Ben_H

Wind Waker and F-Zero GX, mostly. I can't really think of any others that I'd want. I guess any of the other HD remasters they did on Wii U would make sense too since we know they already have the tools and knowhow to do those types of ports relatively easily.

An updated version of Viewtiful Joe, just in general, would rule. I replayed that game last year and it still holds up. That game still looks great but the textures, etc. are what age it. The base game itself still plays good enough that it doesn't feel old so a redo of the various graphical elements is all that it needs really.

Yeah, it's unfortunate for the devs but like... how could they possibly have known the game would blow up as huge as it has? Right after release they said that it already had sold something like five times what their highest pie in the sky projections for sales would be. And the game's kept selling even more and getting even bigger since then.

It's similar to Baldur's Gate 3 in that the people making it had no way of knowing that they'd need way more resources than they did to keep up with how popular the game was (though in BG3's case it wasn't server infrastructure, it was getting overwhelmed with support and bug requests along with massive demand for console versions that weren't originally a priority. They're still cranking out major patch after major patch. They just put one out last week. I doubt prior to release Larian thought that their game would sell so well that it would pressure Microsoft to change game Series S/Series X equal functionality requirements to fast track getting the game on Xbox). Both games completely blew up out of nowhere and sold far beyond the most optimistic projections that the people making them had.

I doubt I'll end up playing this game because I don't really play shooters anymore but every stream of it that I've seen makes it seem like a lot of fun for people who like this kind of thing. Brad Shoemaker did a stream with Will Smith over on the Nextlander channel and they clearly were having a blast the whole time. Brad said that the most fun way to play the game was to go for the dumb action movie-style choice/tactic whenever possible and it seemed to work out for them whenever they did that. This game seems like yet another game like BG3 that rewards you for teamwork and coming up for the most fun, creative way for handling problems. As it turns out, games that encourage you to have fun in a creative way sell well.

I wonder as a proportion of money invested which has made Sony more money, this game or Spiderman 2? This game likely required a small fraction of the investment they did in Spiderman 2 and has from the sounds of things sold millions of copies at a cheaper price. Maybe the big publishers will finally learn that if you don't treat games like they're a strictly planned out packaged good (*cough* Kotick) and let studios flex their creative muscles on things that play to their strengths they can put out games that might actually be better products overall. Maybe they'll also learn that pricing games so high scares away people from giving things a try or talking their friends into getting the game too.

edit: to put into perspective how huge this game is on PC, it has now passed Horizon Zero Dawn in number of Steam reviews. It also has more reviews than Spider-Man Remastered and just passed God of War in terms of number of reviews as well. Given Steam reviews are generally a good indicator on sales, this game is likely to comfortably be the best selling Playstation Studios game on PC within a week or two. Completely wild.

I did totally forget to mention the new voice acting and the sheer volume of it. It's excellent!

I got used to the new voices almost immediately. Most of them sound quite similar to me (I fired up my one of FES saves from last year to compare) and those that are different generally are improvements over the old ones. The only one that stuck out as quite different for me was Akihiko but I stopped noticing after a few hours. The new Fuuka voice is so much better (still sounds like Fuuka but not delivered in a monotone). Also, the Tanaka voice actor definitely saw what the job was and went for it 110% (Tanaka's s-link is definitely the best payoff for having fully voiced s-links). Tanaka in this game sounds so incredibly sleazy and awful. Also yes, Elizabeth is still perfect. They must have known that of all the voices to not mess up, that one is probably the most important given how iconic it was in the old games among Persona fans (I'm on team Elizabeth too. Margaret is too aloof to ever attempt to do high jump).

I've just been working through the various teammate pseudo-s-link thingies now that I've finished off leveling up the three social skills and yeah, so far they're generally great. They somehow made Ken not completely insufferable, which is quite a feat.

I think one of the saddest and most frustrating things about this game happens at the start when they do the intro cinematic and list off the many, many Ubisoft studios that worked on this game in some capacity. What a waste of so many talented, creative people. Imagine what all of those people could have done had they worked on something else instead of this designed-by-committee nightmare of a game? That this game that took this much work from so many people just to be shoved out the door half-baked to fulfill a contractual obligation is so irritating. What a waste.

This is the eternal question none of these executives will answer. They all act as if they are victims to their gambles going wrong but they were the ones in charge when these decisions were made in the first place so ultimately it should be on them if things don't go well.

For our whole lives, we've been told that CEOs and other corporate executives get the exorbitant pay they receive because they have extremely high pressure jobs where they are accountable for decisions that could cause the company problems and potentially harm workers. Yet for the last 15-20 years, we seldom have seen any executives in American companies truly suffer consequences when they make massive mistakes or mismanage their company. In the tech and games industry layoffs of the last two years, we've only seen a small handful of executives face consequences for what was clearly an extremely dangerous and stupid gamble (Nadella and Pichai are still CEOs of Microsoft and Google respectively despite both companies laying off tens of thousands of workers over the last two years, for example. Both were running those companies in 2020 when they did the stupid bet that 2020-style growth would continue perpetually). The executive class has essentially transferred all accountability onto the workers of companies while those workers had no say in what the company did at all in the first place. When things go wrong, the workers suffer while the executives still get paid excessively for what was supposed to be the extra personal risk and pressure associated with the job.

I'm pretty far into this game now. Apparently quite a bit further than most people judging by the Steam achievement percentages. My previous comment that this game is an extremely good remake still stands.

The most impressive thing is that Tartarus still feels like Tartarus from the old games despite how different it looks. The early concerns that they were going to trivialize Tartarus definitely did not come to pass (I just spent 4 hours in it last night. It can comfortably occupy entire evenings, just like in the later parts of FES when fatigue becomes a non-issue. I use it as podcast listening time while I play through it). It's still tricky and requires a lot of time to finish along with planning for SP. They do add some things to add to the variety of it but for the most part you are still primarily exploring it like you did in the old game.

Fears that they changed too much and Persona 5-ized the game are also wide of the mark (this was my biggest fear. I found Persona 5 Royal way too easy), at least what I've seen so far anyway. I'm getting to the part of Tartarus where enemies use Hama and Mudo spells and like FES, you aren't protected from it like in the later Persona games (S-links in P3R work like S-links in P3 FES. There aren't perks to getting them like the teammate S-links in Persona 4 and 5 that protect you from insta-death spells). Tartarus is still ruthless in the second half of the game. The only difference is if you die to an instant kill spell, you don't lose an hour or more of progress like you did in FES (that happened to me several times on my last playthrough of FES. It sucked).

Fusing is streamlined compared to FES but given how much of a chore it was in that game, it makes sense they'd do this. They didn't make fusion completely break in a way that allowed you to trivialize all combat like they did in P5R, but instead kept a simpler system that is essentially a streamlined version of the P3 one (It reminds me of Persona 4 Golden's fusing). They didn't change much about the game at all really compared to FES outside of getting rid of a few problematic things that needed getting rid of (the beach scene is rewritten, etc.) and smoothing out the roughest parts of the gameplay. They instead fleshed out the weakest parts of the old games (you running out of things to do in the evening, fusion, invisible timers on S-links, etc.) while keeping the strongest parts as is.

I do actually think this game could serve as a definitive version of Persona 3/Persona 3 FES much like Persona 4 Golden is for Persona 4. This game is still Persona 3. It feels like Persona 3. It plays like Persona 3. It sounds like Persona 3 (the new music fits in perfectly with the old music and the remade versions of songs are all great). The game's whole vibe is exactly the same. The game's updates feel much more in line with what was done in Persona 4 Golden than a reimagining and rebalancing of the game to make it more approachable for people whose first Persona was Persona 5. It's finally a version of Persona 3 that I could actually recommend to people. I loved FES but the last 25 hours of it had a lot of genuinely infuriating aspects to it (see previous comment about losing hours of progress to insta-death spells. Also boss fights that could one-hit kill you and require you to button through 10 minutes of text to get back to to try again, spending hours and hours trying fusion combinations, losing S-links because of invisible clocks the game didn't warn you about, etc.) that made it impossible to recommend. This game fixes all of the worst things while keeping all of the things I loved about the old game and staying true to what the old game was.

The only thing I'd change is swap when "When The Moon's Reaching Out Stars" and the new evening song that plays when you're at the mall or the strip mall at night play. In my brain, "When The Moon's Reaching Out Stars" is the evening song.

When I posted in one of the other Persona 3 threads about what I would want to see in a Persona 3 remake, this is exactly what I had in mind. It's honestly almost perfect.

... I still name all my Persona characters Charlie Tunoku. I had a crisis when playing Persona Q because Charlie didn't fit so I had to go with Chuck Tunoku.

I've actually rewatched the large majority of the Endurance Run slowly over the last year or so (I'm on episode 125). Parts of it have definitely not aged well (Vinny has said as much too. He also said he knows some of their jokes during this period were not in good taste and that they were trying too hard to be funny at times. It was definitely a different time and both Jeff and Vinny are obviously quite different now) but overall it's still a lot of fun. It was pretty amusing to watch the early episodes where they thought it would be fine to do 10-20 minutes an episode until they realized it would take over a year to complete if they stuck to that type of timeline.

One interesting thing about the Endurance Run is that it's such a time capsule for 2009. This whole thing happened during the widespread shift to smartphones (iPhones technically existed prior but they didn't catch on until the iPhone 3/3G, which is what all of GB got in early 2009). In the early episodes they always had to ask Ryan to look things up for them on his computer. Then one day Jeff mentions "I have this iPhone here" and started looking things up himself (until intern Drew eventually showed up and helped guide them using a FAQ when needed). They also talk about their day-to-day lives a lot. It's almost a mini-podcast at times, especially on fusing or dungeon episodes (Vinny still uses the term "fusing episode" regularly. He just called his Cyberpunk 2077 side quest streams he's been doing fusing episodes).

The Episode 50 drama was wild. People were so worried and I remembered folks (myself included) watching the forum closely to see if Vinny had posted any updates whether the file was saved then very late in the evening he confirmed that it was saved and everyone was relieved. Vinny to this day still refers to Episode 50 when he mentions being worried about losing recordings.

Another interesting bit not mentioned was that it became super obvious that Jeff was so heavily invested in the Endurance Run that he started a second playthrough of it on his own time so he could make sure that nothing would stop the Endurance Run from finishing. By around episode 100 he starts making these casual references to maybe knowing what's about to happen then eventually makes it more explicit that he's playing alongside their playthrough.

I remember back when Endurance Run was first was being released I was doubtful I would like it (the anime-ish look put me off). I didn't watch it until about two weeks in. I was bored one day so I tried watching an episode and ended up watching the entire series that was available up to that point and then it became appointment viewing the second I came home from school. Then I went on a quest to buy Persona 4. Online ordering for niche games was extremely expensive in Canada at the time and I didn't have a credit card so I had to hope I could find Persona 4 locally. One local shop had it on backorder for $80 which was very expensive (at the time Canada's dollar was much stronger than the USD so that was like 60% markup over the usual full price of games) but I ordered it anyway and also bought a copy of Persona 3 FES and a PS2. I've been thinking about this time period a lot lately as I've been playing Persona 3 Reload and using an iPod I bought in April of 2009 again.

Anyhow, I could write all day about the Endurance Run. It was so much fun and made me realize that I did in fact still like RPGs, a genre I had played as a kid but had mostly left behind. Now I primarily play RPGs again, partly as a result of Persona and the Endurance Run.

Please be careful when casting bufu.

Yeah this seems like something that will come to a head sooner or later because of how explicitly anti-consumer it is. Similar protections need to show up for other forms of content, including phone apps and the like too. A recent example that affected me was this: I bought the paid version a guitar tuner app for my phone several years ago. It was great. I used it a bunch. One day when I went to use it again, suddenly the app I had paid for as it had existed was gone and had been "updated". With the new update, many of the features I had paid for were behind a paywall that required a monthly subscription and I was locked out of the features I had paid for. I emailed them about it and was basically offered a free month of subscription. I just gave up and started using a real tuner again instead.

This one was one of those "how long have you been a Giant Bomb fan" ones.

Everything they've added for Koromaru is delightful.

Koromaru additions spoilers: