generic_username

Great job with the stuff everyone made this week. It's been a lot of fun reading through everyone's posts and watching the Film & 40s videos.

Also, I like that the best screenshot on the site to use to convey "believable romance" in Tales of Hearts R is one where the characters have cats on their heads. It's the one I used in the post, but man, JRPGS are goofy sometimes. I should probably actually post a few more screenshots when I have time.

MTG is actually brilliant in the way it tells its story. I think they're getting a little heavy-handed with it in the recent sets, unfortunately; marking five specific cards per set as "story spotlight" cards does sort of ruin some of the magic of getting a feel for what's going on purely through art, mechanics, and small bits of flavor text.

One of the coolest things about storytelling in MTG is the nonlinear nature of it. When they release a set, they're releasing a bunch of cards all at once, many acting as depictions of characters, organizations, events, or locations important to the narrative of the set. When you open a pack of cards, nothing in there tells you "this is the backstory here." You just get a sense of it from looking at the cards themselves, which you are seeing in a totally random order that the makers of MTG have little control over. The fact that it all works, and it's possible to get a pretty strong sense of the plot of each set through this method is pretty awesome.

You could also be in too deep like me and read stuff about the plot from outside sources or see all the cards before release so as to prepare for prerelease, but if we're talking purely what the game by itself gives you, the nonlinear narrative told through art, mechanics, and a sentence or two of flavor text (if there's any at all) is all you have to go on. And it's not only functional, it's effective.

I think MTG is one of the greatest examples of telling narrative through mechanics, even though it does have several non-mechanical things supporting it. 'Investigate' is a great example of this. 'Morbid', a mechanic from the previous incarnation of Innistrad, was a mechanic that made cards more effective if a creature had died the turn it was cast. This meant that seemingly "bad" plays made by an opponent could be made to trick you into killing their creatures so they can blow you out with a big effect later. It created tension that might not have been there otherwise, and added to the "horror" feel of the gameplay.

If you're interested in knowing more about how they design the cards, I'd give the podcast "Drive to Work" a listen. It's a podcast done by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of most sets and kind of the most well known MTG designer short of Richard Garfield. He does it during his actual commute, since that's when he has time to do it, and just kind of vamps about how he designed certain sets or cards or mechanics. It's pretty cool, and he's a charismatic guy, too, so it's not boring either.

@vocalcannibal: I mean, Colette is a "Christ-figure" style of character in every sense of the term. Like, she's basically close as you can get to that archetype without telling the actual biblical story word-for-word.

The only other criticism I have for the cast of ToS is that Presea and Regal (Regal especially) are really underdeveloped. I realized this over the course of a pretty recent playthrough. They each get one or two moments in the sun, but as far as their relationships with the rest of the cast (Lloyd especially) are concerned, there's not a whole lot there. The story would actually function perfectly fine if they and their plot threads were removed from it entirely. I don't think that applies to any of the other characters.

Zelos is rad in his subversion of the "chosen one" thing. NEAR ENDGAME SPOILER, AND A MAJOR ONE AT THAT: The fact that depending on your choices, he can fully betray you and you have to fucking kill him is such a cool, unexpected thing that ToS does.

I have plans to write up a super in-depth post about ToS in the future, but it was basically my first JRPG too, not counting Paper Mario, so it holds a special place in my heart. I have a lot to say about it, and I want to make sure I say it right. It'll be a while before I write the whole thing.

@wchigo: I like Abyss a whole lot. It's one of the better entries in the series in my opinion. In my head, on a list ordered by quality, Abyss is lower than Symphonia, and is sometimes tied, sometimes above, and sometimes lower than Vesperia... depending on how I'm feeling that day.

Abyss puts people off because Luke is fucking intolerable, both as a protagonist and as a character in general. But Abyss is cool because there are actual severe consequences for his selfish behavior, and he spends most of the story trying to better himself when he is faced with that fact.

The other thing I think is cool about Abyss is its disdain for the hero complex. I obviously don't want to go into specifics here for fear of spoiling it, but some really, really, really bad shit happens because a character was more concerned with being a hero than they were with actually helping people. Most JRPG games tend to feed that impulse, engaging you with a power fantasy of sorts about being the ultimate good person that you may or may not be (or have the opportunity to be) in real life. To be fair, there's still a lot of "chosen one" style stuff in there, but I like how they have that moment where letting that "chosen one" stuff go to their head goes bad.

Mechanically, there's a lot to like in there, too. I like the elemental fields you create that can change the attack you're using when used from inside of them. It's a system that isn't incredibly difficult to learn how to use effectively, and I got the sense that if I were better at these games, I could have been doing even more with it than I was. Also, I can't remember specifics, but Abyss might have adhered to the old Tales style of dungeon design as much as Symphonia did. Since I have only played the 3DS remake, I get mixed up as to where the original release falls in relation to Symphonia, but they're definitely cut from the same cloth.

@arbitrarywater: Tales of Hearts might fall into that category, though there are some specific issues I have with it both mechanically and narratively that irritate me enough that I can't quite say it's been a 100% comfort food experience for me.

I'm generally praising it in this post, because I wanted to focus on this particular element of the game, and this element happens to be one of the things I like about it. I actually have no idea how other fans of the series feel about this one, and there's a lot of stuff about it that could be better. That said, I have been compelled to play a fair amount of it in the last week, so there's obviously something it has going for it. My thought is that its tropes and cliches are all obvious and dumb, but it commits to all of them so hard that I can't help laughing or being charmed by it in places.

I'm personally not a fan of Xillia, but I could go on and on about what I like about Symphonia. I think Tales games being comfort food RPGs is usually true, but I think Tales of Symphonia is just a really good game. It's also kind of aggressively corny, but there are a few things about some of the themes and characters that I really, really like, and it was one of the last Tales games where they actually put any effort into dungeon and puzzle design. The dungeons aren't all winners or anything, and the puzzles themselves are usually not great either, but every Tales game I've played since (except Vesperia, which I can only remember the plot of) has had nothing but mazes where you go somewhere, pull a lever, backtrack somewhere else where you've opened a gate, rinse and then repeat. Sometimes less than that, just being an open space with nothing in it at all.

But uh, yeah. Symphonia is a good game. I guess is what I'm getting at. Sort of. Don't touch Dawn of the New World. It's my personal least favorite in the series and is rotten with bad retcons, among other issues.

Fire Emblem Echoes comes out next month; I'm sure that bare minimum there'll be a special edition 3DS XL released around then. Also, just a feeling, but I bet the next Pokemon games, either the Sun/Moon "sequels" or a 4th gen remake, will be 3DS titles. Maybe they just had to slow production temporarily for this launch, but there are still a few major titles coming to the 3DS, so I would think they'd keep making them for at least a little longer.

There are some visual novels, like Sharin no Kuni or G Senjou no Maou, that I think are excellent but will never be popular.

As far as outright "bad" goes... I kinda like gacha games generall, and have been very deep into Fire Emblem: Heroes. Most people I've seen around here seem to either actively dislike it or be disinterested in it, which is 100% valid. But I enjoy the hell out of it. I'm longing for a few more modes, but other than that, I like the game a lot.

I was playing Tales of Link for a while, too, a gacha game based on Namco's "Tales of" series. That one was an objectively bad game with little to nothing in the way of redeeming qualities and I played and enjoyed it for months. I only quit because Fire Emblem Heroes scratches all the same itches but is actually, at its core, a fun concept for a game.

On the subject of Tales, I really like Tales of Legendia, which is kind of an almost-universally disliked entry in the franchise. At least, among fans of the series. It's a pretty standard JRPG with some pretty fun/dumb story twists, but I played it when I was ~15 years old and was incredibly moved by the story, which I now know is super corny and cliched. That said, after you finish up the "main quest" you set out on "character quests" meant to wrap up each individual character's specific arc. People hated them because they weren't voiced, but when I played it, and even now, VO isn't a thing I really care about in games, so I just appreciated wrapping up all the loose ends and seeing the characters get to fully mature.

As far as games that are bad that I know are bad but I like and really can't defend liking... I enjoy StarFox Assault, the non-dinosaur Starfox game for the gamecube. It is a bad video game. My friends and I would play the local multiplayer and invent stories and factions and reasons for the conflict, then developed the story further based on who one. It's the only time I've ever done something like that; we were basically role-playing this game and it's not even a game that deserves the attention. I don't know, I think on it fondly because of those times, and would probably still have fun with it if I picked it up today.

I don't think it will. Persona 4 never got off the PS2 until Golden came out on Vita, a platform that had basically no life in it at launch. Persona feels like a Sony exclusive thing. Tokyo Mirage Sessions was rad, though, and scratched a lot of the same itches that Persona does, so if that comes to Switch and you skipped the Wii U, it'd be worth checking out, It's certainly not going to be the same experience as P5 though.

But yeah, considering that P3/P4 aren't even on PC, where I feel like they'd do preeeeetty well out here, a Switch port of any of them seems unlikely.

We are now officially community spotlight Vita buddies.

To actually contribute something to the discussion, I have played a fair share of the obscure visual novels in this list on PC. Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shōjo was one I enjoyed a whole, whole lot at the time I played it.

Also I'm gonna end up buying that Zero Escape collection at some point even though I actively dislike the only one I've played (VLR). I just... I have to know. I have to see the fullness of this thing that I really, really, really dislike. Okay, I'll say the word. I hate it. And the depth of my hatred has made me horribly morbidly curious and now I have to see this thing through.

I'm someone who generally has one or two gacha games in my pocket, without any intention of sinking a tone of time into them past the first month of its release, so for me, FE Heroes fills that role perfectly. This game got me to delete Tales of Link, and for that, I'm thankful.

I obviously wish there was more content, stuff like the Grand Hero Battles in particular which ramped up the difficulty to much, much higher degree would be great. For Narcian, I had to use a pretty elaborate tactic to make it all work for me, since I lacked the types of heroes that would let me handle the map using the strategy most people seemed to online. I had to send someone up the side, use a dancer to get him to move out of range of other guys, then use a character with the "Draw Back" ability to pull the dancer out of range, too. Maps that actually force you to use all of the various movement abilities available to you would be really cool.

But really, I do enjoy the game a whole lot. I managed to get a team of very, very powerful heroes without spending a single dollar on the game, and spent about fifteen dollars on it the other day just for fun, not feeling any of the awful, soul-crushing pressure to spend money that gacha games normally put on me. And those fifteen dollars also got me two very powerful heroes. So either the rates in this game are generous compared to other gacha games (and they are) or I just got really lucky (I probably also did that.)

I wish there was a more extensive PVP aspect; the friends list system right now is basically useless, which sucks because I have two siblings that play as well and would love to have a more interactive experience with them. At the very least, they should let me pit myself against an AI version of their team, arena-style.

But yeah, it's absolutely serving its purpose for me. I check in on it 1-2 times a day, and on days when they actually add content, I spend a decent amount of time with it. I do, like, really need them to push out a significant content update that I can't complete in a day, but even if they don't, I'm getting a lout out of it as it is. It's nice "collecting" heroes from Fire Emblem, though Erika, Lyn, and Lucina, the three I want more than any other, have all eluded me. I do still have a handful of heroes I like, and the ones I don't have any particular affection for are still useful in-game. On top of that, the game seems designed in such a way that you don't even really need 5*s to do most of it. So even if you get unlucky and are sitting on a bunch of 4*, the game is still totally able to be enjoyed. And then you can even make them into 5* heroes, albeit at the cost of an excessive price that takes actual months to get. But in other gacha games, while they have "evolution" and stuff that's much easier to achieve than the "unlock potential" is in this game, if you don't roll something good in those games, no amount of evolution or upgrading is going to make them any more than serviceable. In this game, a 4* Marth can be turned into someone worth having on a high-level arena team.

Uh, if my excessive droning on about it hasn't made it clear, I enjoy the game quite a bit.