holyxion

While I agree that written reviews are important to serious video game criticism, its not as if all reviews have to have a team of professional copy editors, fact-checkers, and a comprehensive peer-review process to make them useful to the consumer. I think part of why GB shies away from long-form written criticism is because they don't have those things and just want to focus on what they think they're best at. It's not a bad thing to have a round-table discussion with various other people offering second opinions, it's just a matter of the actual written review itself coming off as kind of a low-effort afterthought rather than (for example) an attempt at summarizing (or even transcribing) the podcast. Even just a bulleted list of thoughts and points discussed would act as a suitable summary, if they wanted to have the text review act as a direct supplement to the podcast.

I think the main issue is that the podcast is too long for what it is and the written review is way too short, not the basic format itself. Something like having a podcast where they read the review and then have a discussion about it would replicate too much work and require the audience to listen to the same thing twice, so instead maybe the written portion could include a brief summary of what's discussed in an audio supplement (that's maybe 30 min), as well as a real written review that's thoughtful and well-considered, even if it's not an epic work of deep literary criticism or whatever.

Anyway, if it means they have time to play and review more games, then whatever works I guess. I subscribe to a lot of physical magazines like PCGamer, GameInformer, and NintendoForce, so if people say the written print media review is dead I'd direct them to one of those. Even after having staffed up a bit GB's not going to suddenly have a whole magazine-level writing team in place.

I never followed him too closely, but I listened to Co-optional and always appreciated his honesty, integrity and eloquence in expressing his opinions.

o7

As someone who's always wanted to watch more DBZ, but can't stand drawn-out filler, I can definitely second the manga recommendation for people who don't have time to watch every single episode. The original manga is technically closer to Toriyama's original ideas and really shows off his drawing style in the medium that made him so popular in the first place. As an aside, if you like original Dragon Ball and want something a little less action-focused, his first manga Dr. Slump is a highly fun and charming series as well.

One other thing to mention is that, while the currently running Dragon Ball Super manga is quite well done, and Toriyama is closely involved in storyboarding and all that, it's drawn by someone else and is extremely accelerated relative to the show. It's still good if you don't have time for the ~130 episodes of the DBS anime, but you'll definitely miss out on some of the plot points of the show that just sort of get glossed over.

It's an interesting and sometimes divisive issue, but I think that ultimately almost everyone would agree that good design will always be more important than meeting some arbitrary technical spec. That said, the reason it gets harped on so much is because it is objectively better to play the same game in 1080p60 than 720p30 because you are processing more data and as such the game objects are presented with higher spatial and temporal precision. For instance, on the Switch, I'm sure that the 720p screen looks great for a high-dpi portable gaming device, and realistically most games don't require much more than that, but for a fast-paced, visually complex game like an arcade bullet-hell shooter, fighting game, or anything which requires a high level of precision in its execution, rendering at 60Hz is really the bare minimum to make the game playable, let alone being at 1080p or 4k or whatever (which might not even look much better based on polycount, texture resolution, etc.).

I do think that people lose sight of the fact that targeting a higher res means spending less GPU resources on other things like shaders or whatever else. I'm no expert on GPU programming, but my understanding is, the larger the pixel matrix the GPU has to render, the more calculations are required for every polygon, particle or light source. Personally, I'd much rather play a meticulously detailed and immersive game at 720p60 or 1080p60 than a merely decent-looking game rendered at 4k30.

If there was a "Most Underrated RPG of the Year" award, this would probably be it. That said, it is a little disappointing that it didn't have quite as many obscure and bizarre digimon as I'd like, and more importantly, simplifies the digivolution requirements and interface such as to actually remove some of the depth of previous installments in favor of a more streamlined experience. For those not in the know, Digimon World DS and Digimon World Dawn/Dusk (also on DS) were part of the Digimon Story franchise, styled after Digimon World 3 on PS1, which is where this game gets its title (Unfortunately the last Digimon Story game before this was not localized). In contrast to past games, this lacks the mechanic of "elemental experience" which added a layer of depth and characterization to which digivolutions were available, but increased the likelihood of running into a "grinding wall" early on.

I'd second the notion that they were clearly inspired by megaten in general making this game; even the main artist is shared with Devil Survivor after all, and the overall narrative beats are more or less the same, just with "demonic" replaced with "digital," at least in terms of a half-human, half-arcane protagonist, like Nocturne, or the monster world fusing with the human one (every SMT and just about every RPG ever). That said, sometimes it seems more like it's emulating MMBN than anything else in terms of the whole sidequest format of going into peoples phones to delete viruses and that sort of thing.

Overall a really weird and underappreciated game. Also, I agree that the difficulty swing between standard encounters and bosses was pretty frustrating at times, especially when there's no easily exploited weakness or pattern to exploit, leaving the player with relatively few options besides brute strength. Fortunately, those encounters were far less common than ones that can be made much easier with a little bit of planning and party adjustment, but when you really hit a wall it can still be kind of brutal after hours of breezing through basic enemies.

In terms of more obscure games, I'd recommend Blue Revolver and/or Crimson Clover, two super-indie yet high-quality Cave-style shmups that may have flown under his radar. They're both PC games that are directly inspired by Cave and aim to emulate the arcade shooter experience with arcade stick support and options for tate mode and stuff like that.

I think it's completely misguided to make this about Japan or anime or whatever. Is Mario, the biggest gaming franchise of all time, a niche anime title because Miyamoto is Japanese, and there's been an animated tv show? It's a bit of a pet peeve for people to use the term "JRPG" as if there's some definite mechanical difference between western and Japanese games. "Turn-based games with random battles" have been made by all kinds of people, and those haven't been the majority of RPGs from Japan for a long time anyway.

In terms of GB, they do have pretty significant blindspots when it comes to the specifics of various genres, perhaps the largest and most significant being RPGs in general. In the end I think it's a catch-22, they could:

play every single remotely interesting game on Steam's new releases for 40 minutes in the hope something is crazy, fascinating otherwise engaging to viewers, which results in, most recently, the Box Maker QL which is a weird thing and got a thread on Neogaf about it etc. but results in the same sort of "cover everything, no matter how shallow" mentality GB was created to get away from in the first place, where they only play the tutorial in a recording environment (as Brad is quick to point out, not an ideal way to play) and are then required to have some sort of comprehensive opinion about the game as a whole, which works terribly for RPGs in particular.give each person their own particular "beat" where they only play a handful of games they really like to the point they're experts, which, in addition to dramatically limiting the kinds of games they cover due to the small staff size, would also inhibit their ability to have meaningful conversations about the games on podcasts when one person has meticulously completed every piece of content and everyone else barely knows it exists.It's worth noting that Drew and Rorie are the two with the most niche, in-depth interests on the site, and apart from Jason who is raising a baby are the two people with the least actual video/podcast duties, so it probably really is a matter of who actually has the time.

Hiring new people can mitigate this issue, as for example, hiring Dan suddenly improved the quality and precision of MGS coverage on the site a great deal, but I doubt GB will ever be able to cover every weird and fascinating series in the depth that Dan's covered MGS. Isn't that why the wiki was created in the first place, though, so users could fill in the gaps? I'm in favor of more in depth coverage of obscure or niche titles over video of big-budget action set pieces I can see on pretty much every game site anywhere, that they can barely show any other part of due to embargo, but there's only so much they can do without the community filling in the gaps, or at least providing direction as to which titles might be worth checking out (with regards to SMTIVA, Vinny, the biggest SMT fan on staff, thought it was a part of the Devil Summoner side series, which is a great example of how obscure franchises can be confusing to the general public).

Ultimately this is going to come down to how much pressure SEGA is going to put on them to maximize international sales, since there are already plenty of SEGA developed and published games on Steam.

However, I'd personally be disappointed if they only ever developed games for the PC market, since games like SMT: Strange Journey, TMS#FE, and to some extent P4G do make good use of those systems unique hardware in a way that really supports the experience in a way they couldn't on PC. As much as I'd like to see an HD version of SMTIV, everything from the polygon count and texture resolution to the actual rendering software and lighting model were built from the ground up for 3DS. Not to mention they probably aren't set up to bug test on a much wider range of hardware, though maybe SEGA could help with that.

All things considered, I really just hope they port SMT1 to anything other than iOS. Hell, the PS2 games don't emulate perfectly on PS3 as it is, so porting them one more time really couldn't hurt. I guess it kind of depends on how P5 is received in the west whether they decide to cater more to the PC market or focus more on Nintendo/PS.

I mean, compared to the initial version of Persona 3 this is a pretty good game considering you can actually control your party members and that sort of thing. The story seems pretty corny, but other than that I think it's kinda on the same level as the Raidou Kuzunoha games or something where it's just Atlus throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks while still trying to maintain some of the characteristics of other SMT (and FE) games so as not to completely alienate the audience.

So yeah, I'm pretty disappointed in the ways it tries to ape Persona's structure while distancing itself from the SMT mythos, and that they announced it with a trailer featuring characters from just about every mainline SMT and FE was misleading at best, but it's still sound in its presentation and effective enough in all of its actually original and unique mechanics that it's probably worth playing if you have a Wii U.

It's mostly just the lost potential of a Devil Survivor style mashup of classic SMT and FE mechanics that's such a bummer, but I guess if we want another SMT SRPG we've either gotta play Majin Tensei I and II in Japanese or translate them ourselves.

Just so you know, people definitely do take notice of your work, even if it isn't expressed that effusively. Anyway, a dancers performance is enjoyed once and becomes memory, a piece of software can be saved and reused forever, so it's not all bad in my opinion.