Justabard

I forget who on the team in the latest bombcast noped out because of paimon but i don't blame him. English VAs of japanese style cutesy characters often make me cringe a little, and putting it to the japanese VA doesn't *improve* it so much as nail the effect better, for better or worse.

I'd recommend muting through it if it's not your thing and giving the gameplay loop itself a shot. I love what I played of it and definitely think it's a huge improvement for gacha games in general. It feels like an almost fully fleshed out single player rpg with the gacha elements being restricted to extra playable characters outside of the four you start with. I think that you can have a great F2P experience with it and get a lot of content out of the loop of combat and exploration.

The core combat can be a little button mashy at first but once you have to actually use the environment and weak spots to damage enemies I feel like the difficulty will jump up and become more of a challenge

That said, I have to say this while fucking hating all things loot based. The best thing that GI does in this respect is make it seemingly little of the core fun of the game actually related to the loot shit. I could see myself putting in like 10 bucks to expand my party but you can probably grind out enough in game currency not to even worry about it to get new characters

@phillipcat: are you trying to imply the financial and physical cost of that level of detail is unrelated to other parts of the game? Is this all you have left to work with?

You havent had a point for like 4 posts

@phillipcat: ok so nothing new is being said here. Forcing diversity is a non issue that you've used nothing but "hunches" to justify. I'm not here for that. If you wanna look at a real comparison of resources being used in tangible ways look at how tlou2 spent so much time on animations that they didnt realize that it made for a funner killing experience that directly antithetical to the games message. See how materially different that comparison is from "I assume they spent more time adding a buff girl for no explicable reason". I can only ask so many times how you think what you're doing isnt just bias run rampant in favor of letting games with basic white guys in the cast be what they are with no scrutiny on casting choice affecting story

Finish the conversation with someone else.

@phillipcat: seriously man, your point is bull the moment you say "you're right that nothing would have changed if there wasnt diversity"

We're just going off a hunch that doesnt sound realistic in any way in your hypotheticals. Just because you're ignorant about how easy adding a diverse cast in a game would be without detracting from the writing teams ability to make a story doesn't mean you have a point here.

"Idk how the process went down but I'm gonna spitball to fit my narrative" won't cut it. Reexamine the biases that got you here and move on

Absolutely, there can exist characters that are unnecessary. But you're ignoring the issue and standard you're setting for writing by strictly looking for diversity when an unnecessary character appears. And complaining about TLJ is only going to make me take you less seriously. Any criticism you can levy at this game and either game isn't fixed by removing the diversity in the game. You know why? Because unless you sincerely think that you can't enjoy a game if it has too many diverse characters - which would make me never take you seriously again - the issues of writing can be solved while still including those diverse characters. Diversity isn't the problem in these games, the problem is bad writing. I can agree that the last of us has some serious pacing issues but if you saw this game with only white guys and "demographically accurate" people the game would be no less weak in writing in pacing in the areas we talk about.

And I'm being extremely generous to your take that a post apocalyptic seattle CAN'T stray from the original demography without being unrealistic. That's so laughable and you need to seriously step back and look at what you're saying. There's no such thing as "forced diversity" ruining anything but people's expectations for the cast in a story. And I'm fucking fine with that when the detractors are making the weakest of weak sauce points like you are

No where in your response do you have enough self awareness to realize that the framework for being annoyed with diversity forgets how often lack of diversity makes no sense many other games and stories. It points to the fact that you don't care about diversity and are unknowingly pushing for less realism for the sake of "normal" white straight faces as a default. The moment that default isn't there you jump to the conclusion that it needs a reason to be there, as if anyone but a white guy needs a fucking reason to be in a video game in large quantities

Jesus this was an exhausting part to read. If you ever find yourself counting diverse characters in a story and wondering if diversity has been forced in a game to ruin a story, you've lost the plot. You also classified Abby as being a part of this diverse cast for being... buff?

It's exceedingly hard to take this kind of rhetoric seriously. You'd reject any of a million plausible explanations for how post apocalyptic Seattle might not fit the modern day demography because the mere existence of too many diverse people made you perturbed.

That speaks for your own biases much more than it does the games "wokeness". There doesn't exist a game where diversity was the reason a game was bad. When a bad game has diversity, it's not because it took so much mental energy to come up with a non white character. I'd be willing to bet any game that is bad was bad for reasons that had nothing to do with the cast of the crew in the game. Bad writing is bad writing, and while we can agree that this story has a shit ton of pacing issues I'm rolling my eyes out of my skull at how people think "forced diversity ruining a story" is still a valid concept in 2020.

This isn't to say box ticking and diversity points doesn't happen, but just that when you start squinting hard to fit something into the "forced diversity" box you end up implying that diversity needs a reason to exist while being white cis and straight is totally fine and without any question in a game.