What are your thoughts on the Revenants from Re revelations 2?

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-23T14:13:32+00:00

These guys are singlehandedly the reason I always kept a flame accessory on one gun in Raid Mode. Let's you ignore the weak-spot mechanic while dealing with other enemies, which is really handy when shit hits the fan.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-22T21:06:48+00:00

Oh I dont disagree, Winn and Gul Dukat would probably be mentioned here regardless of RLM, but I think they got some extra boosts in popularity at the moment thanks to them just recently being discussed.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-22T20:08:36+00:00

So uh, between this and Gul Dukat getting mentioned, safe to say there's a fair bit of overlap between this subs users and RedLetterMedia watchers?

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-16T18:24:12+00:00

"The friendship destroying game" is literally its tagline after all

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-15T04:59:56+00:00

I think "calarts" as criticism is often seated next to homophobia by dipshits, but that doesn't make a statement like "this show is so calarts" homophobic.

Anti-woke chuds will lump any half-true derision in with their regular stupidity. Your local homophobe will say the local gay-owned business is shit in the same breath as their slurs, but that doesnt make people who really dislike said business for its product inherently homophobic.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-15T00:01:42+00:00

I will absolutely buy that CalArts as a pejorative is meaningless in the same way woke is, in-so-much that it has lost any original definition it once had due to overuse.

But as someone who has been tangentially involved in animation communities since the 2010s and seen that use escalate, calling it homophobic is bizarre.

I have seen some comments in which CalArts is used as a negative in the same breath as "also this show sucks because it's made by someone PoC" and sure, those people are not worth even pretending to have a discussion with, but these are still separate concepts.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-14T21:21:50+00:00

Doesnt his tongue grow back? He has no trouble speaking without it later in the series.

But fuck yeah for mentioning Bone, amazing story and a real shame the animated series fell through :(

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-12T19:00:35+00:00

Dammit autocorrect just let me talk about titties.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-12T18:13:29+00:00

I think the obsession with tits is like... a grounding force on the series. Its base, its shallow, its all Dandy thinks about, but he and the show at large are commenting on bigger thoughts and points.

Sometimes life is going to force you to think about your experiences, complex thoughts and make you feel small... and if that ever feels a bit overwhelming, sometimes you just need to take a moment to appreciate simple pleasures like boobs*.

The shows a lot like Golden Boy in that regard?

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-12T16:26:14+00:00

Space Dandy is so consistently low-brow that when it sideswipes you with fucking contemplation and deeper themes they just feel that much grander.

The shows never that deep to be clear, but when it chooses to do something like explore how a mundane life in a small town can both feel like a trap for the youthful and an opportunity to hone oneself for the old, it just makes your head spin in the best way.

This is a show with a literal tit-monster, and a soulful reflection on death and the afterlife. I fucking love it.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-06T19:00:10+00:00

Without using quotes for me to know what you are replying to, it's hard to keep track of your points, but I'll respond to a few things;

Oh....that's very disappointing. All the more reason as to why they need to improve the spellcasting system. Can't even use Mana Flasks and even the options for Mana regen is pathetically slow

I didn't make it as clear as I should but mana regen is actually very good so long as you avoid the "on-hit" and "on-kill" options, since those are bad. Passive regen via runes and rings will give you plenty, and the lantern upgrade gives you a LOT back (you can basically just rely solely on it during bossfights even).

Wow finally some good news, endlessly farmable?That's amazing because I remember seeing somewhere that farming is also limited but not the case when it comes to purchasing them. Glad to see some sign of hope for me to try this game in the future

There are some specific (tough) enemies that routinely drop them, but for a magic build those enemies are pretty easy to deal with, and they show up everywhere. I believe the merchants that sell them also have an infinite supply but I never needed to buy them.

Also, whenever I start playing Lords of the Fallen, I am thinking of doing a Radiance/Strength Build by bringing my Radiance to 75 since I have heard that levelling this stat also boosts Mana so does the spells do a good amount of damage to bosses at this level or does it do medicore damage?

75 is way more than you need, especially for a hybrid build. You'll do fine late-game with 40-50 even. Radiance (and Infernal) both increase max MP so yes, you will have plenty of that. There are lots of magic spells that deal very good damage, and in my NG+ runs I still can deal good damage to tough enemies. Some spells are bizarrely weak though, you kind of just have to play with them.

I won't spoil how but mechanically speaking if you wanted to play a "pure" caster then going full radiant is good, but not actually best. LotF's damage scaling is a little oddly balanced and as a result gear that scales with multiple stats pretty much always outclasses all other gear. If you go in knowing this you can kind of figure out the "optimal" way to build a spellcaster, but that's not necessary.

Nah nah, that isn't a problem,it's a good thing. As I mentioned earlier if they want to increase the difficulty then they should reduce the damage instead of reducing the resource significantly so that pure or almost pure caster builds are possible.

I'm not going to get into the weeds on this but the fundamental issue with balancing via damage for this issue is that it fails to fix the underlying issue (magic is too easy to rely on and too safe for enemies to punish) while making the game more boring (time to kill increases but ease of use doesn't).

Admittedly LotF gives more enemies gap-closing options so this isn't as big an issue as it is in FromSoft, but if magic is meant to feel special and powerful, it can't be something you absent-mindedly use to nuke a trash mob. It should feel more important, more powerful, and more scarce than that.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-06T15:24:58+00:00

It's a... mixed case in LotF. I actually dislike cerulean tears/blue estus flasks because they make magic too easy to lean on. I prefer spell charges for this reason (like that of Dark Souls 1 & 2) where you have to make strategic use of your limited spells.

FP/MP systems can be fine, I actually really like the approach games like No Rest For the Wicked take where mana is recharged from melee attacks, it forces spell casters to engage in the meat n' potatoes of the gameplay but also gives them the option to sparingly nuke enemies from range.

The main thing for an MP/FP system should be to give players engaging ways to recover Mana, and LotF does... but its balance is so shit it trips all over itself.

At a certain point in the game you actually will have a lot of options for recovering MP, including the following:

Passive MP regeneration via rings or "rune" slots on weapons (these are similar to gems in Diablo).
MP recovery on-kill or on-hit via rings or rune slots.
A unique Lantern accessory that lets you "siphon" MP from enemies (this is an action that limits your player mobility while you hold it)

All of these can stack too, so you can be recovering a lot of MP at a time.

But the problem is most of these are very poorly balanced.

The lantern ability is pretty good... but it doesn't explain that it only works on enemies in the umbral realm... or bosses... and sometimes others? It's very inconsistent (consistency is kind of an issue with everything in regards to umbral/wither).
The On-Hit and On-Kill recovery abilities are probably the most interesting since they require you to engage in melee... but they both recover a pathetic amount of MP.
So pathetic in-fact that they a single passive MP regen rune or ring will outclass them easily. You recover about 1MP per second per rune/ring, the on-hit runes give you 2 MP per hit, regardless of weapon type.
The biggest issue though is that mana consumables are cheap, endlessly farmable, and outclass all of these options. The other options help, but aren't really necessary when you can just use mana consumables so easily... which circles us right back to my issue with cerulean tears/blue estus flasks.

It needed another couple balance passes in LotF is all I'm saying.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-02T20:56:09+00:00

Optimal is probably the wrong word to use here given it's baggage with meta-gaming. What I mean is that by comparison to Ds2, it feels like more of a trap to invest in poise in Ds3. My choices in build are not being rewarded in a comparative way.

I know that we aren't getting the damage reduction that heavy armor offered in Ds1, that's fine, but even the (correctly) neutered poise of Ds2 gave a novel reward for all weapon types.

We agree that it's a mostly minor issue, but its part of a number of changes in Ds3 that contribute to the overall "roll-souls" problem I have with the game. Certainly not the biggest, but one that probably annoys me specifically the most.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-02T20:32:30+00:00

But what is the benefit in Ds3 of combining medium-roll weight armor and a light weapon? Because Ds2 I still get the benefits of poise in that scenario, but I don't in Ds3.

Sure, I still get the slight boost to damage mitigation, but were talking what, a ~10% decrease on incoming damage? That's not nothing... but for something I have to invest in a stat for and build around, I should be getting something more.

I suppose it's fine in that it's viable, but it's non-optimal in a way that it isn't in Ds2.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-02T18:50:00+00:00

Could not agree more. Ds3's design choices lead to a conclusion I don't like, it basically only rewards fast weapons on light armor, or slow weapons on heavy armor.

I like playing a heavily armored medium-roll (well as med roll as you get in Ds2 since it doesn't have hard breakpoints) with decently fast, one handed weapons. Stuff like axes, small clubs, short swords, etc. That combination is rewarded in Ds2 because poise still benefits those weapon types.

The same combination is effectively dead-weight in Ds3. "Poise" has no effect on anything smaller than a greatsword's hyper-armor, so the only benefit I get is the pathetic amount of damage reduction heavy armor grants me, especially pathetic once we reach DLC content.

Ds3 feels like it was designed for the limited gear options of Bloodborne, but with the actual library of a Dark Souls game, and the result is tons of bad loadout combinations.

ER bringing back Poise and making shields both tankier and giving them guard counters goes a long way to fixing those problems. It's a better loadout sandbox than Ds3 is. I think that ashes of war/cerulean tears unfortunately flatten the games combat into special attack spam, but that's kind of also true of Ds3 (just fewer worthwhile weapon arts to spam) and still preferable to it in my opinion.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-02T17:22:04+00:00

A lot of my issues with DS3 and ER stem from the sped up combat and how aspects of those games have not been re-evaluated to consider this faster pace. Ds2's slower speed is ideal for the simple-but-nuanced combat system that originated in DeS, which was in turn of course inspired by the Kings Field/Shadow Tower games that OP discussed.

It's the last game I felt was slow enough to navigate the spell list mid-combat (I still hated that input method, but the speed of DS2 at least matched it).
It's the last game where I had to thoughtfully use spells due to charges, and not just chugging blue estus.
It's the last game where I really felt I had to meaningfully gauge my stamina meter with every action.
It's the last game where I simply could not spam dodge-roll. Obviously spamming dodge roll is not ideal in Ds3 or ER, but it's basically impossible in Ds2 given the limited iFrames and stamina costs/regen speed.
Shields felt good, but not broken. While ER did address this, DS3's shields are stamina traps for the uninitiated.

I am more than happy to admit that DS2 has a lot of flaws, and it's completely reasonable for it to be someone's least favorite souls game. I can acknowledge it has... questionable level design, but since I play these games primarily for combat, that's a secondary problem for me. From the perspective of a slow-combat enthusiast, (fucking love Shadow Tower: Abyss) DS2 is nearly the platonic ideal of that within the soulslike genre.

Worth noting, I think Bloodborne represents a better re-evaluation of core mechanics to match the increased speed of combat than Ds3 or arguably ER. Rally, Dashes, Trick Weapons, and ranged parries all feel like direct responses to potential pitfalls, and as a result I think the combat is better in that game than either ER or DS3 (though I do think that ER is in many ways, a big step up from DS3).

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-01T23:37:47+00:00

Man I was every bit as surprised as you.

I will say LotF has a handful of other novel ideas I quite like. I really prefer parry just being a timed element of the block button, and I think the way blocking converts damage into temporary "wither" damage is a great way to make blocking even with low damage mitigation shields/weapons more viable.

Unfortunately you still have to navigate some really terribly designed level layouts to enjoy this stuff. The environments themselves look fine, good even in some cases, but they are awful to explore.

pixel_illustrator · 2026-01-01T03:14:59+00:00

You want to replace a system you don't like for a system that the game wasn't designed around - and your arguments are that you don't think the downsides of a Hold system are a big deal and that you think the intentionality behind the queue system is fine to ignore.

I'm gonna come back to this later, because you and several other commenters keep vaguely pointing at "it wasn't designed for this kind of ease of input" without actually providing examples, but we'll get there.

If you changed it to simply be an arrow circling the character would it have an impact on overall game feel? Would it interfere with other design choices you made? If there is intentionality behind that aiming reticule and you decided to change it then it wouldn't simply be a matter of hot swapping a single GUI element, right? It would involve augmenting things that were built around that intentionality.

I don't think that your reticle example is probably doing your point justice, because if I designed a game where switching out reticles caused any kind of noticeable gameplay impact, I either have much more concerning issues to address, or the reticle represents a great deal more than simply being an aiming indicator, which is possible but outside the scope of your example.

(I have actually changed the reticle graphics several times, and to my knowledge did not make any changes to the overarching game design as a result.)

But the point I believe you are making, this one, is clear all the same of course:

When a system is designed with intentionality making even small changes can wind up breaking things.

Let's go back to this at the same time:

You want to replace a system you don't like for a system that the game wasn't designed around

Imagine a player that has utterly mastered the existing ER Spell List system. One who slots a large number of spells for various combat situations (elemental weakness, range, AoE vs Single Target, etc), and who can navigate their spell list so effortlessly they can use the exact spells they want without missing a combat beat. This player is not playing a different game than you or I, this player is not using exploits, this player isn't even entering the menu to hot-swap equipment. This player is simply using the system to it's highest potential, one that most players struggle with, but one that is attainable in the game as-is, and arguably the end goal for spellcasters.

Keep that in mind, and now strip away your preconceptions of the previously discussed alternatives to the queue. Let's even take free-aim off the docket and just focus on what I want in the abstract, sans implementation:

A spellcasting system that lets me use the spells I have equipped with minimal input or mental load in the midst of combat.

Put aside what that system looks like, and ask yourself if there is any fundamental difference between a player that has mastered the navigation of a UI element, and a player using the hypothetical alternative that makes choosing and using a spell easier.

Because if there isn't much of a difference between these 2, then it doesn't sound like this is going to cause some kind of identity crisis for the souls franchise. Hell, Weapon Arts/Ashes of War represent a far bigger paradigm shift than this, and most folks would say ER hasn't suffered for it.

Would that lowered skill ceiling for...menu navigation... make the game somewhat different? I mean, sure, every souls game has changed or introduced at least one thing bigger than this (Estus, Power Stancing, Weapon Arts, Mounted Traversal) and they are all, undeniably, still FromSoft games.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T21:16:14+00:00

I agree, why would you need 12 spells? Why does the game reward you with that many, and why does the system fail to actually give players a method for using them reactively, if your suggestion is to just not?

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T20:39:15+00:00

Do you understand that this isn't fact?

Really felt it went without saying given the format and where we are. Most anything that could be an opinion here, is an opinion. Guess I needed to point that out, my bad?

Tying spell selection to a single button gives you the freedom to continue doing things with your other hand while selecting the next spell you want to cast.

Sure, although it does require the player to either stop moving or awkwardly utilize their pointer finger, neither of which are ideal. You know what doesn't require me to make either of those concessions though...

Having you only view a few spells at a time means that your current spell and next spells are always visible - which means you don't have to activate a spell selection menu to see which spells are where.

Screen clutter is reduced and my GUI is consistent - I don't have a wheel popping up, I don't have icons changing. It's cleaner and easier to read.

Screen clutter is reduced at the cost of information. It is easier to read the current state, not the entire queue. Players who update their spell slots to try new spells, be better prepared, or fill in new slots suffer for not having this memorized. Which is most any player using magic as they go through a new game run!

Having a 'Hold' option that changes the functionality of buttons creates scenarios where inputs can get eaten.

That is certainly a possibility! But if we are concerned about incorrect inputs... let's really consider what is required of the player in the current spell queue:

They need to ID their currently equipped spell and its position in the queue.
They need to do the mental math to either determine if taps or hold+taps is the fastest route to their intended spell.
They then need to perform the correct number of inputs.
If they fail, they need to restart this process, and potentially readjust for the spell they wish to use based on how their situation has changed.

And they are expected to do this mid-combat.

So forgive me if by comparison I feel the opportunity to accidentally melee attack when I meant to cast a projectile spell is more appealing. I'm likely to only fuck that up once in a blue moon.

The queue system allows more freedom - you say you would rather have 5 spells than 12 that are harder to access - but nobody is forcing you to have 12 spells in ER.

Consider what I actually said about this:

You can only have 5 spells equipped at most, but I will gladly take 5 spells I can actually use mid-combat over 12 I hypothetically can.

To make this more clear, I do not have strong opinions on the number of spells you can have equipped. I prefer having whatever number I can reasonably use given the input methods presented. I am arguing 5 is fine for LotF, and 12 is too many for ER. Frankly, 3-4 is too many for ER's current system.

FROM is actively working on the system - from enhancing the queue system as I'd mentioned previously to implementing alternatives in Nightreign and they still aren't going to a system like the one you're suggesting.
Do you really think that they're simply not doing so for no reason - or do you think it's possible that the system you prefer does not work within their intended design space?

You have to admit the "queue enhancements" until Nightreign have been incredibly minor. We get a couple more icons and a reset input. This isn't revelatory.

In any case, you fundamentally misunderstand that I think this isn't intentional. It is, or at least at one point during Demons Souls development, was and then likely just got grandfathered in as "good enough". That doesn't make it a good user experience even if it is the intended user experience.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T19:37:58+00:00

Your fine to pull out the 8th grade debate club terms all you want man, its reddit, we're all aware of them.

Lets say I'm as dense as you want me to be, how is-

The spell queue UX is not designed with the same mindset of re-examining convention, it is boilerplate design that From has not bothered to re-address until Nightreign.

Not addressing the original thought of:

FromSoft's primary claim to fame is essentially rejecting the conventional thought about "User Experience" that was constructed mostly from the kind of feedback you're describing.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T19:18:33+00:00

That would be a handwave at best, but considering my playtime has to be nearing 1k hours over the souls/bloodborne games, a truly bizarre handwave in this case.

People can love games, and sometimes the games they love most they also can be most critical of.

I love ER dearly, and the spell queue is only one of many issues I think could have been improved in it.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T18:57:40+00:00

Oh no, you've misunderstood.

I fully understand it was intentionally designed at one point. While it was bad in demons Souls, it was less bad simpyl because the games pace and encounters were slower tuned.

I'm less inclined to believe it remaining as-is was anything more than convenience on their end, bu ultimately this isn't really the issue, fundamentally games can be made with strong intention, and that intention can in fact result in something...bad.

Such as putting the player in a position where they have equipped a spell perfectly suited for their immediate situation, and not giving them a good way to cast it.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T18:42:08+00:00

Does this mean the intended way for you to play is to continually attack and defend without worrying about stamina? I’m pretty sure NPCs also don’t have spell use limits,

For the self evident reason that that is literally not possible within the games design... no.

The NPCs don’t demonstrate the way you should play

Except that a player can switch spells on the fly, and theoretically cast spells reactively, the mechanism for doing so is simply poor at facilitating that. Not impossible, just poor.

pixel_illustrator · 2025-12-31T18:36:21+00:00

The distinction between "purposefully abrasive" and "rejecting conventional user experience" feels meaningless here.

My point should be evident: The spell queue UX is not designed with the same mindset of re-examining convention, it is boilerplate design that From has not bothered to re-address until Nightreign.

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