MisterEyeballs

I didn't cry but I honestly wanted to. When the last round of What the Dub ended and there were a few seconds of awkward silence as no one knew what to say, I got close. Everything just kinda felt empty in that moment. Ugh. Jeff spending the rest of the stream making jokes about them coming back didn't make it easier.

I think the only thing keeping me from getting truly sad about this is that I'm actually excited to see what the future holds.

I finished the game a couple days ago. The more tedious parts of the game, which I was now playing for the third time, like Okumura's palace and Shido's palace, were a slog, but the gameplay improvements and extra content sprinkled throughout were enjoyable enough.

Then I got to the new stuff and I was seriously blown away. Yoshizawa and Dr. Maruki are both incredible characters, and their stories were presented fantastically. In general I feel like the writing in all the new content is better than anything in the original game. The third semester fits right into the story, is conceptually great, and feels like such a natural continuation/ending of P5 that it almost feels like the game is finally complete. Yoshizawa might be my favorite Persona character, which kinda automatically puts her up there in my favorite game characters.

BTW, I acquired the soundtrack and the song that plays during the dance scene with Yoshizawa (great song) is called "wish come true", which suddenly gave that scene a lot more meaning to me and made it pretty sad. In retrospect it feels like the one moment that Sumire achieved her dream of letting Kasumi live on through her, by having her dance in front of all those people including her (boy)friend with everyone cheering her on.

Overall, Royal doesn't really fix my biggest problems with Persona 5 (pacing, everything drags around the middle, homophobia) but all the gameplay changes made it more fun and all the new story content was fantastic. Persona 5 was already one of my favorite games despite its flaws, and everything they did to it in Royal feels essential.

I finally started watching anime over the last year and a half, so I've just been burning through a lot of amazing shows. I've actually been keeping a running tier list of what I've seen for fun.

In terms of stuff that actually came out this year, I have to say The Promised Neverland is my favorite. I love the characters, and the show is just unbelievably tense and scary. I read the manga as well, and I'm so excited for the show to continue. It might not be as unique going forward, but I love where they go with the themes.

Mob Psycho 100 II, Demon Slayer, and Dr. Stone have also been fantastic. Kaguya-sama is really fun too.

A couple years ago I would've said I want it to be more like Destiny, but now I actually think it might be better for them to not change the formula too much. Whatever the structure of the game ends up being, I'll probably be fine with it.

It needs to have much better shooting and I would like them to overhaul the way character progression worked (maybe get rid of the 4 characters thing altogether) but that's not a deal breaker for me.

The tone and writing could be a problem. Honestly, I really hope they make it more like Borderlands 1 in that regard. I liked how jokey Borderlands 2 was when it came out, but I got sick of that shtick (in pretty much all games) pretty quickly. I really didn't like the Pre-Sequel at all, partly for that reason.

Whatever it is I'll probably play it and reasonably enjoy it.

@silversaint: I've never had Origin Access or EA Access. It's so weird. I wonder how many people have codes and don't even know about it.

Okay so I have no idea how this happened but I went here and my EA account had 3 friend codes to give out even though I didn't have demo access myself and didn't preorder. I used one of them on myself and I have access now. Unfortunately I need to give the other two to my friends but I wanted to let everyone know to check that link to see if you have friend codes for some reason like I did.

Hate to be the first beggar but if anyone would be willing to send me a referral link I would greatly appreciate it! The friend codes apparently aren't platform-specific so any platform would work.

EDIT: Got a code, as I say in my later posts.

This is definitely something I've thought a lot about as I've gotten way more into Japanese games and a select few anime recently. The place I'm at now is that you just have to be willing to criticize media that you love. Honestly I think it's just a way healthier way to enjoy things, to recognize that everything has problems.

I love Persona, so I want it to be as good as possible. And less homophobia and misogyny would make it a lot better. I love My Hero Academia, and I would love it more if it wasn't pervy and actually gave important roles to its female characters more often.

And I will never buy into the "it's just a different culture" argument. We're not allowed to criticize something if a lot of people are okay with it? Like, slavery was a huge part of American culture for a long time (arguably it still is), but everyone around the world absolutely has the right to say that's shitty and shouldn't have been that way. Japanese people have a right to criticize our obsession with putting people in prison. We have a right to criticize their media's obsession with teenagers in short skirts.

tl;dr Just quit stanning.

I really enjoyed this little Life Is Strange experience. I thought the character work was actually pretty great. I'm very curious how this'll lead into Life Is Strange 2. It's hard for me to imagine playing as a young kid for the full sequel. I saw a theory that Chris doesn't actually have powers, that it was the older neighbor (Stephen's brother/son? I'm not sure if Stephen is the young neighbor boy or his dad.) at the end who saves Chris, and that he's the main character of the full game. Makes a lot of sense to me.

I hope the connections to the first game are limited in the sequel. The number of direct ties in Captain Spirit were a bit concerning to me, and some people dug through game files and found text strings talking about transferring your LiS1 save to LiS2, with decisions from the first game impacting the sequel. That's kinda worrying to me. I'd rather them let the first game stand on its own and tell a totally fresh story without any baggage. I wouldn't mind cameos or references but I'm worried it will be much more. Either way, I'm very excited for LiS2 now.

I've been using PS Now to stream 4 and 5 before 6 comes out. I played through all of 4 and it worked just fine (I do have good internet though). 5 was also working just fine, but now it says it's no longer available on PS Now. I literally played it earlier today, and now it won't let me.

It definitely seems to be some kind of glitch. From what I've looked up, some people say it's still there but I've seen a few people say it's done this to them as well. Hopefully it'll fix itself, but it's worth noting that this could happen to anyone else. I don't have a PS3, so I'm really hoping this resolves itself quickly.