I also feel like the GB or game reviewer line I mostly hear of "I play default cause that's what it's there for" for some games feels off the mark when you read through the difficulty they say stuff like "choose this if you play FPS games" for the next option up from the Normal mode. DOOM was like that I think and was way more fun on harder difficulty. I know I saw something similar in a recent action game as well ("choose this if you play action games").
In IT we call it "the Tyranny of the Default" because so few people will be bothered to use any other setting. It says something about human psychology I think, but there's also the line of thinking you heard from Vinny, that the game is/should be tuned around it's default setting. Ideally a lot of thought will go into what experience the devs want to call "Normal." There's probably something to be said for moving away from that nomenclature, too, with settings like Narrative or Veteran.
Mentioned in the other comments, but...around 1:19:00, there's a counterpoint I would make to Carl's arguement about higher difficulty forcing a player to use all the available strategies. High difficulty can also force a player into the most optimized, efficient playstyle that can often not be fun, and certainly isn't always open to diversity and experimentation. That said, I can definitely understand the increased feeling of accomplishment beating a high difficulty can provide.
@vinny Around 1:19:00, a counterpoint I would make to Carl's point about higher difficulty forcing a player to use all the available strategies. High difficulty can also force a player into the most optimized, efficient playstyle that can often not be fun, and certainly isn't always open to diversity and experimentation. That said, I can definitely understand the increased feeling of accomplishment beating a high difficulty can provide.
A lot of grousing about Bioware leaving its roots around the internet, but they aren't obligated to keep making the same thing. (Though if they don't, who will?)
Worth noting on Pokken that all of those "new" characters (except Decidueye) were previously released to the Japanese arcade version of Pokken. So they're not new; they just never came to the Wii U.
@yokunakatta: So the differences with SoV and promoting is that there are no "internal" levels like there were in Awakening/Fates. So not only do characters go back to level 1 when they promote, they gain experience faster after doing so. In addition, the promotion gains are not fixed, but rather a unit is just brought up to the new class's minimums. So if you ground your unit out for a ton of level gains, you may get nothing but HP and MOV from promoting. Growths are also much lower, so those extra levels aren't worth as much on average. So promote early and often, but different classes can promote at different levels; it's not always 10.
Also the voice acting gets really really good. It's too bad they never got to Celica's route. All the Toyota jokes.
That story at the beginning about the girl looking for an apartment in Japan and specifically having to have her realtor filter the ones that don't allow foreigners made me sad.
@alex: Anybody in the East coast office thinking about playing that new Fire Emblem? I think @danryckert played the last one. It's pretty good, especially the full voice acting.
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