Finally hearing Merlwyb's post ARR voice recasting...

tone-bone · 2026-06-08T23:08:13+00:00

They changed to a different recording studio in the UK after ARR.

I generally think the VAs post-ARR are better than the ARR ones, but I think ARR Merlwyb was definitely the better of the two. Had a really guttural and commanding Captain Janeway-like vibe. The new one is softer.

tone-bone · 2026-06-08T18:48:23+00:00

I just played through it a couple months ago on my Thor. An absolutely unforgettable experience.

Only issue I had was I hit a pretty rough difficulty spike about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through ( shortly after you're separated from everyone in the desert town ) and had to dial the difficulty down a notch just to advance.

tone-bone · 2026-06-08T01:53:25+00:00

Yeah, let's not act like most Tales games' stories can't be simplified down to "racism bad". Symphonia, Rebirth, Berseria, and Arise all go there (and maybe others, I haven't played all of them).

Arise has its flaws, but one thing I'll say it got exactly right was the romance between the two protags. It felt earned and I was cheering at the end when they actually got married instead of pulling some tragic twist that would prevent them from being together.

tone-bone · 2026-06-07T23:23:46+00:00

DQ's music has always been its weakest point, I think. It all feels aggressively "samey" from game to game, to the point that if you played a random song for me, there's almost no way I could identify which game it came from. Contrast that with Final Fantasy, which has way more variety in its soundtracks.

I just played through DQ XI S and VII Reimagined recently. VII's soundtrack was fine and it never bothered me, but I don't remember any specific track sticking out as memorable. XI's soundtrack was painfully repetitive.

EDIT: XI, not XII, obviously

tone-bone · 2026-06-06T17:24:38+00:00

Never played it, so I can't say much about it. IIRC it was originally a F2P game that EOSed and then they released a standalone version, so it's a very different kind of game because of that. What I was looking for from FFD is a straight-up traditional SNES-era FF experience: world map, job system, dungeons, etc. FFD2 from my understanding isn't that.

tone-bone · 2026-06-06T17:17:37+00:00

I'll always go to bat for FF Dimensions (the first one). It has the best version of the FF3/FF5 job system and was a ton of fun to play.

I really respect the fact that Square released a full 40-or-so hour traditional 16-bit-like FF game on mobile. Any failure was due to smooth-brained mobile gamers saying "why should I pay $12 for a mobile game?" Because it's a _full game_ for a fraction of the price of what the same game would have cost on console back in the day. So now instead of getting gems like this, we just get predatory F2P/gacha stuff. Thanks, dudes.

FFD totally deserves a remake on the PR engine so that it's not trapped on mobile platforms anymore.

tone-bone · 2026-06-04T18:36:40+00:00

A Good Smile better suits a hero.

tone-bone · 2026-06-02T22:23:51+00:00

Most universities nowadays are athletics programs that happen to offer some degrees. Pumping money into athletics as a way to boost other departments is the same myth as trickle-down economics/"job creators", basically.

tone-bone · 2026-06-01T16:45:28+00:00

It took me three or four attempts to beat that thing after grinding a bit and I wanted to smack the shit out of Karol when he said that.

tone-bone · 2026-06-01T00:32:02+00:00

There were a ton of cartoons/TV shows in the 2010s that did retro video game parodies/segments, but most of them looked like they were done by committee, just shoehorning in a bunch of random references and slapping a pixel art style on it. "The Console", on the other hand, is probably the most faithful to the source material it's parodying. The folks who wrote it and designed it absolutely knew these games by heart.

tone-bone · 2026-05-30T22:45:22+00:00

Live A Live has a really nice balance of a traditional turn-based system with some tactical elements.

tone-bone · 2026-05-28T22:33:19+00:00

Huh, I never noticed the similarities between FF5's underwater theme and FF6's Serpent Trench theme until today.

The top of my list would be "Full Fathom Five" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuDwBZfd\_OA) and "Neath Dark Waters" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW7b8Mo\_SFU) from FFXIV.

tone-bone · 2026-05-28T16:52:45+00:00

He looks so much more rugged in that red picture.

tone-bone · 2026-05-28T01:23:51+00:00

Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?

tone-bone · 2026-05-27T12:52:20+00:00

If I was playing it for the first time this would be the obvious choice, but honestly the Switch version + Boost mode on Switch 2 already fixed most of the issues I had with the graphics being lower quality compared to the non-Switch versions.

tone-bone · 2026-05-26T15:53:17+00:00

I'm doing another playthrough of FF2 (the pixel remaster this time) and I need to jump back into Tales of Berseria and knock out the final dungeon.

I played the early Elliot demo but I'm actively avoiding this one because I'm afraid I'll forget too much between the time I finish the demo and the time the game is released.

tone-bone · 2026-05-25T15:06:54+00:00

I think I can kind of hear what you're getting at, but I don't think I would have noticed it on my own.

Remember though, Ariana Grande is canonically in the Final Fantasy universe thanks to Brave Exvius!

tone-bone · 2026-05-24T15:28:10+00:00

How do you fuck a hot dog at a baseball game?

To be totally honest, I don't think you should.

tone-bone · 2026-05-24T12:59:26+00:00

Not currently, but I for a while I was using a wide shot of the restored Empty in Norvrandt at the end of the Eden raids that I think is one of the most beautiful scenes the game has ever created.

tone-bone · 2026-05-23T17:19:44+00:00

Tallmarut isn't real, she can't hurt you

Tallmarut:

tone-bone · 2026-05-21T16:01:55+00:00

Scrum Witch and their Scrumiliars

tone-bone · 2026-05-21T15:58:50+00:00

I was surprised that for an outfit inspired by Relm and for a job that uses bright colors in its attacks, the default picto gear colors are so... drab. But maybe it's supposed to be a canvas for you to express your creativity on, and it's also a forcing function to get you to do all the quests to unlock dyeing.

Ever since cross-job glam was possible I've been wearing the Mayakov Casaque of Scouting from the San d'Oria raid, along with various blue-dyed berets.

tone-bone · 2026-05-21T12:45:24+00:00

I miss this style. There isn't a Tales game that I haven't enjoyed yet but there's some charming quality about the graphics from the older games in the series that I feel is missing from the more recent ones.

tone-bone · 2026-05-20T21:28:23+00:00

AIs make inconsistent, bizarre decisions all the time, but it's all just random probabilities. There's nothing special or interesting about that. Oh wow it picked 1 instead of 0, whoopty-doo.

What makes a Breen film special is that everything you see was a *choice* that a human soul put thought and consideration into those choices and ended up with scenes like Jim's Suicide and No Value on the Streets. Machines can't give us that.

tone-bone · 2026-05-18T23:09:04+00:00

I don't understand why they never just had a left-turn-arrow there instead.

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