Lurker > trdl23

Yoshiki

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Snake topics bringing back users who hadnt posted in months/years

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Rayleigh

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Okay. Waitlisted. Not quite what I was hoping, but getting put on the waitlist early is still a good sign... I think.

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Up

I haven't forgotten this, but grad school apps have taken priority over everything lately

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Fffffff I was told I would get the decision at 5 p.m. and now it's 6:10

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Nope! There's a small chance of getting them in normal boosters too. The guy sitting two down from me got alternate-art Oko. The pod was stacked.

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Drafted paper Eldraine this evening and cracked a foil storybook art of Brazen Borrower p1p1. Feels quite good, man.

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Have a draft done for Harvard and hate it. I need to redo it completely.

Tomorrow is the big day for Yale... dear god Im nervous.

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Bloodborne imo. I wish I could have fully played it myself but its a masterpiece.

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So I have decided to trim down my cube to 540. It was just way too diluted.

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Spirit

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Thanksgiving (since at this point in our culture its just Christmas Halftime)

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The Star Wars Holiday Special

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Obrov

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Yoshiki

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Up

Might get to #20 and #19 tomorrow

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As a guy who IS a big musical theater and opera guy, you are 10000% correct. Book of Mormon is phenomenal, and I'll admit I was one of those snobs who was stunned by its quality and success.

I also quite liked If/Then (which is criminally unknown outside of dedicated musical lovers). Kinky Boots tried really hard to get into the zeitgeist you describe -- it had big marketing, name recognition, and huge success on Broadway -- but to me, it felt a bit like Rent where the hype overshot the quality of the story, and the songs were simply passable.

Kinky Boots was still better than Rent, though, because everything is better than Rent.

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Winona

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Yeah Labrys was good. They did my boy Yosuke super wrong though, and thats unforgivable.

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P4As writing didnt do the P4 cast many favors (ironically, it did well for the P3 crew), and I wish it werent canon.

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I will get you on the spreadsheet tonight.

Also, how do I set up a CWLS for us?

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trdl23 posted...

-A post-game boss in a series with notoriously bad post-games and this was back from before I was in high school
-The only boss on the list that is the first boss in their game, but they earn every ounce of hate you and your party members have for them

And another one:

-His grievance was legitimate. His heart was good. But only one more person could escape, and it was him or one of us.

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This Secret Lair thing is bad and WotC should feel bad.

They wont, but they should.

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Persona in general does an awful job of portraying non-heterosexuality, which is super disappointing and sticks out because it covers so many other aspects of people better than any other RPG on the market. P5 is the worst among them. I think thats more of a reflection of Japanese society than anything: Persona games are shamelessly hyper-Japanese even via localization, and despite what yaoi and yuri manga would have you believe, homosexuality is highly stigmatized.

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It's pretty great when your literal bro is also a figurative bro.

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xp1337 posted...

But if you're just talking transfer level/inventory then .hack (both the IMOQ and G.U. series) has that covered, for instance. I assumed you meant some of the more unique twists TLA had with its transfer.

I didn't get too far into it in the write-up, but yeah, there's of course more to uncover there.

I wish Dark Dawn hadn't been so disappointing. Then again, the Dullahan fight in Dark Dawn is a bit less brutal due to the game's mechanics -- but it also has the badass aspect of Dullahan summoning YOUR summons against you with YOUR Djinn.

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I never got to play RD. Did it import your items, too? Not that items usually matter as much in a FE game, but one of the coolest parts of the Golden Sun transfer was that some Best-in-Slot gear in TLA endgame came from GS1 only.

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Let's be real, Panic! is just Brendon Urie and has been for a while. He's still fantastic, though.

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Blob

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The ol' cheddar cheese of Summon Rush? I got splatted for my troubles. Seal Dullahan's Psynergy with Rime? Eventually I got Charon'd and screwed. Eventually, I realized I had to change my course and fight him straight-up, mano a mano. I think it took me a full hour from the start of my final run to actually clearing it, but man, what a rush. I have since learned that there are actual cheese strats, but I'm glad I didn't know that at the time. Beating it blind and claiming the Iris summon -- the most powerful summon in the game that is basically irrelevant once you get it -- meant something more to me because I persevered on my own, and I got to brag to all my friends in 7th grade about how I managed to beat the big bad Dullahan first.

...Except Andrew beat it two days before I did.

Damn it.

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#21: The Keeper of Light (Dullahan, Golden Sun: The Lost Age)

If you want the sun's power, show me your own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qpGTPWlL0

In middle school, my close circle of friends were fiends for the Golden Sun series. It was a full-fledged RPG "kinda like Final Fantasy" that we could play on our shiny Game Boy Advance SPs that we were so proud of. My friend Andrew even made a guide right here on GameFAQs -- or at least that's what I remember, but I couldn't find it on the Golden Sun TLA walkthrough/guide page. In any case, GS:TLA is the game that first brought me to GameFAQs, so it gets a shout-out here no matter what.

Golden Sun did something that was unprecedented at the time (and I'm not sure if it's even been done in the modern era) -- it let you import your data from Golden Sun to TLA, but you don't get your old party until midway through the game because you're playing as the "B team" in the first parts of TLA. 12-year-old me thought this was mind-blowing, and by the time we were approaching endgame, naturally Andrew had run numbers and calculations to give us a guide to optimal gear for each character, how to get them, and how to game the RNG in a certain area to guarantee rare drops. A decade later, Andrew would be the one who convinced me to attend the college I got my bachelor's in. Andrew's fucking awesome, is what I'm saying.

GS's story was "fine" in hindsight but not much to write home about. On the other hand, the combat system, where certain elemental spirits could equip to each party member and change both their stats and psynergy, was kickass, and the puzzles were really fun! I don't even like puzzles, usually. However, the coolest parts to us were the hidden super-bosses: Deadbeard from the original game, a nightmare of a ghost pirate, and then three more in the open world of TLA: Valukar, Sentinel, and the Star Magician. Valukar and Sentinel were way too easy for the hype, but Star Magician was a hell of a tactical fight that I thought would be the best in the series.

No, Andrew told me. There's one more, but even to access its dungeon, I needed every single djinn from both games. GS has a TON of Points of No Return, so I needed to do an entirely new play-through of both games to get into the Anemos Inner Sanctum. What followed was a brutal and thrilling dungeon that would have made my Top Dungeons list had it been selected in my poll. Is it nostalgia? Probably, but hell, I was 12 and this was the first time I'd ever gotten into a game this hard.

The reason I put so much setup is to demonstrate why Dullahan means so much to me. This was my first ever "endgame superboss," and he lived up to the name. Three actions per round, brutal melee hits, the ability to use a summon (no other enemy in any game can summon besides the PCs), and the ability to shred your stat buffs at a glance. Said summon had a decent chance of auto-killing a character, and he had a single-target spell that did the same. But the most brutal part was clearly the Djinn Storm. Not only does putting all your Djinn on Standby ruin any Summon plans you might have, it also shreds your stat and class boosts, making you lose HP, PP, and even a lot of your psynergy if you were mixing djinn. Mix in some insane HP regeneration and his inability to go OOM, and it was a long grind as I tried gimmick after gimmick.

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Im still not satisfied that she did! But weve already laid out our positions on this before, and I doubt either of us are budging.

I will at least agree that Kanjis dungeon is definitely the worst one in a game filled with lackluster dungeons.

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Yeah, weve had this discussion before, and while I think that was the intent, the writing was clumsy and hollow. It felt far more like resignation and/or staying at the inn for the sake of everyone else but still sacrificing her ambition and agency as a result.

As for S. Kanji... wasnt really planning to get into this, but the insecurities he demonstrated resonated with me personally. I grew up doing theatre and musicals; I played sports, too, but my lack of strength was always clear. I sure as hell wasnt manly, especially compared to my state-wrestling all-star brother. It was only my freakish height that kept me from being ridiculed on the sports field or bullied in school. Hell, my parents had to give me the its okay if youre gay talk twice because even they were convinced I was deep in the closet.

Without good friends and family support, it could have eaten away at me too. The doubts took a while to clear regardless. Thank god they never festered the way Kanjis did.

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Lets put a couple more hints out there besides the bonus boss one (which will obviously be the next):

-A post-game boss in a series with notoriously bad post-games and this was back from before I was in high school
-The only boss on the list that is the first boss in their game, but they earn every ounce of hate you and your party members have for them

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Talirah

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Won't someone, anyone, please accept me...? (Shadow Kanji, Persona 4)

What does it mean to be "a guy"? What does it mean to be "manly"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=125MzeECtXQ

And here we come to what I think is the most misinterpreted boss on our list, the flamboyant Shadow Kanji himself. Persona 4 is my second-favorite video game of all time because its cast is so well realized. The fact that almost all of your bosses are their Shadows is a major contribution. It's one thing to have hints at your party members' deep fears and insecurities -- it's quite another to have them manifest in such a way as to beat your face in.

Oh, and if you haven't played Persona 4, what the hell are you doing with your life? Get it now. I think it's on PSN. It's good shit. I'll spoiler tag the below, just in case, though the first paragraph itself was a bit spoiler-y.

Yosuke's shadow manifests from his selfishness and frustration with a new rural-town life that bores him to tears. Yukiko's shadow manifests from her hatred at being powerless to make her own choices for her career and life (and incidentally why her social link is the worst in the game, don't @ me). What of Kanji's then?

Plebs on the internet: "Well it's because he's secretly gay, duh!"
Me, an intellectual: "...Not necessarily."

Reread that intro dialogue again. What is the Shadow hung up about? It's not about how he actually loves men -- it's about how he despises women. But as with the other shadows, it's an exaggeration of a deeper insecurity: that Kanji, who enjoys cute fluffy things, sewing, and knitting, is too un-manly for a girl to take seriously. His status as a tough-guy delinquent is a front to overcompensate for it. Add his surprising attraction to Naoto, who he currently believes is a man, and you get someone so confused by his sexuality, gender roles, and desire to be desirable that it turns into a monster that figuratively beats you in the head with male sex symbols.

Then it literally beats you in the head with male sex symbols.

Could it be that he is gay (or at least bi, considering he still gets the doki-dokis for Naoto when he finds out her actual chromosome makeup)? Yeah. But despite what this shadow would have you believe, it's not a guarantee.

Okay, enough armchair psychoanalysis of vidya gaem characters. Let's talk about the fight. Most people think of Shadow Yukiko as P4's "wake-up call boss," but for me, it was one boss afterward. See, this is the first time you have to deal with a boss that has adds, and the Nice Guy and Tough Guy make a fairly simple boss much, much more tedious. In the video above they take down the Tough Guy first, but that's because it's in Very Hard where he hits like a truck. In normal mode, the Nice Guy is the larger problem, unbeknownst to dumbass me who thought "hit the guy that actually deals damage" was the right call.

P4 was my first Atlus JRPG, and Shadow Kanji in particular teaches you how to approach big fights in the Persona and SMT series. By this point you've learned the weakness system pretty well, but unlike most other JRPGs where temporary status buffs aren't worth the action economy lost, playing with your -kajas and, just as importantly, preventing the enemies' -kajas is crucial. Guess what Nice Guy does? If you guessed "puts -kajas and protective barriers on the other enemies," congratulations, you're smarter than I was. In Golden he even cures Dizzy from the Tough Guy to boot. Yeah, I got wrecked.

For story, Kanji is one of the most nuanced shadows, precisely because he screams to be the opposite. For gameplay, he teaches you to git gud for the trials to come. I was surprised he's so low on this list, but that just means even better entries are yet to come.

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Bump, no real updates to report.

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Come watch me make an ass of myself on stream!

https://www.twitch.tv/grandfinalsgaming

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Yoshiki

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NFUN posted...

she attacked them for refusing to sacrifice somebody

^

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Okos price drop lasted all of like 4 days.

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E come vivo? Vivo!

So glad this brought me back to the board. I hope I have half as much passion for anything I do as you do for horror, Snake. Looking forward to next year already!

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E come vivo? Vivo!

I got mine too. Seb <3 <3 <3

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Atrocita

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Added!

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Up

Exhausted, will try to get to this tonight but don't count on it. Definitely tomorrow at any rate.

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Akira so damn good

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Let us know your character name so I can put you on the table!

Got my mining up to 70 last night. Vomited a ton of Gil to do it. Hopefully it will pay off long-term.

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E come vivo? Vivo!

Winona

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E come vivo? Vivo!