WatanabeKazuma

@fishmicmuffin said:

I just graduated. Still not sure how I feel about it.

This. I'm still pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, but that probably has a lot to do with plunging myself into a summer job at the earliest opportunity. Well, that and I did not attend the actual graduation ceremony!

I'm finishing off a teaching certificate at the moment, with a view to moving over to Japan at some point in the near future. I think when that actually happens, everything will start to come more into focus.

Huh, and to think Sega Channel boggled my mind, that seemed otherworldly as a kid; This seems like something else altogether.

Max all Social Links

Oh great, doing that in P3P kind of exposed the game in ways I didn't really care for. To approach the game in a mechanical fashion is detrimental to the overall experience, at least in my experience.

At least P4 was much more lenient in that regard, P3 was always the one that seemed more of a chore if you are deliberately going for the perfect route. Like Yukari, and her innate ability to function outside the realms of logic, reverse my S-Link will you!

Huh, its certainly yellow alright, but its not yellow, if you know what I mean.

@punisherkaos: That's the thing, I could probably watch all the story content online or something, but I want to get involved in the community aspect too. I don't dislike fighting games, its just that I fell out of playing them at some point and it's sort of passed me by.

Not that I'm suggesting this problem is anything new, its the problem synonymous with the genre after-all.

The mouth's animate in the cut-scenes :o

Fuck, the trappings are obviously bait for me to buy this game, but it's just the fighting part I need to be sold on! I doubt my vintage Tekken 2 skills will hold me in good stead.

@D_Bones: How about the part where the metaphor "grab the bull by the horns" becomes literal. Nagoshi!

I came into this thread fully expecting the infamous barrel; I really loathed that thing. I genuinely was baffled on how to get past that section, my younger self scaled that stage tirelessly in order to find some sort of 'proper' route. Considering how I used to simply plough through most games as a child, I'm willing to bet I spent an hour or two mashing the controller blindly. I used to find Sonic games easy, but this was the one time I was genuinely stumped. I was fortunate enough in that a friend somehow manged to get past it without a problem, not that I felt embarrassed about it, there was literally no indication about what had to be done. It surely has to rank up there as one of the most unintuitive pieces of game design ever.

Finally Blighttown will be fully realized in all it's poison induced glory ! I can usually ignore an inconsistent framerate but that was beyond distracting, genuinely made me feel a little ill in spots.

This will hopefully give me a chance to join in on the early PC crowd that haven't yet played it; I would love to guide people through the early stages of the game.

You seem to think that the Catalyst being introduced at the offset seems to excuse its status as a deus-ex machina, which it clearly doesn't. Your interpretation seems to rest entirely on people labeling it a 'God' also, which is how you have earlier rebuffed that suggestion.

@Hailinel posted a perfect definition of it, yet you still refuse to accept thats in fact what the Catalyst ends up being. And on that note, how about this:

A deus-ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

This sounds familiar, no? The catalyst's function is so offset precisely because the ME universe often has a solid grounding in how its universe works, whereas this breaks all of them. If the above definition doesn't perfectly what the Catalyst is, than I don't know what does. Even if you are aware of it early on in the story, its ultimate function is left undefined until the closing minutes of the game, and the closing of a trilogy no less. To suddenly hang all your dangling plot elements on this one device is hugely contrived. The Catalyst looked to have been a means to an end (destroying the Reapers), but ultimately the writers saw fit to encompass everything into it. So by that logic, if you choose to argue the fact that the Catalyst has a perfectly acceptable relation in the story, and it isn't a convenient device simply to solve the plot, I don't know how to respond.

I'm not saying that your arguments have been entirely without merit, but too often in this thread someone has offered a perfectly viable reason for their gripes, only for you to simply skirt these issues by delving into semantics. I'll leave it at that.