chainreaction01

@andythemez: For me it was about 8 hours I think, taking 2 days to get to the treasure room with the first day ending just past the Chapel. Combat is definitely ruthless with regards to SP usage, really punishing not going for weaknesses. One thing for the first dungeon that is particularly brutal is that for the first half of it, you run into a lot of guys that are weak to Zio. The issue there is that the party member who can cast Zio also has the lowest SP pool. Reminds me a lot of SMT4 though, where in the early game you need to more or less kill the enemy before they get a turn if you want to live. This ended up forcing me to use a bunch of healing items instead of Dia for healing, which I think is a good thing actually. Really makes shopping around for the special healing items feel meaningful. Likewise, it ups the value on Physical 'Spells' since even the first ones do way more damage than just melee. Working more around them instead of spells made my SP pool go way longer during the back half of my first day.

And also, personality traits feel painfully slow to even get the first rank, and I'm already running into roadblocks with them which makes the problem that much more noticeable.

The mall setting of 1 really makes it stand out more than 2's casino setting in my opinion. Just something about the amount of variety in shops, that is still very natural due to the environment, that makes the toybox aspect of it very fun. However, from a playability standpoint 2 is far and away the better game for one soul reason, the survivors. That is to say, the survivors in 2 are actually capable of following directions, getting places, and not getting lost behind area transitions. In 1, they are the dumbest motherfuckers why won't you just keep walking stop shooting give me that gun what are you even doing you piece of shit.

Hard to say off the top of my head but the first that comes to mind for me is always Ping Pong. Just such a good hype opening to get you pumped for some ping-pong.

A close second would be Tatami Galaxy. Unlike Ping Pong, this song does a really good job at invoking the sort of feeling the show has. It's a day in the life of this dude and all his weird friends/acquaintances. It feels happy but at the same time there is a longing for more.

And of course, any JoJo opening. In particular, Sono Chi no Sadame is probably my favorite out of all of them. Definitely top three contender for overall favorite as well.

First off, I still love this game to death. I actually replayed it fairly recently just so I could experience it again. With that being said, maaaaan does this game have some jank and a half. Mostly just in the way the game mechanics work, its a weird split between the Diablo style action-adventure and your more standard click'n'swing gameplay. If you can put up with it, and it's not that bad to be honest, everything else still holds up. Sure, you're not getting modern Witcher VO and graphics, but the acting is still fairly decent and the story and characters hold up great. I'd say give it a try, but be prepared to lower the bar quite a bit.

While I can't really offer any advice on overcoming an aversion to violence, I will say that the end of Akira is pretty damn gruesome. Not only that, but there is a lot of emotional investment into the characters and seeing... well what happens to them is pretty dark. For that matter, many anime that want to depict any sort of graphic violence will do so on an extreme scale. Just a matter of the general tendency for anime to exaggerate things. If you have a more difficult time handling that sort of thing, the best I can offer is do a quick google search and see if the show has any sort of infamous reputation for extreme violence. Either way, there's still plenty of anime hallmarks that don't approach anywhere near those levels of violence.

@kogx: You eventually can re-level weapons to get moves back. In terms of diversity, I think it depends on what the character is. Generally speaking, I focus on their melee and main spell type. The rest of their skills we be support moves (Say a 2-2-2 split). However, some characters are better to diversify a ton since they are built to be more general spellcasters. Honestly though, it all depends on what sort of party setup you have in mind. With the way party switching works, I like being able to swap in a set of specialists rather than having a bunch of generalists.

I always want to main a Heavy Bowgun but ammo management, in terms of gathering, has always been a pain in the butt in my experience. Hunting horn is always fun though, and I like some of the changes they made to it in this game based off of the demo.

I would break one leg over one arm in a heartbeat, but two legs? No way. In a survival situation where I'm looking to get out alive I need to be able to get around and, in the worse case, outrun something. That's not even to mention the amount of harmful bullshit close to the ground that you can no longer step over. Now, you have to slowly drag your way through all of it with your hands/arms. The only time where I would break legs over arms is if I had readily available resources and my goal was survival by living, not escaping. In that case, I could put my arms to some serious work which would outvalue my legs.

Well nukes are the Giant-est of Bombs.

I only see those at Aldi here in the U.S Midwest but yea it's pretty much the same as everyone else, put in a quarter to get the cart and you get it back when you return it. It's supposed to keep costs down since you don't need a guy who's job it is to wrangle carts down.