Lurker > KamikazePotato

Paratroopa1 posted...

School week should be cut back on anyway

Reasoning for this? Serious question, never heard anyone say we needed to cut the school week back
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I never play with Japanese VAs.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Nier Automata
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yeah, all of us here have a single-player bias when observing company success. I love FF14 and I still only remembered it after reading this entire topic! Good to see it was mentioned in a previous topic though.

voltch posted...

RE7 is at around 3-3.5m I think? Well off their target of 10m, but that number is supposedly a really long term target.

They did save FFXIV big time, but the initial failure in the first place felt like classic Square mismanagement. Maybe online requires a different skillset management wise, which is why they can't replicate it with their western divisions.

FF14 1.0 is probably the biggest example of Square mismanagement of all time, even more so than FF15 taking 10 years to make. They did no market research on what made modern-day MMORPGs popular and funneled tens of millions of dollars into a blender. They even thought that it would be fine if the game was shit when it came out because it could just be patched and people would stay anyway. Their attitude at the time is still baffling.

FF14 2.0 happening the way it did was basically a miracle. There was ONE dude in their company that could have pulled that off and they found him. Yoshida is not only a very competent director, he's also a huge MMORPG fan who understands what makes the genre fun. He conducted a large amount of market research, had his developers play popular MMOs so they would be more familiar with what they should be creating, interacted with the community a lot and listened extensively to their feedback, ect. Unlike anyone else in Square, he made sure to do it all within a reasonable timeframe and budget. And all of these qualities that made the game's revival a success have continued on throughout its entire subsequent run.

There was a time period for a few years where Square's financial reports were more or less carried by FF14. Of course, most of the money generated by that game seems to be funnelled straight into egeregiously long development cycles for other AAA games that won't see the light of day for god knows how long.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Ya go my NIER
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

It's funny how topics like these never discuss Final Fantasy XIV, considering that ever since it re-released it's been Square's most successfull (recent) game by far. The director is a genius and the development process for the series should be a template on how to turn a disastrous failure in a major success. Rest of Square still hasn't learned from it.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Don't worry, Nier Automata was made by Platinum & Yoko Taro (who no longer works for Square), so they didn't have the opportunity to mess that up!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Snake5555555555 posted...

It's amazing

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

foolm0r0n posted...

KamikazePotato posted...

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but as much as I've poked fun at that voice throughout the topic it's not actually a dealbreaker of any sort.

For an RPG that is dialogue heavy it kinda is. It was enough for me to stop watching Madoka at least.

That character isn't a major character and has no lines in important scenes. You can also just...fast-forward his lines by pressing A. The rest of the case does a very good job.

I mean, it's your call, but it's a really weird thing to get that hung up over to the point where you would skip a game. I hate the voice and it's not a real problem.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

foolm0r0n posted...

holy FUCK that's enough to avoid the game entirely

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but as much as I've poked fun at that voice throughout the topic it's not actually a dealbreaker of any sort. This is a very good game, and I say that as someone who's not a gigantic fan of the Tales series.


I turned up the difficulty to Intense. Boss fights actually feel like boss fights again! Still not hard but they're not pure combo food anymore.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

It's late so this will be brief (wanted to keep playing), but that was easily the best part of the game so far. Ousted the intro which I figured would basically be impossible to beat considering the intro is the point of the entire game. When you pretty much know how something is going to go down and they play with your emotions like a damn fiddle regardless, it's good stuff. I feel like it more or less 'completed' the game for me, and as long as it doesn't get REALLY stupid from here on out I'll be very happy with the experience as a whole.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

This is messed up
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

What the fuck Aball
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

pjbasis posted...

gamefaqs mobile is basically broken for me

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I played Kitten Game until I unlocked Community

Looked at the new list of options, realized how deep this rabbit hole was going to go, then closed out because I value my time more than that, at least
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Thanks!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

MenuWars posted...

I go there every few months and have visited fairly religiously at halloween for several years now, weirdly I don't particularly have a favourite.

I guess Red is the easiest one to recommend though. Short n sweet.

There's a lot of stories with 'Red' in the name. Can't find it.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Link to the Jak and Daxter one

Nominate: SCP
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Oh and I also really like how Velvet's outward emotions have changed gradually over the game. In the beginning she was constantly dour and brooding and never expressed her emotions outside of rage and hatred. Then she opens up bit by bit as the game goes on and she finds people she can talk to and rely on. She goes from never being able to talk about Laphicet, then there's this one beautiful little moment halfway through the game where she starts talking about one time they spent together and then freezes as she realized what she just did. Eventually she becomes able to share stories of Laphicet with the others and even be a little happy when talking about him. Phi helps her come to terms with Laphicet's death, even as she eventually realizes that Phi is his own person and she can't use him as replacement for Laphi. Eleanor forces Velvet to develop some sense of morality, however small. And while she still tells her party members that they're tools to be used

The game never really draws attention to this. It just happens over time, gradually and naturally. She's still full of burning hatred and is willing to fuck up the world to get her revenge, but at the same time she feels much much less like the borderline animal she was after escaping Titania, and more like a well-rounded person. Demon. Whatever.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

The writing in this game is really good at times. I'm in the middle of the sidequest where Laphicet is trying to make the Omega Elixer to save his friend. It's a doomed venture - everyone knows it, probably even Laphicet. But he needs to try and refuses to give up hope. The game presents this as characterization and development for Laphicet, then ties it into Velvet's completely different motivation in a way that makes sense. Velvet knows that Laphi Prime is not coming back, even if she kills Artorius, but as she explains in one of her rare emotional outbursts, she does it because what else can she possibly do?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any Tales writing that is as nuanced as Berseria's is, with the exception of Zelos from Symphonia. It's good stuff.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Strife2 posted...

I recall this happening to me once. I had a recurring dream since I was a child where I was in a sort or horror movie house, walking through hallways. When I got to the basement, there was a weird sieve/quicksand/slow moving trap kinda thing that kept sucking me forward into it. Usually, I awaken when stuff like falling/driving off bridges/etc. happens, but this dream continues, where I'm almost floating over castles and mountains in a weird dreamscape. I start climbing the tower, reaching the top, only to find myself back in a different home smetting. Sometimes I return to the same house, only to "watch TV" until my brain wakes me up properly.

On the night my paralysis occured, I felt as though I was in an arena. Boxing, wrestling, MMA whatever. I don't think I was performing, but I was somewhere at ringside. The usual padding and stuff they had was gone, so I was on the concrete. It felt as though I got knocked down by something, and that's when the paralysis kicked in. I don't recall the remainder of the dream, but it felt as though I subconsciously dealt with the pulling sensation from the basement, mixed it in with the concrete, and I just shut my body completely down.

I think that beats mine in terms of trippiness by several magnitudes over. Damn dude.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Eventually the hallucinations in reality lessened somewhat. This gave me the motivation I needed to to will myself to be more than a little awake. It was a damn battle. My body really wanted to go keep going back to sleep despite what that would entail - I had to fight every moment to stave that off. Every time I slipped a little back sleep the images would start up again and I was forced to jolt myself back into consciousness. Relief came in a way I wasn't expecting at all. I was looking all around the room to try and find objects I knew where there to remind myself that it was all real, but some of the visions were still there and darkness obscured most of my room. I looked to the side and saw a poster I'd put up recently. I liked the posted a lot, and as someone who didn't really express his interests in ways like that until recently, putting it up had been a positive experience. And thanks to bits of sunlight streaming the the cracks of my covered windows, I could see it. The poster became a grounding element for me that helped me center myself. I was able to remind myself that this was all fake, would end, and then tomorrow I would have fun writing about the experience. After some more looks at the poster to help ground myself further, I let myself go back to sleep. The sensations were still there but much less so, and they soon faded. Somehow slept like a baby after that.

It's hard to describe how messed up you are during sleep paralysis. Think of it as the worst nightmare of your life following you as you awake. You can't move, you can't fight...you're at its mercy. I can't think of more terrifying experience I've had in my lifetime. A part of me is nervous to go to sleep tonight, especially since I have no idea what combination of things I did set it off.

On the plus side, I now have a lot more ideas to use if I ever decide to write a horror story!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

So this is the first time this has happened to me. I know of sleep paralysis and how terrifying it can be but I had thankfully avoided that until now, although a combination of meds and poor sleep could lead to some not-so-great dreams. Last night though...yeah.

It started off as a really weird dream. Surreal, but not anything really awful or anything. Then it got weirder and weirder, and scarier and scarier. Surrealism turned into grotesque imagery based off of some of my biggest fears, hangups, and paranoias. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I can't remember them in detail, but I can recall the broad strokes. There were a lot of faces morphing in out of each other, monstrous figures appearing to menace me before transforming into something else within seconds. Discordant sounds blended in which each other and constantly filled whatever space I was in.. Even more than the actual images themselves was the speed at which they came and went. It was an endless assault on my senses. Eventually it was too much. I tried my hardest to wake up with whatever self-aware parts of my consciousness I had at the time.

And I woke up. Except, I didn't. I knew I was awake and not just dreaming I was awake; I was so worried about that notion that I concentrated as hard as I could to figure whether it was true. I'm 95% sure I wasn't still asleep at the time. It distinctly felt like I was lying in my actual bed. Then I tried to move, and couldn't, no matter how hard I willed my arms and legs to do something, anything. All I could move were eyes. This let me see the grotresque images still appearing in front of me, only this time in my bedroom. Auditory and visual hallucinations picked up where my dreams had left off. Eventually I feel back asleep, then woke up, then fell back asleep, then woke up again. The visions continued throughout this entire process completely uninterruped. I have a distinct memory of looking at the clock while 'awake'. It was 5:32 AM. I fell 'asleep' and experienced a long stream of images and sounds. Woke up. 5:33. Fell asleep. Woke up. 5:34. It stretched on forever and seemed like it would never end. I was legitimately losing my grip on reality at this point .At one point I gained enough motor control to clutch my each arm with its opposite hand and weakly rub them. I think I was trying to give myself a real sensation that would let me know what was true and what wasn't.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

LordoftheMorons posted...

Good piece on Clinton's life post-election:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/hillary-clinton-life-after-election.html

Most interesting part to me:

The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush, who has reported on Clinton for years, tweeted “mea culpa-not so much,” suggesting that the former candidate “blames everyone but self.” Obama-campaign strategist turned pundit David Axelrod gave an interview claiming that while Clinton “said the words ‘I’m responsible’ … everything else suggested that she really doesn’t feel that way.” Joe Scarborough called her comments “pathetic”; David Gregory suggested she was not “taking real responsibility for the fact that she was not what the country wanted.” And in the Daily News, Gersh Kuntzman delivered a column that began, “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.”

...

The unusually prolonged pummeling is partly because Clinton’s Election Day loss was not just hers but the nation’s; her defeat this time left us not with an Obama presidency but with an out-of-control administration led by a man so inept — and so reviled — that even (some) Republicans are voicing concerns. The nation is grasping for a way to understand how we got here, and blaming Clinton wholly and neatly takes the heat off everyone else who contributed: from the critics who derided her supporters as empty-headed shills to those supporters who were cowed into secret Facebook groups; from the journalists who treated Trump as a ratings-pumping sideshow and Clinton as the suspiciously presumptive president to all of us who permitted cheerful stories about America’s progress on gender and race to blot out the real and lingering inequities in this country.


I think it's a pretty good about why Clinton continues to be so hated. People who regret voting for Trump, and people who didn't vote for Trump but wished less people did, want a scapegoat. And rather than admit that the country as a whole fucked up big time, it's easier to scapegoat Clinton. Because if she's such an awful canditate who deserves so much ire, then it makes it easier to justify so many people voting against her. Because it was a close, difficult choice, and voting Trump was reasonable at the time. That's easier to swallow than a large portion of the country being some combination of dumb, racist, and/or sexist.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

First Regenerator Encounter
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I willl say this about the whole 'villains' thing:
you're not a 100% villain, but you're definitely not some sort of misunderstood hero. Your party doesn't really understand or care about the concept of 'collateral damage'.

Where I'm at, the guy I'm after legitimately seems like more of a hero than me, although the main character has extremely good reasons to be pissed at him.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Trump would care about riots, but I do not believe he would ever back down from anything ever unless physically restrained.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

SupremeZero posted...

KamikazePotato posted...

So here's something I've been thinking about. Is there any counter to obstruction of justice? Like Trump and his buds were just subpoenad for all Russia related correspondence. What if they just...don't? Can you actually do anything about the people in power repeatedly saying no? What happens when an arrest warrant goes out for someone who reasonably can't be arrested if they resist?

"No, we will not comply with the law" is another one of those "Asking for riots" kinds of things.

Is it really? What happens when FOX convinces 1/3 of the country that it's totally fine?
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

A Dark Room is the one clicker game I can recommend to people. It's fun but won't destroy your life, actually evolves as the game progresses, and has an ending.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

So here's something I've been thinking about. Is there any counter to obstruction of justice? Like Trump and his buds were just subpoenad for all Russia related correspondence. What if they just...don't? Can you actually do anything about the people in power repeatedly saying no? What happens when an arrest warrant goes out for someone who reasonably can't be arrested if they resist?
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I like Kamoana though
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I'm one of the casuals that always sticks with main character. Totally fine with that right now, Velvet is great.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

If subsequent games keep the same level of quality then I think the one thing they still really need to fix is environmental design. Dungeons and areas can just be...kind of lifeless. That would be really hard to do without a bigger budget though.

Quick party rankings:
Velvet > Eleanor > Laphicet > Eizen > Magilou > Rokurou

They all range from good to very good. I also like that the party is a bit smaller than in previous games. It lets each character have more time to shine.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

BK_Sheikah00 posted...

I think the true blight on the english dub is Kamoana

I think her (his? I honestly forget) voice was fitting. It's pretty much what an unstable little kid turned into a monster would sound like.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I like Berseria a lot more than Xillia. Xillia wasn't bad, it just sort of lacked punch.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

That's good to hear. My biggest issue with Vesperia is that the last 1/3 was more or less a complete waste of time.

And yeah, I love all the voice actors except for Bienfu. It's like he sucked out all their malevolence into himself, leaving everyone else with a great performance and him with...that.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I would be okay with Bienfu if he didn't have that voice. What even is that.

Magilou is probably my second-least favorite in the party, which is saying a lot because she's pretty great. She's had absolutely zero story relevance so far though, hoping that will change.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I've been okay with every mascot before this. Bienfu is just...why.

Also hahaha I'm the Calamity
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Heh, figures it's a Velvet thing. That fits considering the story!

I do have one real complaint though: who in the world greenlit Bienfu's voice? Thank god you can skip specific lines without having to skip the whole scene.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Enjoying it a lot!

One thing I will comment on is the battle system. It feels...I don't know, busted? Not necessarily in a bad way, just weird. Once you learn how to keep the pressure up, dodge/guard at the right times, and weave your moves together correctly you can murder the crap out of pretty much anything. I just got into a plot battle with an enemy twice my level and if the game hadn't taken me out of fight to do some cutscenes, I'm pretty sure I could have won. And I'm playing on Hard! It barely feels like an RPG battle system. Which is fine, I like action game and it's fun to DEVOUR enemies, just not what I expected.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

No one told me this game had a flying surfboard.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Summary of ice cream timeline

1. Trump implodes over a period of several days
2. People laugh at him, the usual suspects can't defend Trump so they don't
3. Ice cream thing happens
4. People laugh at him, the usual suspects come out in force to talk about how ridiculous liberals are and the usual rigamarole
5. People forget about the ice cream thing because it was just a funny scenario that didn't matter, usual suspects continue to bring it up because they still can't defend the important things Trump does
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Velvet is my favorite main character in a long time.

I actually don't care about attachments. I find them more distracting than anything else. I still feel obligated to open those Katz chests though. I have a problem
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I just think that everything has been said at this point. It's talking to a brick wall and you guys are even commenting on him when he's not even in the topic! Don't get Literally Obsessed (tm). I hope you realize that feeding someone like that attention only makes things worse.

I'll stop there so I don't perpetuate the cycle, but yeah.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Music is a pretty big thing for me too and it doesn't bug me. It works well enough in-game, I probably just won't be listening to it much outside of the game.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

You guys should stop responding to Seph. Do you really think talking to him is worth anything right now? Honestly it's getting a bit annoying and saturating these topics
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I'm in the middle parts I think, and while the pace is definitely slower compared to the beginning where stuff is constantly happening, it's still keeping up an alright pace.

And yeah, really good kid character. I really like the entire cast which is rare for me.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

35 or do hours in and unless it implodes from here on out it will easily be my favorite Tales game. Characters are strong. Battle system is jarring at first but gets really fun once you get the hang of it. Story is great, and I mean great in general, not just by Tales standards. Worst part is probably the music but it's not bad, just forgettable.

Shame that Zestiria poisoned the well and made it sell poorly!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

wg64Z posted...

Now!
This is it!
Now is the time to choose!
Die and be free of pain,
Or live and fight your sorrow!
Now is the time to shape your story.
Your fate is in your hands!

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

2001- 3.81%

Man, pictures mean a lot huh?


Adjusting this contest seems like a fun exercise. I had a lot of fun adjusting 2015 although it was a huge pain in the ass sometimes. 2013 was like 10x easier.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.