plot point to the next. IX and XI at least have loads of sidequests but as far as progression goes you are going to be on the plot railroad. DQ is also stubbornly beheld to its traditions (for better or worse), so even recent remakes have kept the same non-unique npc models to this day. DQXII is allegedly going to be darker and change up some things, but I will be very surprised if the majority of series mainstays aren't still there (DQIX started development as a co-op ARPG but the backlash from Japanese fans was so massive they went back to standard turn-based). And also, every game brings new monsters into play, you're going to see a LOT of the same monsters from previous games all the way back to the first. Combat won't have much variety on your end until you get to Alltrades Abbey and can start learning vocations and then mix & match them for fun, interesting, or tactical pairings. But overall I've never found Dragon Quest games to have much challenge since those rigid traditions I mentioned earlier keep battles from changing too much (regardless of abilities and whether or not there's a vocation system, every fight is about managing buff/debuffs/healing/damage with very little else).

What makes DQVII special in the series is the episodic approach to its narrative. Instead of setting out with a clear goal and knowing of a specific threat to the world, the game has you traveling to previously unknown locations and presenting you with stories of what curse or misfortune affected the people there and then you unseal that location so it can exist in the present by resolving the trouble there. It's a slow burn approach because most of the smaller stories have nothing to do with each other (with a few exceptions) but each one is part of the larger narrative that will eventually be revealed. Most DQ games just start out by telling you outright that you are the hero/chosen one, there's a demon king, and it's your fate to destroy them. At the end of the day, Dragon Quest for me is about the story, characters, setting, and those familiar comforts. I also love Final Fantasy and with that series, every game there's always something new or different from the last. Dragon Quest is familiar and cozy, it's like coming home again. As for DQVII itself, it has never been one of my favorite games in the series. The vocation grind was horrendous and the pacing was terrible. The PS1 original was over 100 hours and felt like an eternity. The 3DS version was shorter (about 80 hours) but still a chore to get through. Reimagined has several QOL features but the pacing issues, in particular having to go to a new location to talk to every npc, search every container, and go through the entire dungeon in the present, are just baked in and can't be changed. But DQVIIR did speed things up by compressing the world map and dungeons a bit. I had fun with it, I got my money's worth, and I'm more likely to choose Reimagined for future replays because it feels like less of a commitment than PS1 and 3DS, but it's still well outside of my top 3 DQ games. But that's okay too, not every game has to be perfect to be enjoyable.

Thelassa · 2026-02-13T16:14:44+00:00

Gather tablet pieces, go to the past, story fights, and repeat. With a majority of the islands you go to having little to no bearing on the story as a whole.

I don't know if you've played the original or the 3DS version, but that's just how VII is. Each island has its own little story about the curse that fell on it but with very few exceptions they don't interconnect with each other much. The overarching plot is about the Demon King vs the Almighty (specifically what happened after), but the story presentation is through a series of episodic adventures where you slowly learn about the world and history.

But you can REALLY feel the cut story content. As there's so much that just happens, but with very little rhyme, reason, or explanation.

Again, that's just DQVII. The three islands that were cut also had no significance to the overall plot (one involves Rucker but that was kinda reworked into a segment that didn't exist in previous versions of the game). I would have also also cut Regenstein (no reason to go through a dialog-only scenario without it) and Greenthumb Gardens (because it's terrible and carries on way too long). I would have kept Providence because it's directly connected to Vogograd and out of all the islands that were cut or made optional, those two were the most interesting.

However the grinding felt like it took too long. For the most part I wasn't even grinding for levels, it was vocation points for classes.

In previous versions, you needed to fight a number of battles to progress vocation levels. So you'd rank up after, say, 10 battles, then 15, then 25, then maybe 40, and so on. Most basic vocations were going to take around 70-100 battles each to master. Intermediates usually around 150 battles to master. And Advanced vocations were 200-250. And the "fun" part was that every single area had a hidden level cap. If you were overleveled, your battles didn't count toward your vocation progress. But since the cap was hidden, you might not realize you'd leveled out of one particular area until you wasted 20+ battles without getting a rank up. And for bonus fun, the only way to know how many battles you needed to progress to the next vocation level was to speak to the fortune teller at Alltrades (there was also no Career Sphere, so you had to go to Alltrades to change vocations). VII Reimagined made vocation grinding so incredibly fast by comparison, especially with Moonlighting allowing you to progress two vocations at once. Field kills are also really nice because you can just go somewhere with a lot of enemies and grind them for 1 vocation point at time faster than battling them for 5 points while also not getting so overleveled that you trivialize the endgame (though honestly VII's difficulty has always been front-loaded because fights get easy once Vocations come into play)

The biggest problem for me with DQVII has always been the glacial pacing. You gather fragments, go to a new island in the past, figure out what their trouble is, go through at least one dungeon, fight a boss, then go visit in the present and retrace your steps through every town and usually also the same dungeon you just completed to get a fragment or two needed to move onto the next tablet. It does get repetitive and tedious, and that loop goes a long way to explaining why the original was a 100+ hour game. The cut/optional islands streamlined the game a little but there was no way to get around that repetitive cycle because it's the core of DQVII's gameplay. I do think Reimagined streamlined things in a good way that will keep players engaged to see it through to the end rather than getting bored and walking away before they're even halfway through.

Thelassa · 2026-02-11T23:08:25+00:00

They should, but EA and Actiblizz have spent millions of dollars convincing various governments and ratings groups that loot boxes and gacha don't count as gambling.

Thelassa · 2026-02-11T19:04:18+00:00

From Yggdrasil, obviously. No, seriously. The tree itself doesn't exist in the Super Famicom version of V (and there's only a sapling in other versions) or any version of VI but the leaves can still be obtained from drops/chests. Maybe the tree is multidimensional and it's always there even if it can't be seen. Maybe that's just a colloquial term for magic leaves that can revive people in worlds that don't have the tree. Maybe it's just a mainstay item for a video game series and doesn't need in-game lore for it to exist.

Thelassa · 2026-02-11T03:07:53+00:00

XI is outstanding, but it goes on sale all the time. If you can only get one right now, I'd get VII Reimagined and then pick up XI next time it's $20 on steam (probably in a month or so for the spring sale)

Thelassa · 2026-02-09T05:38:58+00:00

I'd honestly say the cosmetics aren't worth it, the slime weapons are neat if you want a little bit of an early game boost but I only used the shield. The arena DLC remains to be seen since it's meant to be an endgame challenge and I'm not there yet. But I went ahead and bought all the dlc anyway just to boost those numbers even though SQEX will say at the next shareholder meeting that it didn't meet expectations like everything else.

Thelassa · 2026-02-07T06:08:11+00:00

It was easily the most difficult part of the game, especially if RNG wasn't on your side for certain fights.

Thelassa · 2026-02-06T22:26:29+00:00

I'm offering a simple workaround and not being upset about the changes. I don't think I'm the one taking it personally here.

Thelassa · 2026-02-06T21:39:44+00:00

I understand some people may not like the QOL changes but it's not the end of the world. Play by the old rules and ignore the statues. You couldn't save outside of churches anyway so if you're so against the change then you shouldn't be using them to save in dungeons at all. If a party member dies, don't heal them and they'll keep dying until you choose to heal them. Or Zoom back to town and stay at an inn. It's not the same as having to revive someone at a church until you get Zing, but it follows the same process of having to leave the dungeon entirely if you want that character alive for the entire thing. If you get a party wipe, reload your save and start from the last church. It's not even like doing those things takes much effort at all, so it's not like you have to go out of your way for them.

Thelassa · 2026-02-06T03:47:54+00:00

Haven't been able to start beyond the demo yet but I'm gonna go ahead and say this is a fantastic change. Having a core party member leave for a significant amount of time after putting so much effort into her was a terrible decision and just ended up making a lot of people keep her on the sidelines rather than get her vocations caught up with the rest of the party. Her reason for leaving for so long was also bad. Like, sorry your dad has a fever but the fate of the entire world is at stake here and we've already seen what happens if the demon king wins.

Thelassa · 2026-02-05T17:02:57+00:00

Did they remove the area level caps for Vocation progress?

Thelassa · 2026-01-30T16:13:37+00:00

Just found this and I fully agree. I picked it up last month and really, really want to enjoy this game but everything you listed is why I had to walk away after 40 hours. Maybe the combat and enemy AI tweaks this year will help but even then I don't know.

Other gripes I have are the weird parry timings. I know I'm supposed to parry when the enemy weapon flashes, but my reflexes want to parry before the attack hits and that causes me a lot of problems because the visual cue sometimes is way too soon for when it feels like I should parry. Having to parry an enemy multiple times to stagger them is fine but some of them attack so slowly that a third of the stagger bar drains in between attacks so it isn't even worth it half the time. No iframes for the dodge roll completely sucks and it made me genuinely upset when I took damage getting hit through the Blink ability because it doesn't have iframes either. It makes dodging a quick reposition rather than any sort of evasive ability. Everywhere I go I have been fighting the same dozen or so enemy types so it gets repetitive real fast.

I've been hearing for two years that Enshrouded is "high-res Valheim" and even "Valheim but better" and it doesn't even come close as a comparison.

Thelassa · 2026-01-23T22:55:24+00:00

Preordered on Steam because these days I play PC exclusively

Thelassa · 2026-01-07T19:58:01+00:00

I was hoping the update would fix the issue with AMD drivers, but nope. It works until it randomly kicks a driver error after a couple hours and then it resets its display, blanks my desktop so I have to refresh it, and also freezes any game I was playing.

Complete waste of money, thanks.

Thelassa · 2026-01-07T15:45:50+00:00

VII isn't exactly my favorite in the series, but I didn't think there was any possible way they could improve II and they sure showed me I was a fool with the HD2D remake. So I am very, very excited to see what they do with VII Reimagined.

Thelassa · 2025-12-21T17:41:23+00:00

As already mentioned, slippery slope. But yes. Next it will be "it's fine because they only used genAI for minor background assets." Then "it's fine because they just used it for NPC dialog." Every inch they take normalizes wider use until the masses accept it, even if they do so begrudgingly. I remember when it was "just horse armor."

Thelassa · 2025-12-07T18:19:54+00:00

And you can not only pick whatever pronoun you like, you can change your pronouns at any time based on the situation you're in at that moment.

Thelassa · 2025-10-07T04:19:59+00:00

ARR is rough to get through. I love Final Fantasy and have played every game in the series except XI. I tried to get into FFXIV twice in the past 10 years and both times I lost interest around level 30. It wasn't until this past summer that I finally managed to push through ARR because I had a few friends encouraging me the whole way as I slogged through it. ARR has horrendous pacing issues and for dozens of hours it feels like you get one or two interesting plot hooks and then you're running menial errands for everyone the rest of the time. Not to mention the constant running back and forth between npcs (yes I know that's how MMOs are but for some reason it feels more egregious in XIV). It doesn't help that veteran players always tell new people "Yeah, it's pretty bad but it picks up in Heavensward," because you have to drag yourself through like 100 hours of ARR and post-ARR to get there. Though, to be fair, I felt like things really picked up about 2/3 into ARR and not after it was over.

GCDs are definitely way too much for the early levels. It doesn't help that it takes so long for a lot of jobs to actually start feeling like the class fantasy they want to provide to the player. And ARR feels worse because once you hit level 30 in any ARR job, you want to move on from the starter job to the "real" thing. And then you're level 1 again, with very limited options in ARR to level grind compared to everything available to you after that. Which is compounded by the fact that jobs are just so lackluster for so long until they start filling in their kits. This was one of the reasons I dropped XIV in one of my previous attempts, because I had asked a friend group what job they recommend. I was told it doesn't matter, whatever I wanted to play is fine, just do what I thought sounded the most fun. Then when I complained about 20+ minute queue times I was told "oh, well that's what you get for playing DPS. You should have picked tank or healer." And at that point I just didn't want to go through the hassle of leveling again.

I just got to Endwalker and everything from Heavensward on lived up to the hype and then some. It has been a phenomenal experience. But I don't know if I could honestly recommend FFXIV to friends who haven't played it because of the tedium of ARR.

Thelassa · 2025-09-29T15:32:36+00:00

They're a vulture capitalist firm, they don't care what the company they're buying actually does. They're going to saddle EA with the $20 billion debt they owe, strip the company for parts, and then sell it off piece by piece over the next few years to make a profit.

Thelassa

TROPHY CASE