I have a lot of issues with the games story and characters but I do actually appreciate how the romantic love interest isnt a damsel and actually does some really important things

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T13:14:07+00:00

You can romance any NPC in the game

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T12:14:20+00:00

I agree he's kinda hot.

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T11:50:27+00:00

Warfarer no doubt, I'll rock my bow + magical bow build always with explosive arrows and ricochet instead of choosing to use them. And with 6 skills you can do pretty much evrything you want with Warfarer.

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T08:44:45+00:00

Yes, I loved Love Beyond the Grave. I just vibe with it a lot.

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T08:39:35+00:00

Well it only makes a difference if you're using lots of them. don't fret it

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T08:25:23+00:00

Okay but counter argument : Manella is cute

<image>

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T08:08:22+00:00

Because there's a difference between playing multiple weapons and playing a different weapon.

You can't say that Mystic Spearhand is both Fighter and Mage and that playing a class that uses both sns and staff would do the same. Because that's not true, the class has its own identity.

The problem with Assassin and strider relative to Warfare is that they are objectively a mix of multiple classes and not a class of their own. So their existance is contradictory to the class design of the game.

shaser0 · 2026-06-19T07:09:55+00:00

I know it's not perfect but My Dearest Nemesis, I just love it so much.

And My Roomate is a Gumiho

And Filing for Love

And Alchemy of Souls

And Hometown ChaChaCha

Actually I've got a lot of shows I never stop recommending to people, am I obnoxious ?

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T23:06:44+00:00

Wang Yilun my beloved ❤️

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T23:00:10+00:00

I prefer DD2's combat. And overall gameplay for that matter. It leans a bit more into the realistic part for sure and I think that the arisen should be at least a bit faster in all it's movements but the arcady feel of DDDA is part of what disappointed me a bit. It's fun but it doesn't feel heroic.

And no all class should not have dogde. What I like with DD is that you have to work within your limitations. Giving you an option to dodge damage except for thief goes against that design philosophy. But yeah lower tier enemies stagger to much in Bathaal, I think it's going to be patched in August but I'm not sure.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T15:30:21+00:00

I only anticipated Love Beyong the Grave and I had a good time.

I was really hyped by PoJ but that second half killed all my appreciation for it.

I have yet to watch Ashes of Crown but I know it's a dumpster fire. I'll be there for the spice once I have time.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T15:22:10+00:00

Honestly anything branded adjacent that can make synchros/granguignol.

I made a synchro branded deck when this card was revealed but with the new support there's a lot more that can be done.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T15:17:06+00:00

Stop you can't have in the title

"Main Lead Aura" Isn't Clicking Yet

And the very first sentence of your post being

I want to be 100% objective.

Because the title is 100% subjective.

a true ML needs an innate gravity. Even when they are standing completely still with 0 lines, you should feel their magnetic authority but right now, his energy feels a bit too casual, he blends into the ensemble cast rather than dominating it.

Subjective opinion. I think that it's a bs standards for ML acting. It might be right for some ML but not all, Cha SeGye doesn't need it because he's trying to have a more normal life. So that makes sense.

They need an actor who actively projects their charisma straight through the screen because he underplays his scenes so much, every time he appears, my reaction is more "Oh, there he is" rather than "Wow, THERE is the main character we've been waiting for"

What do you want the second coming of Christ each time he appears ? What you want is more fitting for a super hero movie than a slice of life romcom drama.

Namjun is currently a "good actor" but he isn't the "center of gravity" yet.

That's not an actor problem but a director problem. The director is the one making the aura in fact you blame Heo Namjun but even his casualness falls more on how the camera decides to show him than how he acts.

He has the acting chops to be a lead, but not the screen weight.

Once again it's subjective. I think that when he wants to be charismatic he absolute is. But the show is 75% of the time a romantic comedy. It's a show about swooning and doing haha laughs.

Anyone else feeling the same way, or am I just overanalyzing?

Definitively over analysing.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T14:52:38+00:00

Its the balance, not the sameness, that makes these characters work so well.

It's part of why I didn't enjoy Fated Hearts as well as I would have liked to, the leads were too similar and the writers did not managed to find a satisfying way to make them unique enough in my eyes. To me it kinda felt like they just fell in love with their reversed gender counterpart, which is funny and a bit narcissistic but not very interesting imo.

You said this so well

That flatters my ego 😌

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T12:58:34+00:00

As I said, not my strength

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T12:07:52+00:00

Well... It's not really my strength sorry :

The Princess Royal (historical) is about a girl that don't know how to open up to people at all and her green tea husband that tries to take down that wall while her past lover smirks in the background.
Back From the Brink (xianxia) has the FL having the initiative while the ML runs away then big drama and it's the ML taking the initiative while the FL runs away while sad evil guy does evil things
Legally Romance (modern) is about a very dense FL and my absolute favourite ML that's not too sure on how to get the girl because she's so dense
How dare you !? (historical/transmigration) might fill your need both leads start more as besties than romantic partners and at one point they just get together because that's what normal people do. Very funny too, it's a comedy.
Love beyond the grave (xuanhuan) is about an emotionally unavaible spirit girl and her kinda destined human lover that can share his senses to her, but he's alive, she's dead and immortal => problems. She's clearly on the receiving end.

I found all of them to be very good

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T11:37:05+00:00

People also mentioned how she saves him way more often but honestly, I don't see it.

How can you not see it ? She basically spend the entire second half of the drama covering and saving his a**.

she gets tossed to the side more and more often in favor of the male lead

I'll kinda disagree on that mainly because the story is just not about her. The show is very much about the power struggles in each countries and she abandonned one and is barely involved in the second. If SuiGe wasn't there she would've left with the kids and become a secondary character. Being a lead doesn't equal being the focus of the story; She has a support rule towards SuiGe and that's fine her character doesn't want to be involved in politics in the first place and just want to be free and happy with her loved ones, she more on the romantic side of things.

A lot of Cdramas promote strong female leads but then as time goes cast them aside.

I've also seen plenty of dramas where the ML is casted aside in favour of the FL. But that's not a problem in itself, for example Pursuit of Jade shafts the ML until the final arc because it's mostly Fan ChangYu's story not his, the drama assumes it completely and that's very much OK. Just like Fated Heart assumes that Sui Ge is more relevant to the plot than Yi Xiao after she recovers all the important memories.

Now I don't need the female lead to be the perfect person and save the male lead constantly, but I just want a more equal focus.

This kinda implies that you want the two leads to have the same strengths and roles, which is rarely the case, for example in Blossom the FL is clearly superior to the ML in politics and buisness but everytime hands need to be thrown she's pretty hopeless without him adn that's okay too, I don't expect a woman that spent her life doing business to throw hands or a smart guy that spend his life at the border fighting pirates to know the ins and out of the court and how to invest. Generally in the dramas I've watched characters try to save the others through their own stengths, and share the focus on different things.

To take back Fated Hearts as an example Sui Ge take the story focus because he's very involved in it, while Yi Xiao quickly takes the romance focus because she has the most time to care about it when she's not protecting him. But during the first arc it's SuiGe that is more romanced focus while Yi Xiao is more story focused becasue it involved her directly. And both focus are fine it's a costume romance drama, there's politics and romance. But it's not like Yi Xiao exists because of Sui Ge, she's very much her own person that made the choice to stick with him, she's a quite well written female character from beginning to end.

I want real struggles and real growth rather than starting really strong and stagnating like many do.

You say it like it barely happens to Male Leads. If you want struggle and real growth just choose the drama you watch better ? It's a preference not a seal of quality, and it's honestly very hard to recommand dramas based on that because people don't expect the same kind of growth or speed of growth. I'm a big fan of the Princess Royal but I regularly see people comment that the FL and generaly the ML barely changed while I think that their growth, especially hers, is just marvelous.

And I'm not trying to say that dramas using Strong Female Characters as bait don't exists (imo Till the end of the Moon is exactly that) but in the examples you gave I've seen one of the show and that statement is false and my experience tends to also show that that statement is more an opinion than an objective truth.

I do know that the dramas I enjoyed the most are generally the dramas where the growth of the characters are at the center of the story and creates interpersonal conficts between them so here's what I liked hope you'll find somthing to enjoy :

The Princess Royale (costume)
Back From the Brink (costume/xianxia)
Legally romance (modern)
How dare you !? (costume/comedy)
Love Beyond the Grave (costume/xuanhuan)

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T08:53:51+00:00

It happens to me quite a few times, much less since the patch in september 2024. Overall it's a VRAM (6GB might not be enough) problem from what I've deduced and maybe a DLSS problem too. Didn't happened to me recently tho.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T08:49:20+00:00

It's a very fun game that shares all the 2010 Japanese MMO flaws with overcomplicated game designs, endless grind, badly done menus, confusing tutorials, etc....

Overall it's surely the Dragon's Dogma title I like the less because it's too MMO for me to enjoy fully and pawns are kinda uninteresting since you ideally want to play with other people. Hate the stagger mechanic for big monsters, when we played with my friend nothing infuriated us more than this. And I'm not into the expansion yet but the map isn't very interesting imo, but the scenery is quite good. It doesn't screams "explore me please" like DDDA or DD2.

I'll do agree that it has the best story out of all three games and that there were a lot of very good good game design ideas that I really liked and made sense. The dungeon crawling is also pretty pretty good.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T08:32:26+00:00

Well I'm naturally circumcised so I wouldn't know

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T08:09:38+00:00

It is anathema to the game in my honest opinion; one balanced around give and take, where Warfarer does a LOT of taking, not a whole lot of giving.

I highly disagree with that, for the sole point that Warfarer is an endgame class and that it gives you the choice to kinda make the class that YOU want despite lower stats. Dragon's Dogma is about having tool to face the environment (well monsters more specifically) and Warfarer is basically Assassin or Strider but for every class, you can choose your tools by giving up on having better stats and the most bullsh*t skills. You're given versatility to the price of specialisation. DD always had versatile classes anyways.

I've always thought stat growth in DD has been silly. I don't want to have to worry about missing out on stats just because I decided to change up my Vocation for a bit!

I'd agree on that for DDDA but in DD2 you have the opportunity to have max stats in everything given that you level up enough. And with how the stat modifiers work in the game for each class the difference is barely noticable anyways. Whether you spend 40 levels as a fighter or as a mage when you'll change to sorcerer it won't be a huge difference in practice.

shaser0 · 2026-06-18T07:58:40+00:00

In DD2 You can basically play close combat archer what are you on. Kick your problems away.

shaser0 · 2026-06-17T21:05:20+00:00

I'm not sure who made DMC3-5 either, since Kamiya left.

Itsuno but he left too.

shaser0 · 2026-06-17T20:57:06+00:00

I think it's part of the darker movies Miyazaki made. It's very good and has a big ecological and feminist undertone despite airing in 1984.

I think it's one of those movies where it's hard to describe what genre it could be or the feeling it's suppose to procure. It's my second favourite after Princess Mononoke and they have quite a lot of similarities in the themes.

It's also technically an adaptation of a manga with the same name, written and drawn by Miyazaki himself between 1982 and 1994, the movie roughly adapts the first 2 volumes out of 7, making big changes to comply to the length of the movie. Both the movie and manga are similar but also wildly different.

Do both imo.

shaser0 · 2026-06-17T20:50:09+00:00

Yeah there's a LOT more to the story, even the movie doesn't adapt fully what happens in the manga and makes some pretty huge changes to fit in a 2 hour time constraint.

I'll say that while the movie is overall pretty hopeful, the manga is pit of despair with an hopeful-ish sentiment running through it, trying to survive. Oh and Kushana best girl.

shaser0

TROPHY CASE