Super excited for this. I can't wait to listen after work. Lots of nostalgia for DBZ from my anime-watching youth. I imagine it was a gateway for a lot of us in GB's target demo.
Man, you guys really got a chip on your shoulder for Dream Daddy, huh?
I think a good portion of it is from people who actually play Visual Novels. Except for the gay dads part, it is about as generic a VN dating game as it could get.
It would be like if someone came out with a boilerplate platformer, and people were falling over themselves to praise it because it was the first platformer they ever played. "But you can collect 100 objects to get new lives! It's so good!"
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I think a wider issue here is that it's obvious that the Giant Bomb crew don't have enough time to play or cover all the games that come out in a year. We could see this back in 2015 when almost no one finished Witcher 3, and large parts of the community got upset because they didn't even seem to give the game a chance. This year we could see it with them playing Dream Daddy but not Doki Doki Literature Club.
It creates a sort of dissonance where this group of people who are touted as experts in the field of video game journalism seem to pick and choose which games they will cover and have large gaps in information about different genres. At least Patrick and Austin went out of their way to try games in genres they had little experience in. Meanwhile Giant Bomb is putting Destiny 2 up on their Top 10 GOTY list when other sites are running articles about how Bungie completely bungled everything to do with the game and how the Destiny community is upset about how things have become.
Finally, somebody else who's willing to admit at least some of the reaction to Dream Daddy not entirely anti-millennial conservative backlash. You're seeing this same sentiment from long suffering anime fans in the thread under the new VN feature. We've been under the "anime is for jerks" attitude for so long it's extra frustrating to see somebody come in and actively misrepresent a thing we really like.
I've had a hard time trying to put that feeling into words, but you've done a pretty good job of it here.
@gundamguru: While thats a valid point, 2017 alone had so many games out that perhaps a couple of people touched at all. People can only play so much during a year after all and for last year, GB sure is understaffed to represent every specific taste and approach towards specific genres!
But even if they have people who care about every good game that comes out, playing each and every VN ever seems a little bit too time investing and as they've already said many times its almost impossible to go back to older games.
Visual Novels are perhaps the one genre where "can't go back to the old ones" is the least true. The game mechanics have largely been the same since the 90s, it's the stories that we're here for. There's also a not too fine line between a VN and a dating sim, something I'm not sure any of the GB staff really get. And besides, they've revisited old games before; that's the whole point of the Vinnyvania and Blue Bombing series.
I don't think anyone's asking that they play every VN in existence, just that if they do make a feature on one, they do an entire route (perhaps Endurance Run-style?) and go with a representative, widely-acclaimed game. To go with another analogy, watching a random episode of The Orville wouldn't be the best way to introduce people to Star Trek.
I guess I may not be understanding the point of this feature.
Maybe when Abby and Vinny say that Dream Daddy “does things other dating sims don’t do” they might be able to know what they’re talking about now.
That's my biggest concern with this. If they only take a passing glance at a half dozen VNs, they'll be more misinformed than if they hadn't played anything at all, but at the risk of then considering themselves experts.
I also second the notion that they should play some classic VNs from actual Japanese devs, rather than all western spoofs. It'd be like forming an expert opinion on Star Wars after having only seen 20 minutes of Spaceballs.
This makes me sad, because I can't play Nuka World now that they've poisoned the Fallout 4 well with Creation Club and its forced downloads. It's too bad I never got around to playing the DLC.
It's just another case of business practices trumping game design. Though as you say, if Bethesda ever were to do a Fallout 5, they'd have a lot of soul-searching to do. It's nice to hear they are exploring fixes to the faction systems, at least.
It's too bad we can't put the genie back in the microtransaction loot box bottle. Now that all the major publishers have tasted the blood in the water, they'll never be satisfied with anything less than all the possible money. Just turning a multi-million dollar profit isn't good enough anymore.
@curufinwe: The "just build a PC" thing seems to come from a collective misunderstanding of console gamer's reasons for playing on console. They're not staying off PC just because of cost, but also because of the console experience. PC can be a headache to build and troubleshoot. Modding can be a nightmare to the non-tech savvy, and the idea of playing with a controller against mouse and keyboard players isn't many people's idea of fair. There's also the couch vs desk experience.
Then there is the cost angle. Even the most expensive console, Xbox One X, is still cheaper than the 1080ti cards the guys run in their machines. And that's just one component in a gaming PC! There's a lot of room between the $250 console peasant and the $1500 PC master race for an intermediate product. The guys just don't see it sometimes.
I get that GB tends to be way into japanese gaming, but for quite a few people the Xbox has been a ok as a console.
The only part of that I take issue with is the idea that Giant Bomb is somehow way into Japanese gaming. This year was probably GB's biggest year for Japanese games since Persona 4, and that's only because of Persona 5 and their surprising interest in Yakuza 0 and Nier. GB have a very, very specific subset of Japanese games they're interested in, and otherwise they just snootily dismiss them and cut poor Jason off after 5 minutes if he tries to talk about one. Hiring Ben was actually a huge improvement in this area, since he seems genuinely interested in some of the Japanese games GB traditionally overlooks.
Don't get me wrong, I love GB, but this hole has existed in their coverage for a hot minute.
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