Alucitary

Another, maybe, unpopular opinion. Every Dead Rising game since the first has been a step down. Dead Rising 2 even seemed to lose quite a bit of the polish of 1. Dead Rising 4 of course was definitely a downgrade though, less a step down than a jump off of a sheer cliff.

Weapons are really good in this game and definitely worth buying, but once you unlock memento you can get very good armor for your entire party for free. I've kept Ryuji pretty kited, and have never run out of money even while working on the Temperance Confidant.

I was planning to drop Morg, but then it turned out that Yusuke was a Chie type fighter, so it was either him or Ryuji for me. Even though I had Ryuji up to rank 8, I still dropped him because of the mid phys aoe that Yusuke had coming up and his amazing stats. I also really started to like Morgana, Lucky Punch crits waaay more than you would think, especially if you put luck accessories on him, he can set up some great all-out-attacks that would otherwise cost you bullets, or expensive spell casts.

Looking back, I feel like Ryuji + Yusuke might not be a bad combo though. Physical seems way more viable in this game, almost to the point that it seems op. I'm only playing on normal though so I guess I'll see when I try it on hard. So what did everyone else end up doing?

Don't waste too much time on jobs, the pay is very negligible even compared to the money you will be getting in the second dungeon. The convenience store and flower shop will get you some side quests, but the beef bowl place is only for unlocking a confidant, it will tell you when you need to do it. Other than that the stat boosts aren't the best, especially the flower shop, once you get kindness to rank 2 feel free to ignore it for a while. It's probably the least used stat, and you can accumulate it passively by feeding your plant.

It got much better immediately after I made this post, I'm at the end of June, and have not felt like I had an unnecessarily wasted day since the second dungeon opened up. The second dungeon just opened up so fast it was jarring, but I now feel like the game has officially opened up.

I really liked the way that his Confidant ranks wrapped up. It wasn't as stereotypically anime as Yosuke's rank 10. It feels like rather than helping him grow as a person, it was about helping him finally be able to make a different in the world around him. The way it played out resonated with me a lot.

I'm on 5/8, and it is really starting to hit me how few days I have had to just do what I want.

Small gameplay spoilers up to this point:

So to start you have to dedicate at least 3 full days to completing a dungeon now, as opposed to the 1 from previous games. I'm willing to accept this because it feels more like you are setting up for a heist, but combined with all the other mandatory events it is kind of a bummer. I was alerted to the exams coming up, but suddenly they tear 3 days in a row away from you to explain the randomized dungeon, introduce characters, and even force you into a social link scene.

I really hope that I'm almost to the point that the game will start to cool off on this. I don't remember Persona 4 being nearly this bad about it. At the very least if it does keep doing this I hope there isn't a major timeskip later in the game like in P4. I just really feel like I am making little progress overall because of these interruptions.

Aside from the obvious.

• Frame Rate drops
• Middling VO
• Easy and short main quest.

My only complaint is with the Fairy Fountains. Upgrading armor is the most infuriating thing in the world because of one really stupid design choice. Once you have upgraded and have nothing left available to upgrade it will kick you out of the conversation, and you have to watch the animation and have another conversation to get back into the menu. Fuck you, I want to see what I need to upgrade what I just upgraded! Literally every time I went to the fountain I had this issue because I kept my inventory relatively clean. I swore to god I wouldn't look up guides for this game, but I finally broke down, and looked up the upgrade guide for what you needed to upgrade your equipment. I probably could have just held onto a basic Hylian Tunic and a couple of bokoblin horns, but at that point I was just indignant at the whole system.

I get why they have to do a site wide top 10 GOTY, but it is by far the least interesting list to me. Everybody's individual top 10s are the most interesting because I know so much about their tastes that I can get a really good feel for what I need to go back and check out from the year, and what I can pass on. The themed categories leading up to the top 10 are also very interesting, and the deliberations are always hilarious, but the collaborative GOTY is always just a mess. Like you said, it's always just a bunch of compromises, and games that only 1 of them has played but that they had super high on their list. It really means nothing. Sometimes it lines up well and you get a really solid list that most of them can agree on, but more often than not so far it has been kind of bland and scattershot. I'm sure it gets them a lot of traffic though so I definitely can't fault them for it. I can just ignore it so it's fine by me as long as they keep doing their individual lists.

Dungeon Hack or pretty much any first person D&D randomized dungeon crawler. Even now those games are my ultimate podcast games. Grimrock 1&2 kind of scratched that itch, but without the randomization I could only get one good playthrough out of them. A touched up version with clean graphics, and 5th edition rule set would be amazing.