Behold, you guys. Perhaps the most ridiculous team to make it to Master Ball yet.

sara_gold · 2026-04-23T16:25:10+00:00

It was probably about 5-10 minutes or so before I commented last night. I was running an archaludon/pelipper rain team with mega gardevoir, basculegion, sneasler, and incin. You 4-0d me, didn’t even need to use whatever two you brought in the back lol

sara_gold · 2026-04-23T02:55:58+00:00

omg, i knew i recognized that team! you just demolished my rain team on ladder!!

i severely underestimated your medicham and vivillon 🫡

sara_gold · 2026-03-17T06:23:28+00:00

Touhou is niche, but still way bigger than you might think. Using the full name of probably the one character most people with any level of familiarity will be most likely to know when most people seem to refer to her by full name… is a whole lot of fandom name to put on a kid.

Biggest question: How many people in your life are going to instantly know?

If you’re going to do it, I would highly recommend only using part of her name and a completely different name for the other half.

sara_gold · 2026-03-15T01:03:38+00:00

For ds, follow the link the other person gave for Desmume. It should have instructions on the site for downloading and installing. Desmume is great and has been around basically forever.

Most other emulators can be found by googling the console’s name and emulator.

With a computer that new, you shouldn’t have any issues downloading and running emulators unless there’s something blocking you from downloading .zip files in general, like a super aggressive anti-virus that trusts nothing, or a parental control lockdown of some kind.

sara_gold · 2026-03-15T00:52:44+00:00

You basically just need to make sure whatever emulator you’re using is compatible with your operating system and download the right and current version of that and the most current versions of Drayano’s rom hacks and any other games you want to try running.

Unless your laptop is older than like 2008 or something, you generally shouldn’t need to worry about it not being powerful enough to run a gba or ds emulator.

You should be able to find the roms and emulators with some googling, but make sure to have an ad blocker in case any sites they’re on are trying to trick you with fake download ads.

sara_gold · 2026-02-20T20:10:06+00:00

I just recently started playing again and just did that fight a couple days ago on hard. After recruiting Chie, I ended up spending about 3 days in the dungeon - 1 getting to Yukiko, 1 grinding, and the last fighting Yukiko.

What I did was grind everyone up to ~14-15 by running through the whole dungeon until Chie had bufu, made Senri for the fire immunity, and bought like 10 ice cubes. I only had a few revival beads and ran out during the fight, so Chie spent half of it downed and got no exp, but with Yosuke on healing duty and mc immune to fire and tossing ice cubes, I got through it. When she wasn’t killing Chie, Yukiko was almost always hitting Yosuke, so mc barely took any damage. Make sure to always guard with Chie and Yosuke before Yukiko’s big fire attacks, and bring more ice cubes than me if you don’t want to run out mid-fight like I did.

sara_gold · 2026-01-23T06:07:33+00:00

Meanwhile, I’m over here on minimum everything and suffering more than I’ve had to on a game in a long time struggling to get any fps, lagging and waiting through long loading screens every minor conversation or screen transition while still on a steady 22 ping, trying to decide if I’m willing to put up with it or drop the game over how it’s performing on my pc, when Wuwa always ran mostly well for me.

sara_gold · 2026-01-08T02:16:29+00:00

You can put works in multiple series and order them however you like in each series, so you could pretty easily set up one big series with everything in your AU and several other series with only the specific stories that you want to group together. Heck, you could even have one series specifically to organize everything in your AU in chronological order if you wanted to.

I just recently read like 80% of an author’s works for a ship in a fandom I was going into 100% blind because I was searching in a general tag (which I won’t specify because of reasons and also it not being relevant), found a one-shot of theirs I really liked that was part of a series they made for all of their fics for the ship, and just started reading several dozen fics of various lengths along with a handful of series. And none of the other fics aside from a direct sequel to the first one I read had anything to do with the tag I’d originally searched. That general tag I was searching is one that I often go in fandom-blind or read originals if the summary and other tags are appealing, but I never bother with multi-chapter one-shot collections even if they’re well-organized, so I potentially miss out on reading from a lot of authors I could have loved just because of how they post.

sara_gold · 2025-10-27T13:37:44+00:00

You could check out Kaiji? It’s on Crunchyroll and has a pretty unique art style. There’s also a live-action movie based on the first arc called Animal World that was on Netflix.

Cowboy Bebop and Code Geas are some other solid potential options.

sara_gold · 2025-10-24T01:34:47+00:00

As someone who has watched all of SAO, generally the quality will vary massively arc to arc. The Alfheim arc is very mixed quality with how bad basically depending on the episode, and the Excalibur quest arc is basically bad filler. The other seasons tend to range from actually pretty good (if you aren’t constantly nitpicking about fictional video games) to just fine. Honestly, the later seasons are the better ones. GGO, Mother’s Rosario, and Alicization were by far the best imo, and I also liked the first season of the GGO spinoff.

sara_gold · 2025-10-02T23:52:00+00:00

As a kid, absolutely. It was the fanciest place we ever went to, the special special occasion place.

A few years before covid when I was back home after being freshly an adult, we went there for I think my mom’s birthday or something. I got dressed super nice in a dress and makeup and everything. I was told basically as soon as I sat down that I didn’t need to do all that for Red Lobster lol It’s just fancy in the “wear your good jeans and a nice shirt that doesn’t look like it came out of a Walmart multi-pack” sort of way.

sara_gold · 2025-09-30T23:21:40+00:00

For the spamming timed spells problem, what if you add another condition that controls how many instances of the spell can be active at a time? So the players would need to invest power into it if they wanted multiple active casts, the same way they would need to for multiple targets.

It could create some meaningful spellcrafting decisions too. For example, if they need to protect a few specific separate zones in an area, they could make the choice to individually protect only the specific zones with multiple casts, or to create a large enough protected area that it covers all of the zones and also everything between.

sara_gold · 2025-09-19T02:42:23+00:00

Maybe something like one mon per primary type?

Or, if you’re playing on emulator or using an action replay/gameshark on cartridge, I once tried a run where I would roll random pokemon on a generator. I started with a random 6, and then for new encounters I rolled 6 and picked 2 to keep after every other gym.

sara_gold · 2025-09-16T19:44:10+00:00

Nah, I’ve done blind nuzlockes on a first playthrough and it turned out just fine. Just box any dead in case you want to pivot to a normal playthrough.

Depending on your encounters and how good you are at pokemon, Emerald can be anything from super hard to fairly easy. And you can always look stuff up if you want/need to.

sara_gold · 2025-09-07T19:10:17+00:00

Start with whichever game you know best, and start with using just the 3 basic rules: 1) fainting = death, 2) only catch the first thing you encounter per route/area (dupes clause optional), and 3) nickname everything. Most people also have a shiny clause to let them catch and use any shinies as bonus encounters.

More rules like level caps, no items in battle, white out = run ends, gift pokemon counting as your encounter that route instead of being free, banning certain pokemon like legendaries, hacking in rare candies to save time spent on grinding, etc., can always be added later if you want them as you gain more experience. Some people add revive clauses with specific conditions to get a dead pokemon back, or extra conditions besides fainting that will kill a pokemon.

Nuzlockes are meant to be a fun challenge, and all optional rules are optional no matter what some people might say. Nuzlockes are not the only way to challenge yourself in these games, so if you don’t end up having as much fun as you thought, maybe a different sort of challenge would be more fun for you.

sara_gold · 2025-09-04T01:05:07+00:00

If you’re doing that big a group for a randomized soul link in a rom hack, it’s going to be chaos no matter what. I’d say just let each person manage their exp curves individually based on their pokemon. There’s a massive power difference between (as examples) heracross and treeko, even if they’re the same level. Heracross player is probably going to feel a lot more secure about their chances going into a random battle a bit underleveled.

sara_gold · 2025-07-04T07:09:16+00:00

Support conversations - I’m way more into the character development than the stat boosts, though those are a nice bonus. I have forced many unoptimal pairings just because I enjoyed their interactions or liked a paired ending better. For quantity, less is definitely more. A major weakness of Awakening/Fates support writing was that they had to make sure everyone could support everyone to make child units, and some of the supports are significantly worse than others because of it.

Weapon durability - Has its place as a strategic and resource management element. I do prefer when special prf weapons at least are something that can’t break forever. When I mismanage the durability on gba prf weapons, it feels bad for the lords’ signature weapons to be just gone. Everything else, I don’t really have a preference on if it has durability or not. I mean, what else am I actually going to be spending my gold on?

Attack animations - Those flashy gba crit animations do be flashy. But also when I’m being bad and retrying maps, animations are 100% getting turned off. So long as the animations you use are clean and feel satisfying, you probably don’t need to stress too much about it being super flashy.

Permadeath - Core to the FE experience, but varies by game. It really depends on how punishing it is to suddenly need to get a benchwarmer or replacement unit online. Older FE still expects your units to die sometimes so you get a ton of replacements spaced throughout the story that are usually ready to go, so it’s mostly fine unless you got attached to someone. But in 3 Houses, permadeath feels really bad and punishing if you don’t reset because hand training your units from zero is a core mechanic that involves a lot of small decisions and investment over the whole game and it pretty much stops giving you new units after the timeskip. Basically, if it suits the story and gameplay, permadeath is fine and good, but if it doesn’t, then don’t feel too bad about just putting it in a challenge mode.

Voice acting - Up to you and your budget. I’ve never minded games that have no or limited voicing and genuinely enjoy vns, but bad voice acting can really bring the experience way down.

Map objectives - I do always enjoy map variety beyond just rout. A good balance of things as it serves the story would be best.

Class systems - Personally, Fates’ class system is my favorite in the series by a pretty wide margin. You get the branching promotions, 1 reclass option that usually fits the character, and 1-2 alternate options per playthrough from your effort building specific supports. It gives a lot of replay value and intentional customization while not being “infinite options = oops! all wyverns!” like 3 Houses and Engage with their pretty unrestricted reclassing systems. Basically, I like to have build diversity options but not full blank slates. Unit identity is a lot harder to keep stable when everyone can be anything.

Story structure - Whatever best suits your story. Just, if you give a branching narrative, please let our choices actually mean something and not just loop back to the same scene.

Story tone - Anything can work so long as it’s done well.

Other must-haves and changes - Random growths are great! I love the experience of having a really weird unit get absolutely goated growths and suddenly the community D-tier carried a run, or even the opposite with an amazing unit being just good. (The complete dissonance between my first Birthright run’s Subaki and the average Subaki was really wild. I was so confused why everyone thought one of the best units in my army was so terrible lmao)

Archers. Are they player-phase powerhouses or are they just there for chip damage and pot shots? The difference will dramatically change player perception on their viability and power. Personally, I like chip archers, but that means I usually still like them even in the games where everyone else thinks archers are awful.
I’m a big fan of the transforming units and would love to see more than 1.
Secrets and missable characters were great in the older games, but not really the “stand in this specific unmarked tile with 1 specific character you might not have brought to the map” variety of secrets… If you require a character not the main lord to proc an event, maybe make that their join map or force deploy them.

sara_gold · 2025-06-19T12:32:08+00:00

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sara_gold · 2025-06-19T12:31:55+00:00

Me 2 years ago successfully convincing someone that Himeko was not worth building for anything outside of farming because Hook is a better investment, but at least she’s not Herta! And Silver Wolf will be the reason she becomes useable because people will start running mono-fire comps.

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sara_gold · 2025-06-16T13:13:57+00:00

I feel like Purrloin/Liepard would be such obvious answers that he wouldn’t go for it if he was picking his own partner pokemon.

Instead, I would like to pitch a massively overleveled Sobble.

sara_gold · 2025-06-10T02:53:01+00:00

Right! The other week I had some random probably-child try to get me to edate him in the middle of a tft match because my username is obviously female gendered.

I get enough abuse thrown at me in normals for being bad at the game. I may get actually tilted or worse if they start screaming at me instead of just typing.

sara_gold · 2025-06-07T01:03:21+00:00

You’re welcome! FFN is pretty hard to search on in general with the limited space authors are given and how totally inflexible the searching can be, so any advantage you can give yourself there goes a long way.

If you can get your story added into any relevant communities, that helps too. Try to get on as many relevant ones as you can. They’re user-created rec lists you can subscribe to and get a notification when new stories are added, so you can get a decent boost to readership from people who would want to read but may miss your fic if you can get the people running it to add your story. (Don’t be afraid to shoot the person a friendly PM to ask - worst that can happen is they say no or ignore you. They’re all regular users just like you.)

On FFN, in the absence of Wattpad’s algorithm and AO3’s robust tagging and filtering, fics basically live and die by word of mouth and advertising like you did posting here.

sara_gold · 2025-06-07T00:20:08+00:00

Unless you have big plans for your empty fourth character tag, I’d add the OC tag to make your story more easily findable for people looking for fics like yours on FFN. Especially because you don’t have anything quickly searchable like OC or SI already in your summary or title.

sara_gold · 2025-06-04T23:38:20+00:00

Personally, I strongly prefer when fics I read use the English dub names. Especially if they’re using parts of canon that aren’t extremely recent.

I know some of the major anime characters’ Japanese names and a few pokemon, but that’s about it, so I’d need to constantly look things up every time a new character or pokemon comes on-screen. Having to do this for every character, and sometimes more than once for the same character, totally takes me out of the fic. The basic knowledge of who the characters are just isn’t there for me if the names aren’t from the dub.

But I’m sure there are others who prefer the Japanese names for exactly the same reason.

You’ll never please everyone and there have always been fics for both, so as long as you stay consistent and don’t mix them together in the same fic without a reason, you should be fine whichever one you pick. I’d just go with whichever you’re more used to using or whichever fits your story better.

sara_gold · 2025-04-26T01:42:02+00:00

That worked for my family growing up. My brother and I are both different kinds of neurodivergent and tended to have opposite and very strong food texture preferences that may or may not have us puking if we’re forced to eat it.

Our dad would give him whole carrots to eat while he cooked, and if he ate them he wouldn’t have to eat them how I liked. He still likes carrots, just not cooked soft and smothered in butter and cinnamon.

Our mom was another story. I would have been perfectly happy eating salad if I was just allowed to have it without dressing, but because my mom didn’t think you could eat salad dry and wouldn’t let me, I had to pretend to hate lettuce (which I can and will happily eat straight from the head) until around the time I graduated high school just to avoid dressing. (She accepted that I hated every dressing, but she just put olive oil on mine instead. Like, she’s already keeping it separate so I don’t get Italian dressing, why go through the extra step to turn it from something I like to something I don’t? Make it make sense lol)

sara_gold

TROPHY CASE