Wow this writing and dialogue. I guess when you know it's a visual novel you need to lower your expectations but this is monkey cheese dishwasher random like an aol chat room in the late 90s. ;)
I don't know if that's quite fair. If you want an example of this game, but without all that junk, I'd highly recommend checking out The Yawhg from 2013. The mechanics are nearly identical, but the writing doesn't lean nearly as hard on cheap stereotypes and the choices presented actually give the player some agency.
I'm all for no "numbers go up" based progression but what i would need is wild shit to do beyond PVP and this seems to be missing that..
Also can you pull any interesting cosmetics from the buried treasure chests or are they all just to sell? I can't imagine making the decision to have a game built around unearthing chests allegedly filled with long lost treasure and not give the player the satisfaction of actually opening them to see what interesting things are inside.. Even if you have to then take them to an outpost to make whatever is inside "usable"..
(and if we want to be honest IIRC since i've started watching/listening nobody has had to defend anything like Abby and Vinny did with Dream Daddy *cough* Destiny 1 *cough*) Only thing that might've come close is Invisible Inc had Austin not brought in his notebook.. previous years they would have and did relent sooner if others didn't want to vocalize a ton of their own reservations... or even at times when they DID!
The tedium here might come in when people instead have to resort to little more than "more game = better game" arguments to dismiss it outright because they are adamant their 9th or 10th favorite games need to trump a couple of people's absolute earthshattering faves.
I just want to say that i really appreciate the crew putting it out there every year and really hope they don't take too much bad faith "feedback" terribly seriously, i want to believe that most people are content with everyone growing naturally together even through some awkward steps (not too many honestly) and the vocal minority here isn't reflective of the whole body of the community.. at least i hope so because what i've read from the commentariat over the past week has been.. unsettling.. but i bet a lot of the people commenting here will rethink how they are choosing to engage over time.. at least i hope so.
Really love the new voices as well as the old ones, and enjoy that they've largely addressed some of my main issues with these discussions in the past. I also want to say I really appreciate anyone in the comments wanting to be constructive when talking about how to improve as a whole and not just singling out the newer members because working through the awkward moments is not JUST on them!!
I've said elsewhere that if this is how we're going to engage from here forward maybe the "debate" format actually does need to be left in the past, i really want to like aspects of it but finding individual hills to die on might be more fun in the abstract than in practice..
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