My ex somehow ended up with my copy of Suikoden II. She would have known to sell it and not toss it, but no idea if she did sell or for how much.

On the r/privacy discussion, I was on Reddit almost ten years and I never once had an interaction like that over karma. I barely even remember seeing it in discussions. People can get prickly when being asked for evidence, so how you ask is also important (and for good reason, sealioning is a thing).

I think the takeaway here is what’s asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and not to worry about conversations with people obsessed with imaginary numbers. It’s not worth giving it this kind of headspace.

It’s a hot take in the JRPG/FF communities, but I’ll be right there with you to die on that hill. I still can’t believe that it has one of the highest metascores in the series to this day. I thought I was crazy when I was reading reviews back in 2000.

It’s not just the transitional load times either; the load times in battle were also so bad that they messed up the ATB. These technical issues had all sorts of weird side effects, like making anything with a cast animation worse than alternatives or making Haste the worst it’s ever been in the series. Bizarrely, the best way to avoid the action queueing was to turn down the ATB speed in the options (or to use a mod that sped up the FPS and thus the battle animations, because the ATB ran separately).

The whole thing was technical overreach on Sakaguchi’s part. Games had voice acting for years by the time FF9 released, but he was obsessed with film-making so he packed the disc storage with voiceless CG animation instead. The Dreamcast had been out over a year with its titles alongside PC games that were regularly pushing 60 FPS, but this game just had to have a fourth party member to really gum things up. By the time it finally came out in the West, we were already seeing footage of PS2 games out in Japan. Final Fantasy has never been as far behind the curve as it was with IX.

I didn’t click with the story or characters at all. Was I just so annoyed by the tech issues that it was a non-starter for me? I never played through the game with the newer releases/mods that address some of these issues, so I still don’t know if I would have liked the game. Maybe I’ll play the likely remake.

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Unfortunately, NIMBYism comes into play should teens start making heavy use of any outdoor spaces, including trails and parks. Low or zero-cost can’t be the only factor in providing places for kids, there also have to be protections against or ways to assuage older persons that are being fed constant streams of fear.

The recent, developing post-Web 2.0 era of the Internet is what I’ve been thinking about lately. The old social media giants are falling, and big corporations are scrambling to establish the Next Big Thing to attract all the displaced users. Combine that with growing nationalism in cyberspace (e.g,. banning TikTok solely based on xenophobia) and problems with foreign-borne propaganda, and I could absolutely see us being a major incident or two away from a splintered, de-globalized set of intranets.

Not sure about the rogue AI-patrolled frontier in between, though.

In the US, since the conversation began with an American retailer? No. The larger trend in this reference window–since the early 90’s–is flat wage growth versus inflation (productivity has increased massively, but the implications of that are a whole other conversation). There was a recent, brief period of inflation outpacing wages as a result of the pandemic, but that trend has also since reversed to a small degree. New fast food hires weren’t making $15 an hour in 1992. There’s been wage growth, just closely in-line with inflation over the long term. It’s an apples-to-apples comparison here, unusually so.

Video games are dramatically less expensive now to purchase than they were in the fourth gen. It’s easy to see why, too; the marginal cost of a cartridge-based game was substantial, owing to a relatively complex manufacturing process. That marginal cost dropped substantially with disc media (with a corresponding drop in game prices at retail), and then again to near zero with digital distribution.

It’s easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80’s kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It’s part of the reason there’s so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn’t put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn’t have the manuals available, so they’d get stuck (before Internet info access).

I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I’ve only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I’ll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it’s mine forever.

That’s setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It’s trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.

There’s definitely an argument for that, even if it can be hard to see at times because Reverie is all wrapped in the “Cold Steel” software package.

Big part of why I liked Reverie is because I’m a huge fan of Crossbell. Azure is one of my all-time favorite games. Loved Zero, too.

Civ5 has been my favorite in the series. They did a great job with the AI on that one, and it gave the game so much replay value for me.

A lot of great options named in the thread but I’ll also add Slice and Dice and Crypt of the NecroDancer. Seconding FTL too, that was one of my top games of the 2010’s.

I also recommend Cobalt Core, which is not quite patient as a past November release. Great for FTL fans or anyone that likes tactical card battlers.

I hadn’t heard about the charm mods, thanks. Wayward Compass being permanently free by default should have been a thing. If it weren’t for the awful map system, I would have felt Hollow Knight was a flawless game.

You’re fully clearing Pure Fiction, Memory of Chaos, Swarn Disaster, Divergent Universe, and Apocalyptic Shadow?

HSR has an entire endgame that’s nowhere near trivial. There are five different modes at the moment, three requiring two separate teams, that will stretch any player. If you got lucky on your Departure Warp pulling Bronya or Himeko and pulled a good 5* to complement them, then yeah, I could see story fights getting easy.

I didn’t like Octopath at all, unfortunately. To me, being round-based puts it a tier below the systems that Final Fantasy X, Trails, and HSR have. I hate speed being a low value stat, and the “guess the weakness” game got old real fast.

I also think Persona’s great, though, despite also using rounds. Press Turn, too, which is why I’m looking forward to Metaphor. Atlus is pretty good at encounter design.

I also thought it was too simple when I started. I think it was Belobog’s final boss that finally sold me on the system; when a studio nails just a few things, it turns out you don’t need a dozen options in your game and it frees up a lot of space for layering in thematic, bespoke mechanics in fights and playing with the encounter design. The break system is an example of one of those things. Cold Steel and Reverie couldn’t let the system breathe because the intricate character kits left so much room to over-exploit break periods and make boss fights trivial. Falcom ends up chasing their tail by putting in static refill points at boss HP percentages that disrupt the battle flow and wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if they’d fixed the original problem. (And they still failed at preserving challenge, especially in Cold Steel 3.)

I’m hoping Falcom picked up some tips from HoYo for Kai, as the teams have met before. I’d love to see them take another big swing at a battle sandbox like they did in Reverie. There’s so much potential there, and it’s something that even a budget-limited studio can pull off.

This game has lived rent-free in my brain ever since playing it. Not always in a good way either, it’s some genuine existential horror.

The ethical explorations are interesting too, such as the implications of repeatedly booting up a personality to extract information from it.

I was enthralled by almost every part of my Disco Elysium experience, but it was the main character’s past trauma that sticks with me. The phone call, the nap dream–both hit me hard. I’m also gutted that we’re probably never going to see another game set in that world again. The global setting concept of Elysium is a stroke of genius as far as I’m concerned.

Hades 2 is excellent so far, by the by.

Had a very similar experience last month starting Honkai Star Rail. HoYo only dropped in a few buttons in its combat too, but all of the surrounding systems and the impeccable encounter design make it insanely deep. It might be the best JRPG-style battle system I’ve ever played.

I could be wrong about Metaphor’s action system, it’s just hard to imagine when it’s not their primary focus. Or maybe I’m still sour about how Starfield brought on extra gameplay systems from an outside genre and missed badly on them.

And there’s still more to come, heh.

Hope you enjoy Reverie, it’s one of my favorites in the series.

I think if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that this will have a better soundtrack than Dragon Quest XI.

I’m playing Trails through Daybreak now, and it has a similar system at a macro level: starts with action combat and transitions into turn-based. I think between that and the expansive job class system, variety won’t be an issue, but I’m hoping there aren’t concessions being made on the turn-based side to make the action side work. I can’t imagine any scenario in which the action element outright impresses a veteran action RPG player. It’ll be simple.