Ben_H

Question: did you leave your game idling a bunch or did you actually spend a bunch of time doing extremely optional stuff? If you actually did spend 25-35 hours doing a bunch of tertiary grinding for things that are only there for the top 1% of completionists then I can see why you might view the game as a slog. I did all of the typical side stuff (requests, s-links, party member cooking things, etc.), did a whole bunch of extra (probably unnecessary) grinding for items/money, and did a bunch of fusing that I probably didn't have to and still ended up at 90 hours (most folks I've talked to who aren't as completionist-y finished the game in 70-80 hours), which felt like a reasonable length for one of these games. If you follow how the game signposts things, the game's pacing makes a lot more sense.

But also, on the default difficulty this game is balanced like Persona 4 Golden and the Persona 5s in that you get so powerful at the end that gear kind of stops mattering to a certain degree. They dole out XP from bosses/mini-bosses such that by the time you hit the top of Tartarus, you're about level 85 and can comfortably fight the final boss with little to no extra levelling/grinding or fancier gear needed. In old Persona 3, you'd hit the top of Tartarus, be around level 70, then need to do 10+ hours of grinding to get above level 80 to even stand a reasonable chance against the final boss. I think P3R's combat levelling pacing setup is about perfect and a much better solution than P5R's solution of eventually allowing you to turbo the catbus through enemies in Mementos rather than fighting them normally, which let you break the game and rapidly get unlimited XP and money. This completely threw out any pretense that the combat and levelling actually mattered in P5R and felt like a lazy kludge fix meant to paper over the fact that Mementos was extremely boring and many hours too long for what it was.

Now I'm wondering if somebody high up at Embracer is a huge Garfield and Friends enthusiast. It would make everything that happened at that company make a lot more sense. Maybe Lars Wingefors secretly loves U.S. Acres.

Finally a relevant thread bump in this, the Year of Shadow the Hedgehog.

This popping up at the same time people are starting to see the video player problems return makes me think that a recent update to the site must have caused some type of regression to occur.

Yukari is basically OP in the back half of the game if you play your cards right and unlock all of her extra stuff. She was a permanent fixture in my party too. Though she always was in my party in P3 FES too because she was the only party member with actual good healing abilities in that game until the very end of the game. They really leaned into "Yukari is the party healer" in this version of the game.

Also yeah, the additions they made to the game helped a lot with making Junpei less insufferable. That also can be said of Ken.

This but also I get random French ads even though the part of Canada I'm from has only an extremely small subset of people who speak French beyond an extremely basic level, because apparently according to advertisers, "located in Canada" means that we all universally speak fluent English and French.

But on the main topic, yeah I've been hearing of this kind of thing happening a lot more recently in general for many podcasts I listen to. I'm not sure if it's advertisement buyers of certain types trying to game the system since they know their ad isn't desirable to be included on most podcasts (I would imagine tons of podcasts flag politics and gun ads as things to filter out of the potential ad pool), podcast providers relying too much on machine filtering to try to organize categories of ads, or some combo of the two, but this does seem to be happening a lot more the last year or two. Other podcasts I listen to have been running into this problem too.

I think the Persona 4 Endurance Run is probably up there. They started it partly as a joke and openly said it might only last a couple weeks (the name came from them wanting to see how much of the game they could endure before giving up). Then they unintentionally got way invested in it and completed the whole game, to the point that both Jeff and Vinny still make references to it from time to time (Jeff referenced the Endurance Run in the last week and still says "get bent" a lot. Vinny mentioned fusing episodes and the Endurance Run a bit ago when talking about viewership of their Cyberpunk playthrough).

The thing that gets tricky with this is that the overlap between Dan's jokes/bits/accidentally getting genuinely way into things he thought he didn't like and Gerstmann's jokes/bits/accidentally getting genuinely way into things he thought he didn't like is pretty big. Gerstmann starting Super Mario Bros. Special as a joke for a stream then committing to finishing the game came to mind for me as a Dan-like thing (much like Dan's Seaman playthrough). Jeff and Dan both being dismissive of anime (Jeff less so compared to Dan. Dan used to be really aggressively dismissive of anime even though everyone else on staff was screaming at him that Metal Gear Solid is basically anime) then getting way into Dragon Ball Z also came to mind as a very Dan thing. The thing that always showed up in those 2014-2016 Bombcasts was that Jeff was in some ways just as weird as Dan, but in a different way.

For other members, I think how Brad viewed computers and technology (or at least used to, he's much less severe about this now) was very Dan-like (well, old Dan from like 5-10 years ago) for a while. His knowledge and views on computers for a long time was very much based in the 90s/early 00s along with boomer takes he read on tech greybeard forums, and he was weirdly dismissive and skeptical of new technology in a way Dan used to be about other things. If you listen to old episodes of the Tech Pod, this tendency would show up a lot and would leave Will flabbergasted at times (for example, Brad would talk as if something was extremely common to do on computers even though nobody else had actually done the thing that way in a decade or more). It seems like Will and others have finally drip-fed Brad newer technologies and ideas that have broken him out of this mindset. As an example, he was extremely stubborn about replacing his pair of 15+ year old CCFL tech monitors because he didn't see why new, bigger monitors would be beneficial (CCFL monitors use significantly more energy compared to modern LED monitors. Brad's monitors were also tiny by standards of even 10 years ago) then when he finally did replace them he had a Dan-like moment of realization how much better the tech has become. Now Brad's way into a bunch of modern tech stuff (home automation/servers and open-source software) mostly just for fun more than anything.

I've never played this game (I've only played most of FFI and like 30 minutes of FFIV on the SNES Classic). This one and FFIX are next on the agenda after I finish FFVII, which I'm about 20 hours into. Like 30 minutes into FFVII I began to understand why people love these games.

Monster Hunter World's DLC is all optional music, emotes, outfits, or otherwise cosmetic-related. What's wrong with that? People play these games with their friends and sometimes want to have fancy outfits. I don't see what the issue is with that. If you don't want any of this stuff you do not have to engage with it at all. I played every bit of content in Monster Hunter World and didn't once buy any of the DLC. If you're gonna pick a game as an example of egregious microtransactions, you should probably pick a different game than this one.

Yeah, it would be one thing if Capcom was purposefully making their games a slog without microtransactions, but they don't do that. I play Monster Hunter games, most recently Rise. Rise has something like 250 different listed DLC entries on Steam available. In the few dozen hours of Rise I've played, I have yet to run into a single situation where I would need to spend money. In fact, from what I've seen, most of the DLC for Monster Hunter: Rise is cosmetic. The one buyable consumable I've run into while playing the game so far is tokens for character redesigns, which is also a cosmetic thing and they include a token or two with the game (you can also get around this by making new characters if changing how your character looks matters that much).

From what I have seen around Dragon's Dogma 2, a lot of the complaints around microtransactions come from people not understanding those games or who haven't played the series (and thus don't understand that these games are deliberately made with a certain amount of friction in mind. They don't want you constantly fast traveling in those games because the intended experience is for you to travel from place to place so you can run into things and see cool stuff. Patrick and Austin talked about this a bunch on a recent episode of Remap Radio). Everyone I've heard talk about this who actually has familiarity with the series (see Austin, Gerstmann, etc.) has pointed out that the microtransactions aren't something you need to even think about if you play through the game normally (which is something people also said for RE4). The microtransactions essentially exist as cheat codes for people who want them but aren't necessary to progress in the game in any way.