Ultimate Paradise

so yeah, another topic that will languish forever

For the greater part of the year, as I've said elsewhere, I've been binging on Guild Wars 2. Turns out the only thing keeping me from being a filthy MMO addict is to have not have to pay monthly fees to play a decently well-crafted MMO (lol KMMOs), I suppose. I guess that's the only thing keeping me from selling my soul to FFXIV! That said, I've been on a huge off period for that game and have been filling the void left in its wake with other stuff that maybe someone here cares about!

So, current projects:

• Fallout 4 - Of course. I dunno, I actually haven't played that much Fallout 4. Still haven't beaten it, in fact. I dunno, I like it less than Fallout 3 or New Vegas, probably because Fallout 4 is essentially Fallout 3 with a couple of mods put in. Doesn't really stand out compared to either of the previous games. I liked Fallout 3 because it was so empty that it felt kinda lonely and introspective, and New Vegas for being extremely lively and having a lot of detail put into its setting, whereas Fallout 4 stands in this awkward limbo in the middle where it's not empty enough, but most of the life in the world is made up by literally nameless settlers who have nothing to say or contribute. I guess it feels kinda like Skyrim where a lot of stuff is boiled down into procedurally-generated components and left in the hands of the player as opposed to having original, detailed content (a bit more or a bit less than Skyrim in specific areas), which... honestly, is part of a trend in open world games that I really do not appreciate. I don't dislike the game, and I'm still kinda playing it every now and then, but it's kind of a bummer.
  
• Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines - Fairly well-known PC game by ex-Black Isle folks, known for being pretty open in terms of setting and objectives. Notoriously buggy, so much so that the game will not run straight after installation on Steam, you have to patch it off-site. I had been meaning to play it for a while, but I never got around to it. One of my new pals seems to be pretty into it, so I guess I'm using that as a reason to finally check it out. Haven't played too much of it, yet -- it's kinda the game I've set aside for when I'm out of my room, since my laptop can actually run it. Seems pretty interesting, though!

And of course, I tend to touch random things for, like, an hour at a time and forget about them forever afterwards.

Looking forward to with ascending degrees of hesitation: Dark Souls 3, Persona 5, Fire Emblem: Fates. All of which I'm kinda wary of -- I'm getting tired of the "DARK SOULS EVERY YEAR" thing that seems to be going on. I think they're really losing their creativity with that specific setting (dunno about Bloodborne), but that could just be that they left Dark Souls 2 to the wrong designers (hey guys, let's make 50% of the bosses clones of Artorias because everyone likes Artorias, right!?). I've long since stopped caring about the Persona games just because of how much time they require and all of the dumb high school bullshit (man, I played Persona 4 when I was 15 and I'm 22 now, let's friggin' move on), but I'm kinda curious what they can do with that franchise on an 8th gen console, since they skipped the entire 7th gen. Fire Emblem: Awakening was the worst game in that series by a decent margin and I dunno if Fates is gonna fix that (looks like it isn't!), but I guess I've invested too much time into Fire Emblem to not see if they've redeemed themselves, I dunno. Sunk costs, yay!

EDIT: Oh yeah, also I may or may not move stupid D&D **** I do or someone else in my campaign does here, too. Got only one meeting left for the semester though, and we're prolly gonna rush it since finals weeks is incoming.

this effectively describes my relationship with Destiny

but probably without the "decently well-crafted" element

I feel like DS3 looks more like Bloodborne than it does DS1 at this point.

It's probably as well-crafted as GW2 at any rate. As long as it isn't KMMO levels of shit, I suppose.

I've totally been in complete media blackout regarding both P5 and Dark Souls 3, so like, I dunno. Like, one thing I'm really cautious about with Dark Souls 3 is that it was announced this year and put up for release early next year -- who has been working on it up to this point? Bloodborne was released this year, and they had been developing DLC for Dark Souls 2 up to the end of last year as well as having allocated at least some people in doing Scholar of the First Sin. Did they have an entirely separate C-team doing it up until those other projects were finished, or is this a short development cycle? I guess they could prolly pull it off by using Scholar of the First Sin as a base, but the idea of pushing Dark Souls as a yearly thing is pretty dubious (not to mention that they have a precedent for this courtesy of Armored Core).

Yeah, I was also surprised with how quickly DS3 was announced. I think Miyazaki described Dark Souls 3 as the turning point of the franchise, whatever that means exactly. It doesn't seem likely that they'll make another Dark Souls game though. Maybe something with similar gameplay, but a different setting like Bloodborne. I know they want to take the whole series in some new directions at least. I also don't even think there are clear cut "A" and "B" team distinctions at From. It seems like they're just mixing and matching, since I know Tanimura is helping out with some design choices for DS3.

Last I checked, Miyazaki said recently this is the last Dark Souls game. Not sure if its the last "Souls" game, but I'd be okay with that; I'd like to see FromSoftware utilize their new muscle and presumably budget on some spiritual successors to Otogi or Lost Kingdoms or something since there's so much worth in those games that they could explore.

also def move d&d **** to this topic

last d&d meeting of the semester. we're in a mystery thing, and we kinda fucked up, missed a lot of cues and checks and a lot of people died. in retrospect, if I stealthed and camped out in the main hall on one night like i probably should have (we were disrupted in our sleep by a red herring meant to disguise stuff actually going down later that night. i'm not very smart with mysteries lol), we could have solved it then and there. not finished yet, so i guess it's gonna be a month-long cliffhanger.

in gay elf sex stories, one of the guests murdered was an elf i spent all of my interactions with hitting on. he also died as a direct response to me pushing the party downstairs to meet up with the cleric, since all of the enemies were incorporeal specters. said cleric was downstairs on my orders, since we found a weird room i wanted someone camped in. also because most of the spells the culprit used up to that point were illusory and i thought the specters were just illusions and the sorcerer who rolled knowledge spellcraft failed a check with her 22. weeeeelp.

also the girl i have a crush on who is also in the d&d campaign was pretty exasperated with my interactions with him, so i guess there's your awkward maniac story of the day

Why does it sound like you're the party leader?

i'm not (in fact, i'm actually spying on them), but i'm the guy who questions everything out of paranoia and wrong genre savviness. like, only one other player in the team is as suspicious and inquisitive as i'd like them to be, so i generally get people to shut up, i come up with a call, and quite a few of them go with it because they're generally not making their own calls.

also, as the party rogue (read: skill mule), it's my job to do all the checks and make sure everything is in order, so i've grown used to making a jillion calls because that's my greatest utility at the moment

Making most or all of the decisions sounds like being the party leader to me.

Not really, it's just that a lot of them are very shortsighted and not meticulous with planning stuff. Actually, before the session started, we were talking about how our party would fit into the TVTropes five man band (lol) and my character was the smart guy, sooooo

Just as an example of what I mean, one of my party members yelled at me for disrupting a plan in the middle of a battle that she literally never told me about, and only well after the fact instead of saying "no, don't do that" right as I was about to do my thing, which actually severely pissed me off. That's the kind of organization I deal with.

just had my last session of the year too with the news that the dm is moving to california so that's cool

well that ended fast

yeah, i'm the oldest of my group by a fair margin -- they're all like, 18-20, so they'll be around for a while. and i guess so will i, because i'm a bad person

sending him my way?

You beautiful person.

I wonder if Undertale would have gotten this far if everyone didn't utterly fucking freak out over it winning for each round it was in. I mean, I imagine nearly everyone who is voting for it would probably vote for it anyway because they like it and all, but I wonder how many of those people would actually turn out to vote for it if they didn't get some concrete results out of doing so.

like ahriman for example

hmm?

Are people freaking out about Undertale winning rounds of the GameFAQS contest?

So, Persona 4 Golden. I guess I'm playing this. On Very Hard mode of course.

Immediate observation: New Chie is a mixed bag, but mostly negative. On one hand, the original voice actor did not sound anything like a teenager, and more like a 40-year old east coast lady. On the other, Erin Fitzgerald is still probably one of the worst voice actors in the industry, and it shows -- she's markedly worse at actually acting. Geez...

EDIT: New Teddie is all around worse, ofc.

Oh, Maniac. Still completely incapable of actually enjoying things.

I do like that about you.

Live on the east coast, can confirm.

p.s. on the first day of dungeoning, both of my characters got criticaled and wiped and i stopped playing ofc

there's a bit of grinding to do on the first day for an optimal all-s-link run (gotta get sandman for the strength s-link), and it really annoys me that, for some arbitrary reason, it's the only day on which you cannot fuse stuff or save in the dungeon proper. i mean, you've already been introduced to the velvet room, so why the fuck not i guess

actually, i just remember persona 4's first dungeon being a jillion different varieties of rough in general, where it's harder than like, 95% of the rest of the game lol

shadow yukiko went out on the first try, despite me remembering nothing about her and not having a whole lot of MP lol

like, it really sucks to have a party member who is weak to her element without a whole lot of stuff to counter it. i guess you get red wall pretty early, but it's also 18 MP (none of my party members had more than 60 MP, and that was after I spent all my MP items on them) and only lasts a couple of turns. so like, she has agi and her all-target fire spell, and unless you have chie guard every turn, she has a chance of knocking her out of commission. doesn't help that she always follows knocking down anyone with her signature attack, which is horrifically sadistic -- very hard mode jacks up the crit rate of physical skills for enemies to somewhere around like, 50%, so it was really great when she criticaled yosuke, used her signature move to wipe out chie and ravage my party, and almost wiped me in one go lol. thankfully, the new shuffle time system makes it really easy to accumulate a lot of endurance early on, as well as level your persona, so my MC was a tanky mother fucker who took half the damage everyone else did lol

not looking forward to shadow kanji on that note -- dude is all phys, so I expect like, a jillion criticals from that one.

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/545299060928166966/C726F57A20D29AAA51B03906F1033EAA3BB7BD9F/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside|1024:576&composite-to=*,*|1024:576&background-color=black)

this is what i've been doing since christmas

spot everything wrong with this picture

you're fatrolling

fatroll threshold in dark souls 2 is > 70%

oh ok

but how the hell is your first weapon doing that much damage with the low stats you have?

two-handing

you're getting close, though

EDIT: also i'm bellbro-ing. it's great, i just got a plunging attack on some poor fucker right under me in luna as he was trying to recover in the middle of a fight with some other guy without him noticing me.

the hair is very distracting

Vanilla or First Sin?

first sin. vanilla, at least for the PC, is a graveyard and even on challenge runs do i feel compelled to do stupid **** online

also spoilers that's a level 1 character with massively over-inflated stats courtesy of all the stat increasing equipment i snagged from the DLC areas

one of the most obvious things ever, but something i've only just noted: running around aimlessly in fallout 4, killing raiders while listening to motorhead's entire discography is awesome

makes me almost want to see if i can make lemmy as a character, and i prolly can. only i'd have to sit through the indignity of lemmy sounding like an american everyman talking about saving his baby, which is just ewwww

you could always go play brutal legend

i have, and honestly, that game sucks

i'm reasonably sure i've seen a lemmy picture so its def possible

Gentlemen, is Dark Cloud 2 not still the best game ever?
"Of course it's no--"
**** YOU

EDIT: i mean, i just had a battle on the top of a moving train, lobbing bombs at this ATV chasing us along the side manned by a clown firing at me on an emplaced turret, moments after having destroyed his clown-themed giant robot. immediately afterwards, said clown stripped to his skivvies, revealing that he has a megaton's worth of dynamite strapped to his flabby body, in a desperate attempt to suicide bomb the hero into oblivion. and the game has only just begun! how is this not the best thing ever?

FIRST D&D MEETING OF THE SEMESTER WHOOOO

in this one, i got angry at another character for being too trusting towards suspicious things (in this case, a group of nonhostile zombies performing a play), and then as soon as this antagonistic elf lady was revealed to be a trap, i completely went against all rationality and went "we HAVE to take him alive"

granted i got this badass nonlethal sneak attack that floored him in one hit and my diplomacy modifier is really high so i managed to calm him after waking him from unconsciousness, but still

you do realize that this means you will have to continue your gay elf sex bender

no matter if you think the joke is old or not at this point

to be honest, i'm kinda expecting the DM to drop a bridge on him to cull that plan

if there could be a constant maniac d&d log that would just be great so get on that

this is just about the most interesting part of it during the combat phase.

but, since some of you seem to be vaguely amused by this, i guess i'll spell out how weird the party is

• i'm the rogue. i'm like, the sixth ranger -- i'm part of a criminal organization and, because i met and worked with the party on a prior mission, i'm on orders to enter and spy on the party because it so happens that the party sorceress's boyfriend is secretly the "prince", for lack of a better word, of a pirate nation. my character is non-good aligned, unfriendly and grim, and he kinda sticks out like a sore thumb in a party filled with anime characters. the only established quirk of my character is that he has a negative CHA modifier, so when he's not being grimdark anti-hero man, he's an awkward trainwreck, especially in the company of someone he has a crush on. also, because i as a person totally love elves and pretty guys, the "loves elf men" thing has bled into his character, which leads to weird hijinks when combined with that CHA bit (although I still have the highest diplomacy modifier in the party and am the go-to person for that, ironically). also, everyone in the party has a "drunk personality" -- mine is "extremely likely to spill all of his secrets while drunk", so while every other party member routinely gets drunk, i cannot or else i'm screwed. this may be a problem later.
• the sorceress has a CHA of 18, so naturally when i saved her from almost being murdered by pirates, her immediate response was to threaten to burn me alive. at odds with her CHA, she's awkward and quirky, so i guess that means that her character must be the hottest lady ever or something. she's pretty much the main character, though -- the common thread of our campaign is her boyfriend and will probably remain that way for a while.
• the cleric is this person:
  
  Quote from: Maniac on 16 November, 2015, 01:22:34 am
  I deliberately withheld information that led to the death of another player's dog for a bunch of reasons, so now she (OOC) has promised everlasting vengeance upon me.
  
  she's also the nominal leader of the party (in the same way freddy from scooby doo is the leader of his gang), so that tends to work out well. note: our fighter and sorceress are the second characters of their respective players, because both of their first characters were killed on the second day of the campaign because the cleric ran away. whoops
• our fighter has an int stat of 8, so that tends to work out poorly -- probably his shining moment is when he was an accessory to date **** without understanding what he was doing. he's also a violent drunk, only he tends to get horribly injured every time he drinks. he's kind of the dumb, over-protective surrogate little brother to our sorceress, so when she was getting laid by her wizard boyfriend, he drunkenly tried to charge in and murder him and was just casually laid low by a thunderbolt. did i mention he's lawful good?
• the barbarian is probably the straightest party member, which fits his dwarven nature. that said, he did challenge the fighter to a half-naked oil wrestling match while our sorceress was off being kidnapped instead of looking for her.

they're all good aligned, except for me.

What has the cleric done so far to seek vengeance?

it's not the cleric, it's the player

and well, nothing actually. on an unrelated note, she has promised that some day, eventually, she will eventually slap me for trolling her during a club meeting a while ago, but i'm pretty sure she has since forgotten that she ever said that

D&D UPDATE:

• we decided to loot the place before confronting the boss
• in the process, we fought some basilisk chimera thing that petrified the sorceress
• at mine and the fighter's demands, we aborted the mission to bring her back to town, so we never got to fight the boss
• while petrified, the sorceress almost sold her soul to a devil for freedom and power at the cost of turning evil and killing the party (except me, because said devil was totally down with my character alignment lol)
  
• took the trap elf with us. he's evil, of course, so he broke free and almost broke our petrified sorceress, and my party gutted him. wasn't there to do it myself, since i had the highest diplomacy stat and had to deliver the news of our failure to the guy who hired us. apparently he only broke out at that time because he knew i was too badass for him to take lol
• met a crazy epic-level dude who could lift battleships with his mind who almost killed us, but made up for it by unpetrifying the sorceress

lots of stuff, very little of it funny, i guess. i guess i kinda convinced the DM that if i died somehow, which the story might actually force upon me, that somehow we'll retcon the trap elf's death and let me play as him kinda sorta maybe lol

Obviously you're going to have to write a mini-storyline about the elf killing your PC for the honor of all male elves everywhere.

And then he joins the party because you were the local Belkar.

found the PDF of this campaign the DM was using. that feeling when you notice that the final boss has 18 HP, a flatfoot of 15 and a negative spot check. if I snuck into his chamber, he'd have to overcome an aggregate modifier of 12 points for me to not sneak up on him and take like, 80% of his HP in a single hit

and THEN i'd roll for initiative, likely get it because I have a +7 initiative modifier, and finish him off. i could have solo'd the boss lol

also the elf has like, way worse stats than i do. like, 7 more CHA, 2 more wis and 1 more dex (17 vs 16, so no bonus modifier, but closer to a bonus) in exchange for like, 6 CON and 2 INT. I've gotten mostly bare minimum rolls for HP every level and I still have 10 more HP than he does. the only benefit he'd have is that he'd be far more persuasive, since i'm the most persuasive party member in the party thanks to my huge per level skill point gains (two points higher than his, b/c +1 int and humanity bonuses)

All that means is that he has to be especially clever about it.

Like an ambush with thugs while the rest of your party has passed out drunk.

actually, what i said about the elf wasn't a response to you, it was just me looking at his stats for the first time and thinking "you know, is the massive drop in survivability and utility and kinda everything ever worth being able to play as an evil trap elf"

D&D update: In which the fighter goes to a ball held for the biggest, baddest criminals in town and picks a fight with all of them. like when he gets nailed by a triple crit by a lady whose weapon we had already established has a +4 enchantment and almost gets pasted right then and there

So how many diamonds are you down?

he didn't actually die, thankfully! although that's because the player had to get the DM to promise that he won't kill him. also the DM knew that he was going to try to do that anyway (this player is adamant about roleplaying his character as being so stupid that he's practically suicidal, and then he complains whenever his HP gets too low lol) and specifically wrote a scene for it

keep in mind, if anyone dies, they're gone for good since we don't have the resources for a resurrection. the DM's plan at this level is to reincarnate any character who dies, round their EXP down, and give whoever dies the most awkward race he can possibly think of as punishment.

EDIT: also, somehow i didn't know the barbarian, who we've been calling "dankbro" for the entire game, is actually in fact named brothor dankhammer. i thought that was dumb OOC nickname, but nope, he is actually called that

that's kind of fantastic

stuff

• spent like, 2 and a half hours doing pointless shit, including a lot of time discussing mechanics and optimizing equipment
• we are now in the fighter's home town, where we've learned he's a mamma's boy. also his mom despises the sorceress, who she calls a "goblin prostitute". i tried to disguise the sorceress because she was hell-bent on coming into town, but the mom rolled a natural 20 on sense motive and found out.
• the fighter is so dumb that he ends up telling his mom about how he met a devil and was turned into a tomato, killed an entire royal family (who were possessed) and slaughtered a troupe of performers (who were evil) without context. his mom still blames the sorceress for that
• some stuff happened and then cultists attacked. of course, i was the only one to make my listen check and everyone else was elsewhere and asleep, so we were split up and that was awkward. i did wake them up, though. fighter ooc kept bitching about how i was really quick to murder what could be members of his townsfolk despite the fact they were running around with battleaxes and had murdered a few people, and despite the fact that i'm not good-aligned so i don't care.
• so the member of the party with the highest HP is our barbarian, at 41. we got into a fight with an enemy barbarian - with a single crit, he dealt 48 damage to him and almost one-shot him. if he dealt that damage to literally anyone else, that person would be dead
• fun fact: ever since the start of this adventure, my party has yet to ever see me because i've been doing stealthy stuff elsewhere. trolled the fighter ooc by revealing that if i take 10, it is literally impossible for him to see me. even got to fight my own set of enemies alone, but they were mooks. didn't get to kill all of them since there were 8 of the fuckers and the DM was in a rush to leave.

also after it was done i spent like, one and a half hours talking to the girl i have a crush on about her neuroses, so that was hella awkward

goblin prostitute is definitely a band somewhere in europe

[4:00:07 PM] Me: so, i'm in a D&D campaign with 2 dudes and 2 girls
[4:00:27 PM] Me: both of the girls are out doing girly things, so we would normally do nothing this week
[4:01:12 PM] Me: only i just goaded my DM and the other two guys into having a no-stakes, reset upon success/failure boys only, no girls allowed run
[4:01:43 PM] Me: the girls are the magic users, so all that's left are ugly, burly men who swing swords and ****. it's gonna be great

cleric girl is gonna be so pissed, i can't wait

*chappelle show dude's night out sketch but with swords*

so, that was a raging success. with only three dumb sword guys, we basically did the entire thing perfectly, ruined a bunch of people's shit and nobody went below half their max HP.

some notes:

• apparently the module didn't expect me to be awake or to pass my listen check for when the cultists started attacking, and it was built for us to be about an hour late. so I prevented us from fighting an encounter that the DM said may have been able to wipe us
• the final boss was, of all things, an insane halfling cleric riding a headless bugbear zombie. may have been the most retarded thing i've seen in this campaign to date. also, he heard us coming and put a bunch of buffs on himself, only I decided to take 20 for a sneak check to sneak into the far end of his chamber, which took so long that it almost elapsed his buffs, lol. still, he was dead within the first round
• an earlier cleric cultist dude summoned a wolf that our barbarian killed. we have a running joke about dogs dying, so the DM sent cleric girl a message saying that the barbarian killed a puppy. she thought the DM was referring to her new puppy, and after a bit of goading from me and the DM, this happened:

[anyone who cared to see it already has~]

Mmm, tasty tasty dog tears.

bringing out the old "this thread sucks and is now about trains" makes me misty-eyed for memes from 2008.

and since the oldest party member was still born in 1996, none of them got it!

sometimes i feel kinda old in their presence, in a particularly bad kind of way lol. i mean, none of them remember 8bit theater! how can this be

If you can't remember 8BT your life isn't worth living.

(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/017/636/907.jpg)

actually, nonono wait, here's the best part: the youngest was still in the single digit ages when this site was made. only for like, a couple of days, but still, now she's in college

think about that

*old man dialogue here*

i do occasionally feel very old despite not at all being old and it doesn't help that most of my online buddies are younger than me, some by a pretty decent amount

well you're older than i am by a couple of years so i guess you get to feel old watching someone younger than you feel old

I saw someone use that old "X Y is X" meme a while ago. Felt surreal seeing that.

Do people anywhere even use the >_> face anymore? Never forget its overuse on BP when this site was at its prime.

i saw someone used multitrack drifting fairly recently and could not withhold a tear


i am become a shriveled aged husk

i do actually still use it, but i've most graduated to ¬_¬ now that i'm a bit more literate in the field of alt codes

meh

I think emotes are more timeless than memes, so I don't really feel like it's possible to date oneself by using any given subset.

apparently some people do get **** for using ASCII emotes and not emojis or whatever you call them. oh man you use ">_>"? don't hurt your hip, grandpa!

i've lessened my use of ">_>" in recent times

not because i've matured, i'm just more deliberately irritating instead of hiding it behind a "lol it's a joke man" face

i always thought of it as a "you're an idiot" kind of face, honestly

it ranges somewhere between "you're an idiot" and "i'm being an idiot"

D&D meeting was pretty uneventful. Fought a giant fucking troll with 34 strength, I guess. Did like, 50 damage to the barbarian.

So, here's the eventful part: today my D&D team went to a friend of the DM's house to play Pathfinder. It was pretty amusing; we were press-ganged into service on a pirate ship under some sadistic fucker. I chose a female Tiefling brawler, so basically an unarmed monk-y kind of character with like, 19 dex.  Only I have a negative wisdom modifier and a very negative CHA modifier, so my Tiefling is a hideous, gibbering lunatic who terrifies everyone she meets, barely functions as an intelligent lifeform in terms of interpersonal relationships, and is insanely violent. I chose to represent her design with this:

(http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/valkyrieprofile/images/1/1c/Homunculus2._Png/revision/latest?cb=20131008173806)

Other party members included a stiff, 7'8" Gnoll cavalier (a pirate with a god damn horse, man) with 20 strength who beat down a pirate and used his unconscious body to beat up another pirate, a grumpy undine who hates us all because we're batshit insane, and a psychotic barbarian lady who found it real hot when I, as a pink-haired 5'2", 125 lb lady, kicked the crap out of a hulking fighter dude above my level in one-on-one, hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, playing as new characters was kind of a fun change of pace, especially since everyone is some kind of neutral, so it got real weird fast. We might go another week or so just to keep playing with the setting, but we're not going to stick with it. Which is a shame, because I kind of like the character I rolled for this (she's genuinely pretty nice, really! she's just an utter psycho towards anyone who fucks with her), I might just keep her character sheet and re-use either her personality or the full damn thing.

how's pathfinder play/feel compared to d&d my one buddy has expressed interest in playing it

If you've been playing 3.5e like I have, it's barely different since Pathfinder was designed to be a modern 3.5e with some bells and whistles attached. If you've been playing 5e, I dunno since I've never played 5e.

welp, here's hoping FE:Fates isn't total ass

(it probably is)

the following is me ranting about DLC stuff in FE: Fates that might constitute a spoiler for anyone who has not had exposure to that game beyond promotional articles. i don't think anyone should really mind, but after i kinda thought about it for a bit, better safe than sorry

EDIT: honestly, one thing that reaaaaaally bothers me about FE: Fates isn't the two games thing -- it's the third campaign. I mean, they clearly made two games just to gouge you out of your money, but the premise that sets up the multiple versions deal is something you can actually make work, at least enough to justify the existence of two games. the idea that there's a third, "golden" route that is held as DLC that completely obsoletes the other two routes and allows you to have your cake and eat it too bothers the hell out of me, like you need to spend an extra $20 to get the actual good ending, the one that actually matters. and if you don't get it, you get to do one of two shittier routes don't don't result in any meaningful resolution beyond "oops, you didn't pay extra for the BEST ending". and here i am, about to do it anyway despite complaining about it because i've been playing fire emblem for too long to actually take a stand and say "this is horseshit" and allow myself to be deprived of the latest entry. ffs

like, maybe i'm wrong and am just making a snap judgment based on ignorance. maybe it isn't the miraculous, unequivocally happy ending i kind of anticipate it to be. but i highly friggin' doubt that, and everything i've learned of it points to "yep, it totally is what I think it is."

pretty audacious of them to pull off that DLC nonsense considering how the series was hanging by a thread financially before awakening came out

But I guess they can get away with it knowing that people will want more waifu simulators.

I played the Nohr version back when it came out in Japan and it was at least better as a game than Awakening, but still not good enough to want to pay for the other versions.

How distraught are you over the VILE CENSORSHIP of waifu petting mechanics?

you have three guesses and the first two don't count

think one of my buddies put it best: nobody is upset over the multiple versions horseshit, but they're upset over like, soleil's shifty support conversations getting the boot instead, because everyone on the internet has decided to become a pants-shitting baby over "censorship" or whatever.

EDIT: oh yes, did i mention i'm doing nohr on lunatic mode? because of course i am

EDIT: EDIT: chapter 5 was such a load of horseshit on lunatic mode that I had to throw the hoshido-exclusive characters straight at all the mobs of enemies to stand a chance, and even then i was only saved by azura dodging like, 3 67% (so like, 80% with true hit lol) hits in a row.

i would be digging it so far but the SJWS CAUSED THE REMOVAL OF CRUCIAL DIALOGUE AND MECHANICS

I just spit up blood while typing that.

Fire Emblem: Conquest in a nutshell:
Garon: "Iago, my good friend, how will we make the Avatar's life a living hell this day?"

this may very well be the lamest storyline in history, who the hell thought anyone would possibly want this

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cb_0YH6WAAUwMjy.jpg)

close enough, akari. close enough

I...huh?

we are here today to celebrate the birthday of someone very important. someone who has been with us in the darkest times, and also in the happiest of times. indeed, today we shall celebrate the continuance of this person's glorious existence.

(http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/d/da/FEF_Belka_My_Room_Model.png/revision/latest?cb=20150629022252)

i am, of course, speaking of beruka from fire emblem fates: conquest, and not myself. happy birthday!

beruka, eh

looks like volke with **** slapped on to me

never seen maniac and beruka in the same room

hmmmmmmmmmmm sounds suspicious

so, big annual anime club tournament thing

preliminaries were made up of three games:
Street Fighter V (got 3rd in)
Vectorman (negligible position)
NBA Jam (lost first match)

got enough points from street fighter V somehow to survive the preliminaries and into the top 8, from which point we played:
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (went out in the first round)
Gears of War 3 1v1 (lost second match)

didn't qualify for the top 4 games, so that sucked. they're still doing that right now, actually, I was just extremely busy yesterday and couldn't bring myself to stay any longer. final 4 was based on this game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengeki_Bunko:_Fighting_Climax

so basically the game where you play as your anime waifu and beat up everyone else. would have crashed and burned if i got that far, but top 4 actually wins prizes (and I made 3rd place last year and wanted to retain that) so i'm actually pretty disappointed. like, all but one of the top 4 were officers because they had a natural advantage since they've actually played, own and chose these games ("i haven't played street fighter V yet" "but you've been playing street fighter 4 regularly for years, you have a working idea of what you're doing!"), so that really tipped the scales.

did win a $20 nintendo e-shop gift card in a raffle though, so I can get the other fire emblem game if i choose to be so frivolous with my money or whatever

well you didn't have to play dengeki bunko so i'd say you were the real winner in the end

i had gotten a couple games in a while and i can usually fake my way through fighting games, but since literally every officer had played more than a couple of rounds of it and actually know how to play it, i'd get destroyed.

basically if the officers didn't participate, i could have maybe won that game

but you can play as kirino tho

kirino is actually broken as **** in that game lol

that is pretty great for some reason

i'd only play as bugzapper though

i tried to main as railgun for the few games i played and it didn't work out very well. she's really hard to use and if you're not using her the way you should, she's doing nothing fast

twilight princess reviews are up. i think the internet has rightfully come to the conclusion that that game isn't even worth remembering. but you know what is? 8.8!

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcewPypW4AE1Y1E.jpg)

how many of you remember this horseshit

i absolutely remember because i found it slightly odd then just went on to play and enjoy the game anyway

oh mid 2000s

i still think it's hilarious. i was 13 years old when 8.8 happened and even then it struck me as incredibly retarded

those did seem like halcyon days compared to now, though. people didn't like you over some frivolous horseshit, they'd throw out death threats and then cease to be proactive beyond that. nowadays, stuff like this happens constantly, and it makes even less sense:

https://twitter.com/iglvzx/status/704850191258484736

crosspost with "What brought you down today?", btw.

everything about "gamergate" is terrible

it's a shouting match between two sides who want things their way

Any time I see something they do or get mad about it almost impresses me with how fucking shitty they are.

full disclosure, i may have been stunned into inactivity for like, 30 minutes after reading about it. they also specifically timed it as she was on vacation in japan. so like, yeah

Man I fu(http://)cking hate these gamergate nerds. Really is shameful.

Goobergate has been a shitshow from the very first, yes.

[4:23:08 PM] Me: http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/6261-how-long-have-you-been-playing-video-games this poll kind of amuses me
[4:24:32 PM] Me: it's still a fairly common thing where i meet someone in real life, and they seem pretty into gaming at this point, but they've only been doing it for a couple of years, maybe 5 at most. i guess none of those people are found on gamefaqs
[4:25:04 PM] Me: wonder if that's because they don't really seek a resource like gamefaqs, or if gamefaqs is becoming a more obscure backwater as time passes by

i am quite convinced that intsys picked the most unintelligent, incapable person they had to write the scenario to fire emblem fates: conquest. i thought awakening was dumb enough, but this is on a whole 'nother level.

also just makes all of the censorship folks look even weirder. led harassment campaigns over this horseshit lol. there is no translation that could have salvaged this plot

Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch

i really think the game is written so that you're supposed to go for the birthright path, though i haven't tried that side yet

well, it is and it isn't. it really feels like all of their ideas were allocated towards making hoshido into marysuetopia and fighting the good fight against the hilariously, obviously evil nohrian army, and that conquest was basically just an afterthought meant to justify selling two fucking games. on the other hand, the hoshidan characters are about as interesting as a tree stump (and they introduce hoshido with none of the characters that look even remotely interesting as well) and the entire prologue is presented in a manner where you've known all of those chucklefucks for a good 15 minutes total such that they don't do much of an argument for caring about any of them (alas, poor mikoto, i knew her... for 5 god damn minutes). really does feel like conquest goes about itself in an ass-backwards fashion even then, though, almost like they kinda went out of their way to avoid the simple way to make it interesting and took some time and effort to make it dumb as all hell.

actually, it's kind of weird. it feels like they went out of their way to make the nohrian family pretty interesting. lots of detail put into the characters of camilla, leo and elise. and on the other hand, the hoshidan royal family have no discernable personality characteristics aside from takumi, whose trait is "asshole". it's like they want you to like the nohrian royal family more, although that may also be to drum up sympathy for when you kill them and all of their friends in the other route i guess

So what you're saying is that the writing really is that bad?

i may or may not be trying to say that

They got some mangaka who hasn't done anything I've heard of to write Fates. Apparently they really played it up in the Japanese advertising, so it's cool that the plot turned out so dumb and bad.

so, my campus's wi-fi service restricts wi-fi on game consoles, so i've been unable to do online stuff in fire emblem fates up until now, where i've decided to go home for the day (to vote in the primary)

fighting dudes online and taking their skills after defeating them in their own customized castle is a ton of fun and I'm really enjoying myself. really need to get a router up to campus at some point so i can do this more often

Finished Conquest last night.

Like, I've slagged on that game's plot to death and how the entire idea was ill-fated from the start, but let's talk about Conquest as a game before I do that yet again one last time. It's actually pretty decent -- played it on hard mode, and it's balls hard. Prolly harder than its equivalent difficulty in Radiant Dawn, even. In deliberate defiance of how people characterized map design in Awakening, in which every map was a tedious outdoors, "kill the boss on THIS map, man!" kind of deal, every single chapter has some gimmick wholly unlike those of the others going for it, some of which are pretty creative and neat. Although the game was frustratingly difficult at quite a few points, it was overall kinda fun. Enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than Awakening, that's for sure.

Story was dogshit to the very last, though. Like, this campaign comes off as an extreme afterthought: The entire objective of the second half is the most hilariously round-about manner of solving the same damn problem, and it's done so incompetently that the person who wrote it should have slapped himself in the face. The egregious thing is that they had so much equipment to have made it interesting, what with the "step into the dark" marketing that made it sound like you would go full-on anti-hero. I mean, that could have actually been compelling, but nope, you're some wishy-washy goodie-two-shoes with the charisma of a librarian whose mental fortitude is as tough as a soggy paper towel, who spends the entire game being the whipping boy of the actual villains instead of standing against them right then and there. I mean, they actually have some plot twists where they're fucking negating some potentially interesting character subversions in favor of making them as bleedingly stereotypical as they could. Also, what I predicted earlier on in that spoiler post? I was a hundred percent right on the money. Honestly, nobody should expect a riveting epic out of a Fire Emblem game, even when it was at its best, but it took some damn effort to squander what little potential that was lying right there to come up with this. Everyone responsible should be ashamed, god.

Not in much of a hurry to touch Birthright. It's prolly less dumb plot-wise, but the fact that it's basically Fire Emblem: Awakening 2.0 in terms of gameplay doesn't attract me. I'll play some of it when I have absolutely nothing else to do, I guess.

this made me smile

I played on normal and classic mode and got fucking wrecked routinely. I'm admittedly pretty casual with the series/turn based strategy in general but it really broke me. Birthright was much less a pain, even if grinding wasn't a thing. I feel like it falls back on the "just have reinforcements as difficulty" thing that really drove me insane in Devil Survivor 2, although not to the same degree (I don't remember if it was a problem in Awakening since its been awhile since I've played that.) I found the story in Birthright to be kind mean at times actually which was surprising given how its been marketed as the right choice/the Awakening sequel from the start, but I also don't really play games for the story anymore so that was more of a "huh weird" thing than anything else.

well, i guess i lied and am well into birthright

main character seems much less lame here, in a complete 180. i guess you'd prolly have to be built pretty thin if you'd choose "omg i want to go back to my family" over "i will fight this evil madman who is ruining the world," but still.

so maniac went to on his first day of his first con yesterday

and spent all of it playing reflec beat

like, most people come out of cons with tons of pictures of cool stuff and a lot of sh(http://)it they bought? i came out with like, a fucking list of every song I played matched to their difficulty and the score i got.

i think i should be direly ashamed by this. but hey, reflec beat is a really fun game -- a lot easier to pick up, play, and make some progress than modern day beatmania IIDX

what did you cosplay as

as an ugly long-haired metalhead with a leather jacket and ripped jeans

note: the first 8 I cleared happened to be:

(https://remywiki.com/images/a/ac/INSOMNIA_MEDIUM.png)

i always knew the jakarta funk brothers were there for me

(http://i.imgur.com/k2ywFH7.jpg?1)

look at me now, ma

EDIT: god damn shame the closest arcade with this kind of **** is like, 4 hours away. living in michigan blows.

ma and two of the other campaign folks played a one-off session of AD&D 2.0 ran by one of the DM's buddies. AD&D 2.0 is the edition Baldur's Gate ran under, and since Baldur's Gate is almost two decades old, it is antiquated as hell and it shows. It's less of a game of modifiers and number crunching as much as it is a less forgiving, yet more linear game of scoring under or over static thresholds corresponding to your base stats. Still has a lot of weird jank: notably, you roll your HP for your first level as opposed to getting a static amount corresponding to your hit dice: with negative con modifiers, it is possible to roll a character with 0 HP, as the first player who rolled their stats managed to do. It's also kind of rough since you're allocating stats based on 3d6 as opposed to picking the best 3 of 4d6, so the probability of getting below a 10, and thus having a less than 50% chance of succeeding any given roll, is pretty damn high. Feels really janky at low levels especially, where HP is so low that you can easily be killed in a single hit (the highest HP value in the party was six -- a single d6 has a chance of felling that lol), and a lot of character specializations are just utterly worthless for lack of skills or whatnot. Interesting session nonetheless, though.

and for the goofy shit because there's always goofy shit, i noticed how there were a ton of really stupid rogue proficiencies like juggling and tightrope walking and since this was a one-off campaign, i decided to play as an embittered clown rogue with like, 8 cha, so he's basically just a miserable wreck who can make nobody laugh. however, I rolled super well for charisma checks, so i managed to make this broken, emotionless and incredibly messed-up kid smile, so that was cute. think i'll keep the character sheet -- always down with saving fun character concepts.

a clown rogue sounds horrifying, but if you're making kids smile, you must be playing it pretty straight

one thing about character alignment in AD&D 2 is that neutrality implies balance rather than disinterest -- do actions that are both lawful and chaotic, good or evil in equal balance, which seems like a weird, inconsistent way to characterize someone. was kind of thinking chaotic neutral when making the character, but when the DM explained that, i went "screw that" and just decided to be good.

aside from that, though, my character is still kind of an embittered jerk since he's a total failure and all. it's just that he's good at heart under that.

this is making me miss playing d&d

http://kotaku.com/drama-ensues-as-fire-emblem-fates-fan-translation-gets-1766634100

lol

p.s. birthright sucks hard. like, honestly, I'm down with the idea of limitless grinding and stuff, but they even copied the tedious "rout/kill boss on map with inelegantly-sorted blobs of enemies and torrents of reinforcements that do nothing but stall you" horseshit from awakening. like, honestly, who thinks maps like these are fun? kinda wish they'd just do the whole meticulous level-crafting of conquest with the opportunity for grinding, kind of like a hypothetical version of sacred stones that's actually difficult lol

I've never played Fire Emblem but I love reading your rants about these games.

maniac d&d adventures: my favorite elf prostitute tied me up, stabbed me in the chest with a poisoned dagger and threw me into the ocean

welp

You knew it was coming.

there are worse ways to go

p.s. that still didn't kill me. ain't got 16 con for nothin'

---------

also people on twitter are getting really whiny about having to wait a few weeks to get dark souls 3 when it's already out in japan. i love this one, it's so hilariously self-righteous:

"Reap what you sow isn't it? Sadly this is crap forcing me to leave a negative review on Steam no matter how good the game is =/"

apparently someone tried to DDOS from's servers over this crap. i've never really thought about people being "entitled" before, but god the modern "gamer" is an incorrigibly entitled fucking brat.

Did you see the initial PvP outrage after one small mistranslation? People were flipping a sh(http://)it.

i am not familiar with this. or so i think? lol

I'm going to mark it in spoilers in case you or anyone else cares about mechanics stuff.

People originally thought you needed to have two items to be invaded. Supposedly you needed to use an Ember (which I think is this game's humanity) but then you also needed to use a Dried Finger to actually get invaded (basically "summoning" invaders). People got upset, because this meant only gankers would be using the Dried Finger. Because only few people would use the Dried Finger solo, it would also supposedly ruin the "mystery" and "fear" of an invader messing you up.

None of this was true. You just use an Ember and you can get invaded. It's like Dark Souls, though apparently the Dried Finger allows you to summon an additional third phantom for co-op. However, you have a chance of getting invaded by a second red phantom if you use it. People were just quick to believe a one sentence mistranslation from some random redditor who even said his/her English wasn't very good. derrrr

Some people on reddit were going nuts. Someone actually claimed that we have an ethical responsibility to not buy the game. Everyone else kept saying stuff like RIP PvP, Dark Souls 3 is dead, going back to play SotFS. Then the actual truth came out and everyone was suddenly fine.

i was actually kinda wondering if it was the same kind of deal as FE:Fates rather than implications towards gameplay, especially since i kind of imagine the game with the largest cross-section with people who really like talking about ethics in games journalism is dark souls lol

every souls game has kind of gotten shit like this, of course. "PvP was ruined in Dark Souls, it was ruined in Dark Souls 2, etc etc". dark souls fans really are the worst, which is kind of why i avoid any and all communities like the plague and just stick to discussing it with close friends or experimenting on my own


i love this kind of stuff, though. i guess it's more amusing when they eat crow because they auditioned for the olympics in jumping to conclusions than the normal tedious horseshit is.

I'm a bit annoyed with the staggered release, but it's really not that big of a deal. A few days ago people were also freaking out by sending angry emails to Bamco and complaining about them on internet forums. I mean it sucks but the fact that they've made 3 Souls games in the past 3 years is really something. I think you can wait an extra 3 weeks.

I like some parts of the Souls community, but it has its fair share of tumors like that. I also really dislike how people who play Souls games act entitled by playing a supposedly hard series, as if they're elite mlg pro gamerz and everyone who likes skyrim or any other game isn't good at anything.

Like, it's kind of annoying (not to mention that the U.S. release date is far more inconvenient for me since that's coming up close to finals week), and I can understand being annoyed or even a little pissed off, but the folks who turn it into an ethical/moral issue just burn my ass. Even moreso if one of those people were actually behind the DDOS attack, and I've little reason to think otherwise. I mean, come on, there have been so many Souls releases in recent years that even someone as religious about these games like me cannot even keep up with them.

Aye, I cannot stand those people who treat playing a video game like some kind of Spartan effort. Nothing more tedious than a guy who unironically explodes in a profusion of phrases like "scrub" and "getgud"

Every day that goes by I wish I could enjoy games in a vacuum. I honestly can't think of the last game I got/played that didn't have some sort of bullshit crisis involved with the fans of the game.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty bummed that streamers got it early, because I'd rather not get spoiled with Youtube videos all over my feed. But when you call these people things like "sh(http://)itstains" and "scumbags", it really embarrasses me to be a gamer. They're just fans trying to have fun and enjoy the game.

i guess i can't help but think about whether or not i might be able to beat DSP to beating the game despite him having a three week head start lol

at least there will be a this is how you don't play dark souls 3

seeing random's rankings of bloodborne bosses makes me want to do a boss ranking from some of the other souls games

so i started with dark souls 2 before i realized and went "wait, I like maybe 3 bosses from this game and the rest are varying degrees of meh/bad" lol

instead here's dark souls 1

1. Knight Artorias
2. Dragon Slayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough
3. Bell Gargoyles
4. Gravelord Nito
5. Black Dragon Kalameet    
6. Sif, the Great Grey Wolf
7. Iron Golem
8. Chaos Witch Quelaag
9. Ceaseless Discharge
10. Gwyn, Lord of Cinder
11. Manus, Father of the Abyss
12. Sanctuary Guardian    
13. Centipede Demon
14. Taurus Demon
15. Crossbreed Priscilla
16. Seath the Scaleless
17. Stray Demon
18. Capra Demon
19. Dark Sun Gwyndolin
20. Gaping Dragon
21. Four Kings
22. Pinwheel
23. Asylum Demon
24. Moonlight Butterfly
25. Demon Firesage
26. Bed of Chaos

papa nito in an appropriately high place

i figure i'd get a lot of shit for having gaping dragon near the bottom, honestly. i mean, it's a cool-looking boss, but it's so harmless and it has so much HP for the time you fight it. such a boring boss fight.

I have lots of good memories of co-oping it when I first beat the game and the design brilliance counters out its lack of threat for me, but at this point most of the boss opinions of the people I know offline and on vary so much that I don't give anyone shit for any of them. I have a buddy that put Bed of Chaos in his top ten for Dark.

Iron Golem is curiously high, but speaking as someone who has never not let Tarkus beat it for me, it may be I'm missing out on something

Iron Golem was actually a factor that sold me on the game in the first place, him and Sif.

one thing i remember about sunbroing for gaping dragon is that sometimes when it slams its chest into the ground to do its charge, it will sometimes raise its torso back up as if to cancel it, and immediately lag out to being back down and do its charge. really messy boss to co-op

i kinda can't describe why i like iron golem, it's not too exciting or hard even without tarkus. actually, i think tarkus is kinda part of it, where it's kind of funny to have a boss that can be reasonably solo'd by a summon (i guess beatrice ruins the moonlight butterfly, but **** that guy). otherwise, it guess i have an affinity for huge, sluggish, colossal knight bosses in the same vein as tower knight from demon's souls

also, golem armor is pretty funny-looking and was my armor of choice whenever i wanted to rock super-heavy armor. was also a fan of his axe, one of my favorite boss soul weapons

the moonlight butterfly is completely pointless

i just forget to fight moonlight butterfly most of the time lol

i really wish i could remember my friends explanation for why he thinks that fight is underrated but i forgot it immediately after he told me

is this the same person who likes bed of chaos

if it is they need to be excommunicated from the souls series

its not

Bed of Chaos guy has only played Dark and Dark II since he's a PC guy and is way more casual when it comes to the series. Does magic playthroughs and stuff. The other guy is closer to a kind of snob (started with Demon's, uses the B Team excuse for II, etc.) and probably likes the Butterfly flight for some dumb reason because he's got incredibly dumb opinions on things in general.

Alright, here's my Dark Souls 2 list. It's probably much weirder.

1. Darklurker    
2. Belfry Gargoyles
3. Demon of Song
4. Vendrick
5. Afflicted Graverobber, Ancient Soldier Varg & Cerah the Old Explorer
6. The Pursuer    
7. Elana, the Squalid Queen
8. The Rotten
9. Ruin Sentinels
10. Fume Knight
11. The Duke's Dear Freja    
12. Scorpioness Najka
13. Velstadt, the Royal Aegis
14. Looking Glass Knight
15. Sir Alonne    
16. The Lost Sinner
17. Giant Lord
18. Mytha, the Baneful Queen
19. Old Dragonslayer
20. The Last Giant    
21. Burnt Ivory King
22. Aava, the King's Pet
23. Old Iron King
24. Executioner's Chariot
25. Skeleton Lords    
26. Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon    
27. Flexile Sentry    
28. Dragonrider    
29. Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin    
30. Nashandra    
31. Covetous Demon
32. Royal Rat Authority
33. Dragonriders
34. Royal Rat Vanguard    
35. Prowling Magus & Congregation
36. Guardian Dragon
37. Smelter Demon
38. Smelter Demon (Iron King DLC)
39. Throne Defender & Throne Watcher
40. Ancient Dragon

out of curiosity did you fight the varg cerah graverobber gank squad solo or co-op

solo. i'm a huge pvp guy, so fighting multiple human-like enemies alone is like candy to me.

Word. I could only get them in a loop of "run down the pool area, head up the ramp, hit Cerah while the other two catch up, repeat."

i'm particularly bad at pvp/dealing with anyone human sized foe

i think that kind of strategy or any permutation of it, like dropping down into the lower levels of that chamber, was intended. i kind of like the idea of pvp involving the terrain or tricking your opponents into a spot or maneuver related to the map that compromises them (belfry luna is a really cool map for this), and that rarely occurs since most invasions take place in maps where everything is instantly hostile to you, so you have to huddle in the corner where everything is already dead. although i guess that's a less interesting tactic when you're playing with CPU that can't actually learn.

I ended up liking the gank squad more than I originally anticipated. But that was with co-op. It's kind of boring for a solo fight I think.

is the yahar'gul gank squad some kind of reference to that or is it more just coincidence?

Probably just a coincidence.

did more of the AD&D 2.0 module. we failed it because we jumped too early and ran into eight enemies at the end, rolling d8s (the highest party member has 6 HP). over the endgame, one of the other two players died and rerolled 3 times trying to keep going, so me and the other one just hightailed the fuck out of there. the evil lich's zombie horde demolished the town, killed everyone who couldn't flee in time, and we ended up running off into the unknown.

the quest failure EXP just barely pushed me up to level 2. in AD&D, level 1 characters are so fragile and useless that they don't even get names until level 2, so the ultimate triumph of this module was lasting long enough to give my clown rogue a name: arnold.

Playing Devil Survivor for the first time, for however many of you even touched that. Seemed like it was the big SMT thing of its time, next to like, Persona. Playing the Overclocked version, such that I get to hear Invader Zim's Gaz and Shinji Ikari yap in my ear constantly (no really, they picked literally the nerdiest, dorkiest sounding guy to voice Atsuro and it's bugging the hell out of me). Really bad dub so far, despite being from like, 2012.

(http://i.imgur.com/U3dd5wv.jpg)

also, is it just me or is the art in this game really, really bad even by anime standards. this artist seems to be everywhere now, and his characters just look so angular, noseless and hideous

some of those dudes look like they could use a punch to the face, and I think some of them are actually girls, but they do too

Yup, Yasuda characters all look either stoned or needing the release of death.

I played the non Overclock/Break Record versions of both games. I dig the first one if only because some of the bosses are crazy fun and I like the idea of a game that goes "people getting pokemon in real life would cause societal collapse." The second one is my least favorite SMT related game I've played.

Those are all men.

Couple of days in. Wendigo was funny, since it's like, 8 levels above everyone and just soaks up damage forever. Yuzu is a monster, which is hilariously incongruous with her character, but since she's a mage and this game seems to be all about magic kicking all sorts of ass (yet again), she's well-speced for the metagame. Atsuro is, on the other hand, hilariously useless

also, kinda bored with the "oh man, we have to find a way to escape the jsdf blockade" subplot that is taking a long while. like, i guess it's reasonable, but with the whole chronic heroism deal the party has and the fact that, with all the equipment the party has, they can actually, in-character, logically come to the conclusion that there is no escape. kinda want that to stop wasting my time and i kinda want to see what's going on with the rest of the cast and setting

Almighty magic by the end of the game pretty much sweeps, although I used physical on my main character and had a hilariously broken set up.

What are you leveling up for your main character? I'd recommend at least some degree of strength since there's are certain point where it's essentially needed to move forward in the game but it doesn't really tell you that.

i am exceptionally curious how i somehow quoted my own post

lol. i gave him a few points of strength -- balanced out my stats for the first few levels to get a feel for whether or not this was a phys/magic game. at this stage, it seems strongly in favor of magic, tho

definitely pump some more into strength for a bit in the main character then up until the end of like chapter 3

Physical gets good when you can get Pierce and whatever the strongest physical move in that game was. I'd have one physically focused character in the party and have everyone else magic focused.

Pierce, Deathbound and the demon families that let you attack from three spaces away and attack twice essentially beat the game for me.

Let's see what these hard free battles are like...

*Four parties of Yuki Jyorous who move before I do and spam Mabufu and usually get extra turns*

¬_¬

also, holy **** there are so many escort missions in this game, and every single time they're surrounded by demons who are much closer to them than you are. it's especially fun when some of the demons who are closer to you have bind, so you don't even have enough time to rush over to them unless you have one specific type of demon that can buff your speed. can't really say this game is very fun to play

left my 3DS charger at another guy's place, so I guess i don't get to finish birthright until wednesday or something

so it's time to do another attempt at a no-death run in scholar of the first sin I guess. I have like, one lord soul already so maybe this won't suck.

the thought of doing a no death run wouldn't concern me so much in dks2 if i didn't have a propensity to die by gravity at least once in every area

chalk up the end of that run to "slipping on a random undead sitting down on that balcony in earthen peak where Gilligan is"

i don't think i have ever, in the history of any no death challenge run, had an end that lame before. and i'm the guy who lost an 80% complete base level no death speed run in demon's souls to the penetrator after saying, out loud, "oh come on, it's the penetrator, he's easy!"

What's the fastest time you've beaten these games?

i've done demon's souls in a bit over two hours, which isn't really that hard. never actually done a pure speed run with no limitations (that time came from some kind of challenge run), so i'm sure i could beat that easily. i don't really attempt to speed run any of the other games, so I don't know.

http://www.craveonline.com/entertainment/972903-gamers-flood-baldurs-gate-expansion-negative-reviews-introduces-transsexual-character

jfc. i cannot believe that there's no end to this shit. what a world we live in

but aren't you glad some rpgs let you change your gender from a guy to a sexy waifu because there's nothing wrong with that right

in less terrible news

http://kotaku.com/fallout-4s-next-dlc-drops-apri-12th-lets-you-collect-m-1769099023

i am quite amused by how horrifically immoral this sounds

how in the actual hell have you speedrun Demon's Souls in 2-ish hours

i don't think I could run through it that fast if there were no enemies or bosses around period

very carefully

also that was a no death run i think so there's that too

but no really, that game is just really easy after coming from dark souls. enemies have way too little health, most bosses die in like, 10 or fewer hits from an easily-crafted dragon halberd +5, lots of shortcuts for players who know what they're doing, etc

Yeah, Demon's Souls is actually really short if you know what you're doing. Even Dark Souls isn't very long. I started doing some stuff on NG+ after my playthrough with Floyd and random and got to Seath in about an hour and a half. Granted that's because I had a lot of my items, but still.

Finished Birthright.

As with Conquest, I'll start with the... well, not so much good as much as it is just passable, but I guess the story is drastically less stupid than that of Conquest? Can't help but basically just damn it with faint praise -- it's not good, but I guess it made me tear out my hair and erupt in a fit of tourettes less often. It's pretty generic, gets really anime every now and then and has some really stone stupid moments. It's rather incompetently handled for what it is, but it's walking down a road long-since paved by so many hack-n-eyed fantasy novels that it would take some work to... 'innovate' in the same manner as with Conquest. It's at a low enough level of quality that I might have been more acerbic in my evaluation if I hadn't played through Conquest already, but all I can do at this stage is throw up my arms, accept that IntSys commissioned a mongoloid chimpanzee to write their plot for them and lower my expectations accordingly.

On the other hand, the gameplay is just bad. It's bad in that kind of tedious, Fire Emblem Awakening kind of way where there's nothing creative or strategic about how it goes, it's just haphazardly-sorted waves of enemies on maps that largely blend in with one-another charging your position, being replaced by the exact same units spawning from the exact same places as they die for 20 rounds straight. It's basically just a numbers pissing contest: can you kill this many enemies with this many units? Cool! It's about as fun and engaging as it sounds.

I don't own Revelations, and with Dark Souls 3 over the horizon, I'm in no rush to change that. I might revisit Fates eventually, but for the moment, this is where this story ends.

Until Dark Souls 3 comes out, though, I'll see how far I can get in Devil Survivor. I've slowly becoming obsessed with cracking every skill available in free battles, but now I'm really overleveled lol.

You know, I'm kinda charmed by one of the voice actor choices in this game: Midori is voiced by Erin Fitzgerald, aka new Chie. Erin is one of the worst voice actors in the industry, but that is totally the kind of voice and cadence someone as annoying as Midori would have. Good job, Erin, you actually had one (and probably only one) inspired role.

EDIT: Awesome. I did that rescue mission with Midori, and then Beldr came out at the end and used his attack that hits everyone on the map as he is just allowed to do since he's invincible. Just barely killed one of the townspeople I had to protect and failed the mission. gg Atlus, that is some amazing game design.

lol yup that was cute

although there are a few more tricks to pull, like aggravate, blitzkrieg and double up. made that dude my bitch that way, it was harder getting to him than ganking him was

the game can be a bit of a mess at times but finding those methods of breaking it and ganking everyone was always very satisfying to me

EDIT

i also remember a buddy of mine being like ITS THE HARDEST THING I'VE EVER PLAYED HARDER THAN ANY SMT GAME and that was a huge motivating factor for me to beat it just to rub it in his face

college internet is being a huge bitch right on the day i'm trying to fucking download dark souls 3. it may or may not have just broken the download at like, 66% too. i dunno. can't wait to see

EDIT: yup, i had to abort it because it did something really fucking weird. good job, MSU, you wasted four fucking hours.

the dark souls-ening resumes. i'm prolly just gonna take screenshots of this guy rather than say "this place/boss is hard" because omg

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/458614058554200347/FE249667BF2B51AC2D0A698C2BA158F0612C20F5/)

look at this sexy little bitch

they look 15

lol

it's mainly the angle and the shading. he mostly looks gaunt, pallid and kinda creepy in-game -- didn't quite succeed at making him look good, although i guess he looks better than most default souls characters do, all of whom are varying degrees of subhuman

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/534001598484262431/4810EF4FAD84A9DD62BC354E6911BDED25542AF1/)

not as much of a raging success as my dark souls 2 character, tho

boss spoilers~

Curse-rotted Greatwood is an interesting boss. Feels like a more realized Demon of Song where it's weird and shambly and kind of interesting to watch move that actually stands up to the scrutiny of a broadsword. Prolly the first good boss of Dark Souls 3 so far.

I really dug that guy.

My first two invaders spawned within about 5 minutes of each other, leaving me no time to recover estus. Beat both of them, but not for a lack of trying -- I was never good at PvPing with a straight sword, and I mostly won because I grossly outdamaged them (about six one-handed strikes from my +5 heavy broadsword did the trick) They both used katanas, and surprise surprise, they're still good -- a two-handed swing seems to outspeed a one-handed swing of a broadsword, so that was annoying.

"Fashion" souls update: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=664510075

Not much time in the near future to play. Got a geometry project to research, as well as two quizzes and a very large homework assignment due on Friday. I wish I could afford to be lazy.

Well, I got in what little time I could allot to the game only to fight two of the shittiest bosses in the game lol

boss spoilers~

Beat Pontiff Sulyvahn on the first try. It was about as close as a fight could get, though -- zero estus left (granted, I came in a few estus short 'cause I was all "yeah, I got this"), used an ember, a sliver of my health bar remaining, unloaded my stamina gauge on the last barrage as he brought out his shadow again and about a second left before he would have flown off into the air to prepare for an attack. Honestly, Dark Souls 2 left me really cynical about human bosses in these games, albeit mostly because they decided that every human boss should basically be a clone of Artorias. I wasn't to impressed with either of the human bosses to date: the Abyss Watchers were pretty "yeah, whatever" and whatshisface from the beginning was kind of interesting for a first boss, but not much a mechanical standout. Sulyvahn, however, is pretty neat once he gets his shadow out -- it's really friggin' hard to get up close to him, but he keeps his shadow behind him constantly so it's hard to actually get at -- basically had to use throwing daggers and firebombs to take care of it, because there was no way in hell I could get up close. Kind of a cool boss, honestly.

INVADERS because i guess the part after sulyvahn has a forest covenant thing or something

• First guy sucked, - claymore/shield combo, overreliant of blocking. But years of using DS3 tool has done awful things to my USB ports, so my controller disconnected midfight and I lost. That was cute.
• Second guy was an uchi-wielding mage. they were kind of a pain to deal with since my range is ass with this sword, but they had like, 600 HP and I did 250 per swing. Didn't take long to deplete their estus and kill them.
• Third one used an uchi and a spear. Low damage, but both had poison build-up. It's kind of annoying to deal with because being hit in the middle of dodging i-frames still causes build up. Regardless, easy fight.
• Fourth one invaded in the middle of the fight against the third, but I finished her off before he came in. Prolly the best player out of every invader I've fought -- used a large curved sword that actually hit quite hard/had bleed build up, and he had pretty good HP. Really aggressive, but easy to trick into getting himself locked in a combo so I could heal. Dunno if he ran out of estus (doubt it), but I ended up leaving myself at half health to goad him into attacking instead of healing, and I got the best of him.

So, that's 5/6 invaders killed, and really, I'm not counting that sixth. Pretty good, but I had similar results when Dark Souls 2 had just come out -- nobody has a long-term gameplan, enough experience with a variety of weapons or a sufficient-enough mastery of the mechanics yet, so I just tend to win with a reliable, tough-and-hardy build.

Gotta leave right now. Think I'll finish up this place when I get back, and that'll have to be the end of it for now.

And there goes Aldrich.

He feels like a more credible variant of Gwyndolin -- keeps as far back as he can by moving all over the place and teleporting, and unleashes a barrage of spells and arrows to keep you back. He's not as defenseless up close, but his close-range attacks are all middling and leave him open since he's so big. He's really good at keeping you back though, so he's still quite an impressive foe. I'm just kinda tickled by the Gwyndolin call-back -- they managed to make one of Dark Soul's lesser bosses pretty interesting and dangerous while preserving the same general set of strengths and weaknesses he had, so I give him quite a few points for that. Think I'd rank him as my second favorite boss up to this point.

Getting pretty late now, so I guess boss spoilers are getting more spoilery maybe.

Snuck in some more time and beat Yorhm. Stormruler strikes back, being a cool weapon associated with otherwise shitty bosses that make up the bottom of the barrel for their respective games. Really, they just randomly added Stormruler, just threw it in a corner of his room, decided it was super effective against giants and gave Yohrm massive damage reduction and a boatload of health to railroad you into using it. Incredibly shit boss, honestly -- well in the running for worst boss to date. It's like they went "hey, we spent 66% of the game hunting down Aldrich, what next?" "Uh... just throw Stormruler in there and call it a day lol".

No D&D on friday this week, so once I'm done with hell day, I'll see about finishing this game up.

Since I have like, 7 posts in a row now in this topic, prolly 'cause I'm ahead of everyone else, I'll just dump the mass of bosses I killed in one thing.

- Dancer of the Boreal Valley was pretty unnotable. Got way harder in the second half, but that's compared to its almost completely harmless first half.

- Dragonslayer Armor... Oh hey, it's Ornstein again! Only he has an axe and shield. Folks like Crystal Sage and Yorhm can pack it up, because this dude is easily the shittiest boss in the game -- feels like a total rehash of every generic-ass boss to have ever come from Dark Souls 2. I don't know why this boss even exists beyond just another excuse to have Ornstein, I guess.

- Oceiros, the Consumed King: Uhhhh I beat him in like a minute. Used like, 1 estus flask total. Maybe the easiest boss in the game, I dunno.

- Champion Gundyr: Improved version of the first boss. I kinda like watching him move -- he's insanely unpredictable, and throws basically any punch he can get into what ends up being just a never-ending chain of attacks. Gets very aggressive near the end, but I still beat him coming in with only half my Estus -- as unpredictable as he is, his damage is still far too middling to pass muster, and his attacks do leave him open.

- The real money here is Lorian and Lothric -- like the Abyss Watchers, it's a two-parter. Has the Throne Watchers gimmick of having one of the bosses revive the other when he dies, only that boss is stapled to the other's back. They're far more dangerous than the Throne Watchers, but Lothric's position really hurts him -- he's a mage and his magic gets annoying when mixed with Lorian's attacks, but you don't have to deal with the pain in the ass that was weaving attacks in between the Throne Watchers, and circle-strafing behind them produces considerable results and basically makes sure that Lothric doesn't get a chance to bring Lorian back. Lorian for his part is a bit tricky to get down on a sightread, and I did die once to them, but his pattern is simple and I undid them swiftly on the rematch. Pretty fun boss though, I enjoyed fighting them. My Souls senpai is currently struggling severely to beat them, so I guess the student has surpassed the master. Alsoalsoalso Lothric is moe. Has the same sexy voice Gwyndolin had, too.

And to conclude this chain of posts, Dark Souls 3 is done! Took 28 hours, so about the same amount of time Dark Souls 2 did. In general, I think I died more often in general than in Dark Souls 2, but I died less often on bosses. Dunno if that's because they're easier or I'm just better than I was back then (kinda leaning towards the latter), but with the exception of two bosses, I didn't die more than once for the bulk of the bosses in this game. Think the game is harder in general, though.

I'll ramble about spoilery details or do summaries/rankings once everyone else has caught up and finished -- kinda felt bad about dumping so many boss reactions after I saw UF looking at them. Kinda wonder if just putting them out there ruined, or at least damaged, someone else's experience when they felt tempted to look at them.

I've peeked at no small text outside of my own topic, but I do look forward to going back and reading all of it once I'm done, along with the discussion that follows.

I already know some boss names, so I wasn't really too concerned about spoilers to be honest. I don't know about the final boss though, other than its name. I wouldn't worry about it.

Also Younger Prince is so sassy. "But you may rest here too, if you'd like.

new playthrough, new utterly androgynous player character

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=667828231

and he's even wearing a skirt, too

i think i might actually have a problem.

And the first boss this character dies to is, of all things, Deacons of the Deep, because that battle is actually an insurmountable pain in the ass with a rapier and magic. I found the exact one build that gets perfectly countered by one of the easier bosses in the game lol

Reminded me of this:

https://zippy.gfycat.com/RadiantSmallBlacklab.webm

that is some pro work and i can only aspire to make that some day

i just checked and DSP has not in fact finished dark souls 3 yet, so i guess i have the important, super-special and unique distinction of being better than DSP at video games

How far did he get? I heard he was actually doing decently, but I guess not.

He's about to slam head first into one of either Nameless King or Lothric and Lorian, so pretty far in. Think he'll just ragequit for Nameless King, and then spend a while on the brothers. He apparently died something in the order of 50 times to Champion Gundyr, who I perceived as an afterthought, so uh, I guess I wish him luck on the gauntlet of difficult late game bosses!

Not gonna lie, I'm gonna enjoy watching snippets of the upcoming "This is how you don't play Dark Souls 3" video.

I heard he got swatted once, which is a pretty outrageous thing to do to someone for just being obnoxious.

to be honest, i don't think i've ever finished a "this is how you don't play x" video. after a while, it's just boils down to DSP failing basic pattern recognition and being a tool about it, so w/e. like, the idea of watching even a truncated version of him dying to a low-mid tier boss 50 times makes my brain melt. i guess good on him for getting paid for being a manchild though, that sounds like a sweet gig and given that i'm about to become the shittiest mathematician known to man, i could totally use a cut of that action.

wouldn't doubt he's been swatted before, and that's a pretty shitty thing to do, even to him.

Lol, yeah. I'm impressed the makers actually had the patience to edit his entire playthrough and put in various Youtube comments throughout. I've never finished one either because I get too irritated after a few minutes, but they can be good entertainment.

Also which ending did you pick?

Aborted the mage run. I guess, just like Dark Souls 2 (for all my playthroughs in that game, I have, to date, never done a pure or even 50% mage run -- the extent of my magic usage has simply been buff spells and the occasional Warmth), this game is not quick enough at making magic all that credible for me to justify wasting time, nor the sheer number of stats I had to dump to balance it, on it. I'm more interested in experimenting with melee weapons, anyway.

Still, the new character I made last is using the same face, of course. It's a masterwork.

Apparently Revelations contains a bit of information that renders the whole premise of the game entirely null and void.

This is just about what I expected when they tried to pull an edition split with a strategy game.

it's not like i didn't rant about it six/seven or so pages back

but it's not even golden route shit

they literally negated the very premise that causes the route split in the first place

turns out corn isn't actually related to any characters on any side at all
except for a goddamn dragon
oh japan and your "not blood related so it's cool" fetish

to be honest, i always saw birthright and conquest as a dichotomy between "save the world from a shitty tyrant" (because **** if you have any reason to stay with them because they're your "family" or whatever, you've known them for all of 15 minutes) and "stay on the same side as the 'family' you've known for basically all of your life", so that kinda doesn't bother me as much as just everything else about revelations

so, like, i guess i've been pretty silent about D&D. haven't updated on that for like, 3 or 4 months.

grown pretty god damn tired of it, to be honest. the DM has shown himself to be overly fond of the grindy, dungeon bits -- a lot of the modules he uses, especially recently, are redundant, overly long and filled with the same mobs who are practically just huge time sinks with no actual cast members to actually roleplay with. he has chosen a module that's basically a 6-floor fortress or something, and pretty much every floor is densely packed with rooms and mobs, and they're all mostly the same and do the same stuff. i complained about it and he pretty much went "deal with it" in slightly more polite terms. as it gets closer to the end of the semester, and as my grades start looking shittier and shittier by the moment, i've run out of patience for the tedious grind of sitting through that horseshit. i also constantly get harassed by cleric girl because she's a giant, unlikable douche, but she's also emotionally stunted and has actual behavioral disabilities, so i can't reciprocate without the party saying i'm out of line. because, you know, her constantly being a dick to the guy who is horrifically depressed over losing a large chunk of his family, is dirt fucking poor and barely has a place to live isn't out of line.

this'll be the first meeting i'm just gonna outright skip. i'm tired, sick and really not in the mood right now -- i've no time to sit down and get reamed by the grind again and deal with a party member i don't actually like, and who blatantly doesn't like me either.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=671493443

an affinity of the moon

For those miffed before, I went out to Sulyvahn three times this run. I had him down on the first try, but then my controller caused a driver error that BSOD'd my computer and uh, the subsequent matches turned out quite poorly. Like, that dude is legit hard as balls; I have a game plan for the other two asshole bosses now, so I shouldn't have too much trouble with either, but I still have to wing it with him.

I finally know why Yorhm is such a shitty boss: It's the culmination of Siegward's quest line. Shame Siegward died like a total punk, since NPC AI doesn't really mesh well with a boss like Yohrm who's all about being really predictable, but doing loads of damage.

so apparently the usual neckbeards are whining about "muh censorships" in the Persona/Fire Emblem crossover.

...As opposed to the whole piece being bad and dumb in the first place.

https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4h4z6q/psa_if_you_get_invaded_by_malcolm_reynolds/

well i guess this happened

what is it about dark souls that attracts the worst people

Yeah, that guy seems like a real class act.

Spent like, 100 hours on Dark Souls 3, but I'd kinda like to say I'm done with it. Like, I dunno if I want to wait until random finishes because I kinda hate the idea of reviewing something in smalltext, but for now, I'm actually kinda disappointed with this game. Of course, I have nothing else to play, hence 100 hours I guess. Maybe I'll go back to it once it gets a **** ton of balance patches or some DLC I guess.

Replaying Touhou games now. Well, I sure used to be able to play these games, but I definitely can't anymore!

i thought for a second this was masterman posting since he posted a bunch of places elsewhere and i was very confused at first

maniac and I are interchangeable

two sides of the same coin

i don't think masterman has ever addressed me since i came back

don't feel obligated to wait for me to express your disillusionment or whatever (even though I'm gonna try to beat the game this weekend)

I would hate to think my slow progression is holding back a quality maniac rant. I'll just have to wait to read it.

well, this one isn't that caustic, just kind of underwhelmed. it could prolly wait

Oh I've been watching and smiling all the while.
Because of you I've been exposed to the greatest band to ever form

Demetori

Really, now? That's actually kind of funny; I only really got into Demetori after I left the site, don't think I ever really talked about them before.

I was going through old messages on this site a while back to reminisce all the horrible tragedies I experienced here, and I came across you and Ahriman talking about Touhou.

I never knew what Touhou was so I did a search and the first thing I heard was Septette for Dead Princess and that was the day I left earth

And in doing that, I became exposed to many other doujin bands and have expanded my musical horizons.

lol

something compelled me to do something very important in dark souls 2 today: run to the end of gwyndolin's boss arena

(http://i.imgur.com/31i7Thw.jpg)

can't say i ever noticed that gwyndolin had t(http://)its. guess i never actually looked that hard. actually, that kinda makes sense why he's much grosser and spindle-y in dark souls 3 as part of aldrich: that was an illusory form and he's actually genuinely more deformed than just having a mass of snakes instead of legs would imply. still went from roughly human-sized to somewhere around 20 feet tall, though.

that boss fight still sucks, btw. also the guy who thought that mapping jumping to the running button was a good idea is still a complete doofus

Not only is that person a complete doofus, but someone actually decided map the jumping button to the running button again in Bloodborne. You know, after they changed that and made it better in Dark Souls 2.

playing old yu-gi-oh games while watching that shitty anime: forbidden memories is still one of the worst games ever, and i'm slowly getting stockholm syndrome'd into liking it. but jesus christ, in order to beat the game without cheating, you have to constantly fight the same dude over and over, hoping that you perfect the match (which is easier said than done) and then hope for one specific 1/100 chance drop. not like, one of 5 or so different 1/100 drops, just one. and you'll probably need more than that to win, too! great game design, that's some MMO-level farming in an offline PS1 game with a linear "have more attack points than the other asshole" strategy.

also played crypt of the necrodancer. sure as hell can't play this game worth a damn, but it's pretty cute, fun for about an hour at a time and has some cool music. as far as roguelikes go, it seems to be one of the most reliant on getting the right kind of equipment: less because it's impossible to beat without the right stuff ala FTL, but because the skill threshold is so high and the game throws so much crap at you that good equipment is needed to bring the difficulty to parity. granted, that's not too much of a problem when a run takes about 10 minutes, and usually takes less than that since you're getting killed constantly. it's modestly enjoyable, i feel like it was totally worth the $5 i spent on it, but i prolly won't beat the game with all the other playable characters

saw someone post this on reddit. spoilers for the one person here who hasn't beaten dark souls 3 yet: http://pigeonheart.deviantart.com/art/New-Best-Friend-608578435

but have you played the pot of greed yet? i heard it's a pretty good magic card

oh god lol

pot of greed does not exist in that game so maybe that says something of its level of quality

EDIT: also for reference, pot of greed was never used in duelist kingdom. that fucking video made me actually pay attention to that lol

https://twitter.com/botherer/status/732904166679564288

this thread ugggggghhhhhh (crosspost with "What brought you down today?")

it just got worse the more I scrolled

i like how vampire: the masquerade bloodlines crashed right before the infamous sewer level

seems as good as any place to end the day

Alright, I've beaten Dark Souls 3 like, three times now. Did a tier list for Dark Souls 3 bosses, this time with little write-ups. Not gonna small text this time, 'cause only DB is still playing. Here's a buffer, tho

















LOW TIER:
19. Dragonslayer Armor
- Dark Souls 2 reject boss who happens to be as much of an asshole as he is pointless.
18. Ancient Wyvern
- A boring gauntlet boss. Slipping off to my doom while trying to plunge attack him didn't win him many points, either.
17. Nameless King
- The bastard child of Alonne who decided to fight like Ornstein instead. "Hey, do you really think giving the badass superboss that will close out our series a charge attack that leaves them open for the 10th time is a good idea?" "yopyop"
16. Ocieros the Consumed King
- Hilariously easy, boring too.
15. Dancer of the Boreal Valley
- Pretty much the most forgettable boss in the game, except for being a pain in the ass to deal with on low vit/level runs.
14. Crystal Sage
- Neither Crystal Sage nor Pinwheel are anything resembling a worthy successor to Fool's Idol, and those aren't even deep shoes to fill.
13. High Lord Wolnir
- Lamer version of Curse-rotted Greatwood, essentially.

MID TIER:
12. Deacons of the Deep
- Kinda glad they finally made a Phalanx expy, but they're a bit too far on the low end of the difficulty curve to pass muster.
11. Yhorm the Giant
- Kinda have more appreciation for this boss now that I've been doing the Siegward questline on every playthrough. Easy boss that's kind of lame for a Lord of Cinder, but working with Siegward is kinda fun.
10. Abyssal Watchers
- Artorias is my favorite Dark Souls boss, but god am I tired of this series fellating him. Otherwise, semi-intense (albeit easy) battle, kinda neat how the Watchers are basically humanoid enemies despite that. Pretty generic boss, though.
9. Iudex Gundyr
- Kinda funny how "big knight dude" is the new Asylum Demon. Anyway, kinda neat starting boss -- its second phase is pretty intimidating and has the illusion of being unpredictable due to how strange and monsterous it is, but is actually quite predictable when you play patiently and keep an eye on what he's doing.
8. Vordt of the Boreal Valley
- Basically the same kind of deal as Iudex, but different. I kinda like bosses in the vein of Iudex and Vordt, where they're bosses with nonstandard designs and fighting styles that seem intimidating and unpredictable in all their bestial poise, but are quite easily felled by a clear mind and fluid action.
7. Old Demon King
- Improved, more interesting Demon Firesage. Feels like a Dark Souls 1 boss, but with a bit more difficulty behind him. Not bad, I kinda like his moxie.
6. Champion Gundyr
- Intimidating mother fucker who attacks forever -- not really too hard to overcome, but imposing thanks to how insanely aggressive he is. Points for leaving enough room to disengage and play defensively.

HIGH TIER:
5. Soul of Cinder
- Well-rounded, fun boss who is challenging, but reasonable.
4. Curse-rotted Greatwood
- Funky piece of work who pressures the player into a tactical "find the weakness" strategy while keeping them on their toes. Hell of a design on him, too.
3. Pontiff Sulyvahn
- Scary badass mother who never lets up. Second phase is crazy as all heck, he puts a metric ton of pressure down and basically never allows you to feel safe, but he never really feels like too much of a pain.
2. The Twin Princes
- Incredibly fluid battle that rewards an instinctive sense of timing. A lot of the bosses in this game as kind of designed around rolling and weaving through attacks, but at no point did any of them really have a preciseness to their patterns or ever really justified themselves like these guys do.
1. Aldrich, Devourer of Gods
- The child of Gwyndolin and Darklurker: non-stop magical barrage that challenges the player to find the best opportunity to move in at risk of being utterly ruined. He was basically designed to be a re-do of Gwyndolin from Dark Souls 1 with the same strengths and weaknesses, only challenging and fun. He was quite successful.

Misc notes:
- Honestly, a lot of people rag on Dark Souls 2 for being rather uncreative with its boss design, but Dark Souls 3 has the same problem in spades. Lots of bosses who are just obscenely aggressive and do nothing but spam combos forever, who are all countered the exact same way: by hugging their asses and rolling through or blocking all of their attacks, and striking them in between their combos. At least half the bosses have this kind of game plan, and only a few really get away with it. Really drags near the end of the game, which is why Dragonslayer Armor and Dancer go to the bottom of the list.
- Strength weapons (Ultra greatsword, greataxe, great club, etc) are strictly inferior to normal weapons here. I guess you could say the same for Dark Souls 2, but it's just way worse here. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) bosses have some kind of weird DR where an attack from a strength weapon with say, double the AR of a straight sword will do less than double the damage, in a game where defense otherwise seems to work by way of subtraction against natural defense (which, in the case of our hypothetical, usually means more than 2x damage). 2) heavy weapons are, of course, slow -- bosses are much faster in this game, so you're risking having to trade blows with every swing. 3) heavy weapons have incredible stamina drain, and require a lot of stamina just to swing more than two times + rolling out. Some other mitigating factors also come in to make the deal worse. So like, it's basically a pain in the ass to get creative with which weapon one uses to deal with most of the bosses here. Points lost there.

When it comes to something as wide as an entire series of games, I dunno how my "top 10 bosses" list would look since it's probably constantly in flux. That said, Aldrich and the Princes will easily be on it. Dunno about Sulyvahn, but if he is there, then Curse-rotted Greatwood prolly would be too. Soul of Cinder absolutely isn't on there, though. If I brought it down to top 5, Aldrich is on there. Dunno if he's top 3, though.

Think the boss list here has some high highs and some low lows. Whichever bosses were effective were very effective, but whichever bosses sucked did it real hard. Most of the mid-tier bosses get stuck somewhere in the mass of other okay-ish mid-tier bosses in the other games.

i get the feeling you misspelled abyss watchers on purpose

if i did, i'd call them the abysmal watchers instead

aw but that's what i expected

i did think of saying "aldrich, devourer of waifus", though

(http://i.imgur.com/FwJRfTD.png)

also relapsing into GW2 addiction save me god

EDIT: what does it say about me that i noticed that this is my 538th post

you're secretly a fan of nate silver?

i've actually been making fun of nate silver for the last while

buddy of mine is playing MGSV for the first time, so i decided to play it for the first time in half a year

that game is really disappointing on a number of levels, but on a technical level, it's absolutely fantastic. not like, "man, it's great" fantastic, the literal fantastic insofar as i cannot believe something this powerful can exist in reality, at least at this time. stunningly gorgeous, amazing draw distance, 60 FPS. at minimum settings for each, Fallout 4 runs at something like 40 FPS on my computer, and Dark Souls 3 gets choppy as hell quite often, but here's this game that's more taxing than either and it runs perfectly. like, they fit their engine perfectly to PC, it's amazing. and it's going to be wasted now that all konami does is bemani (which they're slowing down on and relying more and more on cheap-ass doujin circles and fan submissions) and pachinko machines lol

kind of a shame what happened to the game -- it's beautiful, stable and fun as hell to play, it's just the design is such that it ends up being a vacuous experience

speaking of bemani and cheap-ass doujin circles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnCM28psXY

i love you usao-kun

uhhhh

what

what

...why do you like that song?

why not

i spent way too much time today cultivating cool skills on my birthright party so dudes can take them from me.

i mean, i've beaten the game and am in no rush to play revelations, but i did it anyway.

the day i abandoned my D&D group was apparently the day when their luck ran out and they got TPK'd

that's kind of fitting

the greatest kind of victory really

come play d&d with my loser friends and i just have to put up with dumb comic and 70s rock jokes

(http://i.imgur.com/pf5lHrE.png)

who on earth vetted this

cant be real

http://store.steampowered.com/app/447040/

i took that picture myself so

EDIT: i never did scroll down, tho. and oh god they have pre-order DLC starring a zodiac killer copycat. they cannot be serious about this

EDIT: EDIT: and now i just went to the steam forums and they're filled with people whining about a black protagonist. this is the best omg

"alright, i need some kind of game to be the backdrop to a 7-hour metal marathon, what should it be? ...how about the original guild wars?"

game's still it's own weird kind of jank, as one would expect from an 11 year old MMO, but it's kind of amazing how much of it there is, and how diverse a lot of that content actually is. and then i look at guild wars 2, which over 4 years has accumulated about half the amount of content guild wars 1 accumulated within a year of its release lol.

was also reminded of how machinae supremacy hasn't released a good album in a decade as of this year, but that's something else

man i sure do like making fun of E3 conferences

Berserk Musou.

take your bets as to whether or not all of it is gonna take place in the golden age

considering the terrible trailer?

After.

then 50% of the game will take place on the boat

hellllll yeahhhhh

I despise musou games but I guess the pull of Berserk might be too strong for me to ignore.

a lot of the licensed musou games feel weak, honestly. of the ones i've played (which doesn't include zelda musou, which i kinda expect to be near the top of the tier list), the only one I could even mildly enjoy was the first fist of the north star one, and some of that might have been colored by how i'm a huge fan of that franchise

not too optimistic for berserk musou, personally

wait, remastered crash 1, 2 and 3?

what did i sleep through omg

that and a bunch of vr games

kojima was there too with a game that doesn't exist yet

zzz don't care

on the list of things i wanted a modern day remaster of, crash 2 and 3 were pretty damn high up the list, honestly. those games are pretty much evergreen, for as much as crash bandicoot is thought of as a lame relic of the 90s these days. pretty excited about that news, especially after getting absolutely nothing out of sitting through the hilarious dumpster fires that were microsoft and especially ubisoft's conferences

no cuphead release date so thus far e3 is its consistently lame self

This Zelda footage is uhhhhhhh

On one hand, it looks pretty, and I am quilty of having an affinity for open world games with a tinge of deliberateness to their design. On the other, here we have a Zelda game eschewing its tradition (not an intrinsically bad thing!) for... an open world setting that is largely empty aside from meaningless little camps filled with the same enemies and a few chests that drop completely disposable items, with insipid AAA tinges like facile overtures of customization, weapon durability, crafting, etc. It feels like they're just doing the same follow the leader crap that poisoned MGSV, and it doesn't seem like they're doing anything with it.

It probably doesn't matter to me so much, since I haven't cared much for that franchise over the last decade. But that's a very beautiful open world, and it looks like it has some actual texture to it in terms of design. I want to hope that this is the one game that actually has its shit together, but it sure doesn't look like it in action.

It does have the option to have link run around wearing nothing but shorts though, and that's like an automatic 7/10 by itself

I think it looks great. At least they're finally showing us something.

is it bad that when i saw shirtless link, i thought of you

yes. for me, and for you

http://www.gamerankings.com/ps4/733052-mighty-no-9/index.html

After MML3 was cancelled, my twitter feed was just consistently flooded for days with people bitching and moaning about it, consistently decrying Capcom as the devil for killing that game and the whole Megaman line. It's like the amount of umbrage they took from that was on par with how a normal person would respond to a terrorist attack. So of course, when MN9's kickstarter began, all I ever heard on Twitter over the duration of that week was how it was going to be the savior of games, the best thing ever, etc. I got sick of that pretty damn fast. Then it took about 3 years for the thing to happen, and the final product ended up being just another subpar game given "eh" ratings from major gaming outlets. It's just so vindicating.

that was your regular "maniac is a douchebag" update, please enjoy the rest of your day

EDIT: quote from one of the guys who was most annoying about it:

i don't even think i'm going to redeem my code

i'd rather just forget

https://twitter.com/DarylSurat/status/745008521897381889
https://twitter.com/DarylSurat/status/745012044496150528

(cross-post with "What made you smile today?")

i appreciate this person's shinsuke nakamura twitter header

I join you in this douchery because I also hated hearing about it. I think part of the issue everyone ignored is that while Inafune is a well known name, he's responsible for Mega Man's art and character design and not really is gameplay. After that he mostly served as the guy overseeing production but rarely the straight up creative director. Everyone just saw his name, associated it with Mega Man, and assumed it would be great.

admittedly this could very well happen with bloodstained but i think/hope igarashi's history of making due with shitty budgets will allow him to make a good game on an actual budget as well

yep, fallout 4's survival mode is horrible

that game's early game is pretty inhospitable as it is, when you can get ripped apart easily even on the default difficulty if you're just wading into mobs fallout 3-style up until you've gotten some good armor, skills and weapons. ramping it up such that literally any bullet at pointblank range is an instant kill makes it horrifically tedious. every fire fight becomes a dumb game of chicken where I take some potshots while all the enemies have their backs turned, run a couple of blocks behind a building or a rock until they lose track of me, and repeat until they're all dead. gj bethesda

but then again, bethesda has always been terrible at balancing difficulty, so i can't say i didn't expect that.

enjoying the collective meltdown going down on the star ocean 5 gamefaqs board right now

do tell

(http://i.imgur.com/AgNbcNz.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/8F60k8p.png)

i mean, what did they expect

oh lol

"Thumbs Up to the True Fans" is my favorite.

I haven't even been paying attention to the latest Star Ocean. Is there anything to it other than being the latest 8.8?

oh man

i don't imagine there's anything really to that game other than a mediocre jrpg that's probably vaguely serviceable for someone starved for jrpgs that aren't tales or idea factory games.

Can you really think of vaguely serviceable JRPGs in the same thought as idea factory?

Cause everything i've ever see of hypershitmention faptunia is...well...

this was the operative fragment of that statement. not that those games are vaguely serviceable, just that they make up quite a chunk of the JRPGs that get localized these days (as well as the bottom of the barrel) and for someone who wants something vaguely different, Star Ocean 5 is vaguely serviceable for that person. hence all of the people going "ignore all the reviews, this game is great" -- of friggin' course it is, you're a god damn JRPG fanboy for christ's sake, those reviews weren't written for you.

back in demon's souls and dark souls, the biggest barriers to a no death run were typical, pain in the ass things like the harder/more bullshit bosses (bed of chaos), or the harder bits to specific areas (BP gank squad in 1-4). with dark souls 2, i only ever seem to die to dumb things out of arrogance about one half or two-thirds through the game -- oh hey, let's leeroy those mastodon knights guarding the front of drangleic castle instead of plink at them with poison arrows! let's gets killed by that knight guarding the horseman boss! let's run along the edge of some ruins and get body checked off by some fodder undead sitting down inconspicuously. reaaaaally makes the idea of ever trying again seem painful as hell.

also this would be the first time I've played dark souls 2 since dark souls 3 came out. not many people agree with me because of blind, unchecked hype, but this game is still way more fun than that one ever was. i guess it's probably "less cohesive", but it still somehow has more variety in stage design, the nonlinearity is pretty fun to play with, and scholar of the first sin especially gives you a ton of crazy fun stuff really early, so you can get rolling with whatever gimmick you want to run almost immediately. by the time i died, i was one-shotting everything short of minibosses with a great hammer item that you normally got at the end of the game in the original version. friggin' three-hit killed ornstein lol

actually, dark souls 2 feels like the most fun game in the series in general -- it's fully realized mechanically, you can do god damn near anything and make it work, it's probably still the largest game in the series, and it runs at the right pace. only real things holding it back are the lame boss designs, agility, and a number of shitty hitboxes. gets quite a bit uglier when you ignore gameplay, though -- both dark souls 1 and 3 have a decent atmosphere that kinda makes you care about their world, while dark souls 2 is basically just a hideous, patchwork chimera of fun levels crudely stitched together without any regard for whether or not you feel anything from it. that's fine with me, though -- rather have the fun dark souls 2 over the evocative, yet tedious and restrictive dark souls 3.

I don't know if I like it more than 3 but I love 2, especially with my last playthrough of it. Gets way more hate than it deserves.

like, the other day, i was watching some dark souls 3 videos and went "hahaha, that stuff was fun! maybe i should try dark souls 3 again!" and then i went "wait, no, that game isn't fun at all. that's a terrible idea."

like, i'm kind of amazed how badly i've soured on that game. it may actually be a bigger disappointment than MGSV.

Oh noes, Maniac dislikes a Soulsborne game!

Let's see how long it takes for him to come back around to loving it again.

it would take some substantial patching and probably some good DLC to make me like it. and looking at the patch notes since i had last paid attention, it ain't quite there yet (and i don't think it ever will be).

Sold a ton of cards I had been accumulating to afford a steam key of FFXIV. So I have that now.

Unless something crazy happens, that's a month of that game. Time to see if it's any fun. And since it's on Steam, my "hours spent" counter is right there to see. Given how I've spent an insane amount of time on Guild Wars 2 in year and change I've had it, I'm, uhhhh... not looking forward to seeing how many hours I've wasted on this fucker by the end of this month.

About 8 of those hours are going to come from 15 GB of updates

That's what you get for playing MMOs.

and then the download crashed overnight .-.

yep, i sure spent a lot of time with that today

spoilers: my character is a pink haired elf boy with a battleaxe. because of course he is

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/454118500792925628/88889EEB778F2DE243248D7FCF4FA07590CC95CE/)

how dare you not play the obligatory catboygirl

that armor makes your head look tiny

elf biology

he is swole af, actually. went for some time with goofy leather straps for some time and it was almost kind of distracting how huge his torso was compared to his immaculate face

he's also like, 7 feet tall, so actually not the most unlikely character to be wielding a huge **** battleaxe tbh

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/454118500795481450/46892116AF273B0219B390F74EDEF657FAA6099E/)

nice choker

http://store.steampowered.com/app/406550/

lol umineko on steam, w/ugly pachinko game art to boot.

as opposed to the sublime beauty of ahaha.wav?

(http://i.imgur.com/1EgIZgn.jpg)

can't wait for the new zelda game man

(https://remywiki.com/images/9/91/SINOBUZ.png)

i was worried after how lazy copula was that we were approaching THE FINAL. i can breathe easy, at least for another year

although for all i know, konami could do to IIDX what they did to pop'n and just do one massive floor event in lieu of a song list worth a damn and make me wish that they had just pulled the plug

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/454118974118231653/0393FA18DB6562A6C3EA90181D1FAB503B28F8CA/)

ah, mmos

i'm so glad i never got into them

same

(http://i.imgur.com/DbTXBrD.png)

this track list makes me want to puke. there's like, one cool thing on here (fucking dj setup song hell yeah) among some varying okay things (maozon is cool and sexy, ryu doing something unique, lapix is okay) in a sea of doujincore garbage.

Oh cool, I actually recognize kors k and Snail's House.

kors k is a bemani legend, he made his career off of IIDX. his batting average recently isn't that good, though -- he's one of those folks these days who got huge into modern EDM at some point and now seems to insist that every song they make has to have dubstep or 808 kicks or whatever no matter how incongruous it might be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOlQtfY41Uw

no idea who the heck snail's house is, though

EDIT: All the names have been filled out. No USAO or Noriken, huh? Maybe they'll come in later, but if not, this would be the first time in a while that they didn't have something on the default song list. Think USAO has always had a song in the location tests since he started contributing, at least (EDIT: actually, he didn't have a song in the pendual location test but he did have one in the default song list, so there could still be hope).

Oh god that doesn't seem appetizing.

Snail's House is strange and I don't really know what to make of them. I recently heard of them through a Diverse System album called Future Challenge.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTtA3QimnDQ


Oh hey cool, I know USAO and DJ Noriken too. They remixed that Moonbound song that I really liked and it seems like they're down with aran who I also enjoy. USAO has been around the block a few times.

Guess I'll have to come to you for guidance since dojin.co is going into donation-only mode soon, which is essentially my kryptonite.

Do you listen to Camellia?

i'm a doujin scene neophyte myself -- most of what i know is from 1) seeing names and circles thrown around in bemani, 2) piecing together a bunch of gaps by way of twitter and 3) memories of that period of time back in 2008/2009 when i was getting into touhou and running into a lot of those folks in their formative years like REDALiCE, ARM and Masayoshi Minoshima.

i don't really listen to camellia (he's in that song list by the way, only he regularly writes his name in hiragana). a lot of the stuff of his that I've run into (mainly his bemani contributions) seem to be in the same vein as, and likely directly inspired by, a bemani composer called nekomata master. among other things, nekomata specializes in a kind of introspective, synthetic electronic music that kinda reminds me of IDM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiqmI7_hYis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7nlzNC8lR0

camellia's biggest addition to that kind of music seems to be adding dubstep, which really turns me off. it's kind of the same problem as above. on the other hand, he made what is probably my favorite song from pendual:


but a lot of the judgments i make for quite a few of these folks are based in their IIDX music, which isn't always exactly what they usually do. so i dunno. i mostly started checking out the modern doujin scene early last year, but that scene has been cultivating for about a decade, and is based on music culture that's even older than that. i'm cramming a good decade's worth of music in one and a half years, so i'm no real authority

fuck, they cut LIFE SCROLLING. that was the very last hiroshi watanabe song, and also one of the best songs from resort anthem, the best IIDX game.

they also cut shinigami idol, which was a pretty fun song too. but dammit man, they cut life scrolling, that actually god damn hurts. love that song...

RIP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKaVFbi1l-o

This is so bizarrely far from my musical life I can't help but look at it as a sort of gibberish.

you're saying that to a guy who has been a metalhead for 15 years lol

as of yesterday, persona 3 is 10 years old

Simply put, I don't care about Persona 3 or 4 anymore. They're heavily padded-out games heavily reliant on settings and times of one's life that no longer resonate with me. My last experience with Persona 3 was watching a 30 year old man play it, culminating in a 5000-word blog post just tearing it to shreds. But those are games that I played at the the right time, back when I was a social disaster of a 15 year old kid who wanted to jump into the life of someone else and do what I couldn't actually do in real life. In lieu of making my own identity, I essentially replaced it with that game. So for better or for worse, P3 is inexorably tied to the period of my life when I was still a high school-aged kid. So when I think of how Persona 3 is 10 years old now or whatever, all I can think is how little I've ended up doing with my life since I played that game.

do you have that blog post because i'd def like to read it

I don't hate either game but I have zero desire to play either of them again personally. Too much time to dump into something that I'm not 100% on.

(http://i.imgur.com/CC5MwTB.jpg)

i can now transform armor pieces! getting all arabian nights with my mage outfit. only i'm a blonde, fair-skinned elf. is this was cultural appropriation is like?

(he looks so cute in that outfit, tho)

those pants are exceptionally poofy

yeah, so they clip through the jacket in any animation short of standing up. otherwise, they look pretty good with the rest of that outfit.

watching weirdo reactionary people in the newbie chat for this FFXIV server discuss how race and intelligence might be correlated, among talk of how ultra liberal the U.S. is or how their first amendment rights are being suppressed by SJWs and so forth.

even if i was drunk right now, it wouldn't stave off the massive headache i'm getting watching these goons butcher biology, statistics and sociology right now. but it's an american server and it's 5 AM in the east coast, so i guess i bring it on myself to play when all the weird people are out

you have my sympathies

https://twitter.com/2vvink/status/755378554444079104

i think this is probably my favorite generic anime character design: the cute guy with brown, shoulder length hair with a huge clump of hair parted perfectly down their forehead. hopefully persona 5 has a gay option lol

of course it prolly won't, but still. he's adorbs af

dj amuro final boss song zzzzzzz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsHmPp1bCzE

the real star of the show, slake-y as fuck. good to see long train running wasn't a one-off thing and that dj mass is still making music for iidx, even if it's only a remix of a song from his konami-produced album

It's...not the worst thing I've ever heard, I suppose.

i ended up burning a lot of time on final fantasy xiv. i'll spend inordinate amounts of time on damn near anything since i'm unemployed, friendless and between semesters, i guess. that game is pretty uhhhhh. the gameplay is pretty average, the whole final fantasy xii rigmarole, although it's a bit too far on the sluggish side. the main storyline is padded with quite a bit of repetitive busywork, so it got tedious really damn fast. dungeons are pretty boring and drawn out by overly-resilient trash mobs that take minutes to clear by the endgame, although some bosses are kinda cool. as stated elsewhere, queuing for dungeons on specific (75% of them) classes takes an eternity. think i'd be more merciful if it didn't have monthly fees, but i'm probably gonna end up letting that thing lapse after this complementary month ends.

finally touched dark souls 3 for the first time in a while. hot off the heels of my pathetic attempt at a no death run in dark souls 2, i wanted to see how far i'd get in 3. turns out the answer is "not very far" -- summoned holy knight hodrick in an early zone and got riposted by him. figures that the worst part of dark souls 3 pvp is what would do me in. that game is still really friggin' boring, by the way -- not gonna put in another attempt for a long while.

i just ranted about persona 3, but i did start a playthrough of persona 4 golden that i never got all that far in. might burn the rest of the summer on that.

so FFXIV has a promotional event with yo-kai watch. if this event has taught me anything, it's that holy crap those yo-kai watch designs are fucking hideous. i guess that franchise means more when you're more steeped in japanese mythology, but from an outsider's perspective, it resembles a charmless, almost bootleg pokemon, basically

and now that it's making level 5 a ton of money, that means they'll keep doing it, just like they kept doing inazuma eleven (I'm sure 60% of that series' fans are shotacons) and professor layton when both of those were the "big things" respectively. just make dark cloud 3 already, guys... =(

I feel you on the dark cloud thing, man.

That said, as somebody who has been taking a look into Japan's mythology and folklore...yo-Kai watch is a soulless Pokemon knockoff for very small children.

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/449616801417531017/53BDE36503763EF4BCC9E3B37A5369E12DEADD5C/)

i was so close  :( :( :(

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-x-button/2016-07-28/signing-off/.104740

think i've been following todd ciolek's work for around six years now? always kinda liked his glib sense of humor and his undying fondness for alt text and valkyrie profile. his ANN column was largely redundant, but i had been following it for the last 6 years anyway simply because i liked him. and now it's over. =(

EDIT: also, oh hey i forgot about mobius final fantasy. that was the thing where the male hero was basically wearing a g-string that offended a bunch of nerds so bad that sqenix gave him more clothes

(http://cdn.gamer-network.net/2015/usgamer/Mobius-FF-Shot-02.jpg)

thanks for ruining everything, guys

well it mentions sandman so its a good column even if it no longer exists

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-29-pokemon-go-and-dark-souls-are-more-alike-than-you-think

fuck yooooooouuuuuuu

meh

285 hours. -15 or so from updates, a good amount was spent watching anime on the side while queuing, etc. But uh, still. Yeah. It's the kind of thing one looks at and can only go "I'm a lazy, worthless slacker".

(http://i.imgur.com/K9sceoR.jpg)

gonna miss this goofy, adorable little bitch, tho

RIP Abigail, 2016-2016

At least you were pretty.

i know right

if nothing else, that game let me make my ideal kind of man (which is apparently 7 feet tall and elf-y) and had the right diversity of clothing and armor to satisfy me

anyway, back to GW2. the big new content update took me a few hours to complete/get all the achievement stuff lol. new map is pretty cool-looking, tho

oh, also just for perspective

(http://i.imgur.com/PmuVKf2.jpg)

here's abigail in GW2! nowhere near as cute.

while i'm doing show and tell for girly MMO characters, my old guard is a bit better, not to mention that heavy armor classes ironically are the most likely to show more skin:

(http://i.imgur.com/eBsLc3H.jpg)

which naturally led to this at some point:

(http://i.imgur.com/1cor2pO.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/SQT6kuD.jpg)

alas, he's retired. grew real attached to the reaper class instead.

I like the purple at least.

that outfit also looks good in a deep, dark red, but that looks a bit too edgelord for me, femboy with girly name notwithstanding

every other day, i spend a good hour or so on crypt of the necrodancer. think it has replaced FTL as the go-to "break roguelike". finally completed an all-zone run and spent some time on some of the other playable characters. 's cool.

also i've been going through the d&d 3.5 srd recently, thinking of d&d archetypes i could totally rock. i guess it's a damn shame that i no longer have anyone to play that with looooool

alsoalsoalso on an unrelated note, it has now been 5 years since i left this site

wow our 10 year anniversary is next summer

I had been thinking about playing Persona 4: Golden for the remainder of the summer, but I'm gonna shelf that for the next winter break. Figure it'll probably be more tempting then, what with it being closer to Persona 5's release date as well as overlapping with the 8th anniversary since I played that game. However, on the subject of SMT, I never did finish Devil Survivor, so I'm chewing through that now.

Just beat Belial and locked my route. I unlocked basically no events aside from what I imagine forms the standard law/chaos/bad end axis. Which means that neither of the routes I was looking for, Atsuro's and Gin's, were available. I ended up going with Naoya's route over Amane's. I'm not fond of Naoya's sales pitch; it largely sounds like he's manipulating the hero by telling him what he wants to hear in order to further his grudge with God. It doesn't help that we're basically riding on his coattails, and I doubt he's got everything locked down as well as he'd like us to think. Every indication of Naoya's 8th day sounds pretty cool and eventful, though, even if it's probably not as happy of an ending as Amane's. Not really satisfied with either, so I just hopped on Naoya's for shits and giggles. It did utterly ruin my party, though -- see ya later, Yuzu, Midori and Keisuke~

I'm fairly overleveled, likely because I'm pretty obsessed with cracking every single skill. I kicked Belial's shit in pretty hard and haven't really stumbled at any point, aside from taking two attempts at that one mission where you fight both demons and angels. But now that I've lost Yuzu and Midori, I'll have to tweak my party a bit. Dunno what I'm gonna do with Kaido (there's really only room for one really good physical squad captain, and Atsuro has been that to date), but Mari, Naoya and Black Frost look like they have their own niches.

Spoke too soon I guess. Jezebel was a unique pain in the ass, enough so that I got the game over screen twice in the process of killing her (had only seen it once up to that point), first by accidentally killing Amane (Naoya, you told me to keep attacking, you friggin' goober!) and the second time by getting Naoya killed (for something that I realized on my second. She's not even hard, she just has a ton of annoying crap going on to the side.

Solidified my current party:

- MC (56), Hecate (49), Norn (56) -- Insane magic damage, all three are resistant to damn near anything, two demons with effective squad-wide healing spells as well as Holy Dance.
- Atsuro (54), Arioch (56), Seiten Taisei (53) - Spams Deathbound and Hassohappa forever from 3 spaces away.
- Mari (54), Huoniao (56), Spriggan (55) - Modest magic damage, usually wipes fodder. Used to be a more dedicated healer, but she's currently undergoing growing pains with her current configuration.
- Naoya (54), Ukanomitama (54), Yama (50) - Mixed sweeper group. All three have Ma-dyne spells, both demons have magic amps for their corresponding Ma-dyne spell as well as Mow Down/Pierce. Naoya and Ukanomitama both have Diarahan in a pinch.

Got a pretty good rhythm going here. Helps that, yes, I'm still overleveled as all get out -- the level difference between my MC and each Bel seems to be halved every since time, what with Jezebel being only 3 levels above him.

I loved the Jezebel fight and the design is my jam, the fact she didn't get into IV when Beldr/Baldr did was some bullshit. I don't know if Apocalypse rectifies this yet.

I'm kinda disappointed that most of my favorite demons, like Hekatoncheires and Persephone, aren't in this game. On the other hand, they did take one of my favorite demon boys, Okuninushi, and upgraded him from a mid-tier level 40 demon to a final boss/endgame monstrosity, so that's cool.

Honestly pretty curious to see who is in Persona 5, if only because it's the latest 3D SMT since like, Raidou Kuzunoha 2 or something. It'd be cool to see the models and animations of my favorite demons rendered in 3D at late 7th-gen/quasi-8th gen standards

That's honestly a big part of the appeal of 5 for me at this point, especially since they seem to be enemies rather than the shadows which had okay designs but got super old really quick.

i'll miss shadow hulk hogan, tho

(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkqpw3gjTx1qc17mzo1_400.jpg)

a real loss to be sure

(http://i.imgur.com/mvM1aQ4.png)

well, i didn't notice this. and uh, given the level of quality here, i'm not surprised i didn't.

when the big song of your event is "oh hey taka and yoshitaka are doing a shitty happy hardcore collab together", you know you're strained for ideas

these genres are basically gibberish to me

my favorite genre name is cuddlecore

I listen to lolicore exclusively

also, i wrapped up a half-finished playthrough of San Andreas that I had started a year ago earlier today. it'd be the first completed playthrough of that game I've committed myself for close to a decade. san andreas has aged pretty badly, although that's more of a result of how many rough edges that genre has smoothed over in the 12-something years since that game launched. think it's still a really fun game at its core; san andreas was quite loving designed from top to bottom in its day, enough so that it generally still holds even if the gameplay is pretty dated, and that's more than I can say for damn near any game of its ilk that has come out since, aside from saints row 2. were the mechanics fully reworked to be slicker and more expedient, that game could probably still kick ass even today.

kinda wanna play either gta: vice city or saints row 2 now, but I don't own either of those on a console that actually works anymore.

xi is the only name that looks familiar to me!

btw, kinda off-rails, but have you heard of a group called Pizuya's Cell? Just got into their stuff recently. Pretty lovely.

Only ever heard two albums from them, both were collabs with MyonMyon. The Grimoire of Alice is pretty alright for goofy, chuggy Touhou groove metal, but the other album, Nuclear Blast, was aggressively bad. Kinda weird that they came out within like, half a year of each other, given the huge rift in quality between them. At least, that's the memory I have of those two albums from back when I was 16 years old and gobbling up every single bit of Touhou metal I could get my grubby hands on.

Oh man, actually went through some old doujin releases I has lying around from like, Comiket 77. It's kinda funny seeing random **** from people I've only come to recognize over the last few years just lying around in my harddrive lol

my bemani senpai implored me to actually listen to triple counter, and yep, it's certainly a thing.

meanwhile in jubeat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPiW4gda2A

as much as like, almost everyone else in HARDCORE TANO*C sucks (Noriken and Myosuke are okay, MNK are cool but they don't contribute to BEMANI so w/e), USAO is probably the most consistent and talented person contributing to BEMANI outside of DJ TECHNORCH (who is ex-HARDCORE TANO*C, I guess). he's at like, 8 songs and they're all great.

also fuuuuuuck i just realized that i forgot to tune in to akira complex's show at mogra back on the 13th. they definitely still have the archive up, but i wanted to watch the stream live.

[/edmshitnobodyherecaresabout]

EDIT: actually it looks like they didn't stream it in the first place, or they deleted the archive. that's weird.

EDIT EDIT: now i need someone to remind me that sexy maozon is there on the 26th. <3 maozon

so, crypt of the necrodancer's narrative is divided across three characters: cadence, her mom, and her grandmother. cadence is the main girl, so she's the default character who doesn't have any boons or restrictions. her mom is stuck with one weapon forever and cannot get damage boosters, but it's a pretty good weapon. her grandmother is... uhh...

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/450744765028997051/83FDDCA8E7C7BBE1A734CD99561DC22CA4CC5C86/)

she gets resurrected once if she dies, but that means fuck all since she'll die if an enemy so much as looks at her the wrong way. she also does the stages in reverse, so she starts with the most bullshit mobs, minibosses and traps. so basically, you need to do a perfect run, which is balls hard, to see the last portion of the story.

lol no thanks

oh touhou, i just can't quit you

beasted through some SHMUPs last night for giggles (p.s. if you're a metalhead, no really, check out exceed 3rd's soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gUZVglcDQXE&index=2&list=PLfStbN_tX2Z11XdHyHUF7Dee7dBMfgxl2), it's pretty badass), so here I am playing Touhou again. Still can't play Subterranean Animism for shit -- I 1cc-ed easy mode, I guess! (lol)

weirdly, the game is running at a constant 45 fps on my desktop. no idea why

The synths are tinny, and are way too much of the body of the song.

Other than that, I liked it.

i meant to link a playlist, not have the video come up lol. thanks smf, your auto-embed feature is very intuitive.

four days of summer left, so what better way to spend my precious time but by watching USAO try to play dark souls 3 at 2x speed. 20 tries and all of his embers just to beat the twin princes.

king of storms looks pretty miserable at 2x speed...

EDIT: "無理ゲーの王" loooooooool

(http://gematsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wyald-Berserk-Fami-shot_08-23-16_001.jpg)

the character everyone was clamoring for to be in berserk warriors


man, i would totally like to play as adon or grunbeld, but we got wyald instead lol

No Grunbeld is pretty crushing.

like, who the hell doesn't want to play as grunbeld? that dude is so cool, and instead we get EXCITEMENT AND ENJOYMENT. we better at least get one of the other dudes from the new band of the hawk like irvine or someone.

i mean, the fight with wyald was actually pretty cool, but man i don't want to play as that guy, and that's coming from the person who loved playing as jagi in ken's rage. they better at least reaaaally tone him down.

oh also dungeon fighter online is on steam now. 2D brawler MMO. wanted to play that a while back when nexon hosted the game, but their weird browser-based software would not friggin' work. maybe i'll have a look at it, but there ain't enough time left in the summer for it now =/

oh hey i played that a long time ago. it was pretty fun, but i think i remember it being kinda shallow, which is to be expected from a browser based free mmo

tuned in just in time to see USAO finish 3x speed Dark Souls 3

and just in time to see him start all over again @_@

EDIT: note to self, never play dark souls 3 at 3x speed as a sorcerer

what do you think of aran, Maniac?

just curious

I have pretty much no experience with his music. His only songs that I can even remember are a remix he contributed to USAO's BREAK OUT WHITE and this song he contributed to a MEGAREX release

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8JY8t1ssRk

(p.s. ULTRA HITECH 01 is crazy good, check that out)

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cqz5MzkWgAAX5He.jpg)

reminder that akari daisuki bot is the best thing on twitter

Fun fact: I've never played more than an hour of Baldur's Gate 1. As a kid/teen, I loved the hell out of Baldur's Gate 2 (for good reason), but I never got into Baldur's Gate 1. I still conflated the two because Baldur's Gate 2 is a masterwork, but yeah. Now that I've actually played raw AD&D 2.0, I've decided to finally tackle Baldur's Gate 1!

Playing as a mage, which is pretty uhhhhh. Mages level slower than any other class, requiring 2500 EXP for the first level. A couple hours of adventuring has gotten me a third of the way through that. At CL1, I have one spell: the damage spells do ass damage (Chromatic Orb has applications, I suppose, but not when it's my only spell), so I basically have one save-or-lose spell and then all I get is this dinky little slingshot with a THAC0 of 24 lol. For my part, I chose color spray, although now I'm using Sleep. Meanwhile, with 16 CON, I still have 4 HP so literally anything could one-shot me. I had a fun experience early on where I was attacked by that one CL3 mage assassin with mirror image and magic missile, and he basically just constantly no-sold my color spray and nuked me to hell with magic missile (All three blasts one-shot a level 1 Imoen, whereas a single blast out of three killed my mage). Should have brought on Xzar and Montaron when I ran into them, but I didn't expect to run into a CL3 wizard like, right outside the inn where Jaheira and Khalid were camped out, in the middle of public with guards running around no less.

After smashing myself against him for 20 minutes, hoping either my two party members or the guards could burn through his mirror images fast enough to kill him before he one-shot someone with magic missile, I actually got my party going. Jaheira and Khalid, as well as Kagain from Belerost. Pretty much none of them have the sufficient THAC0 where they hit anything, but having three meatshields alternate while two guys in the back poke the enemies with ranged weapons is cool. Spent another 10 minutes fighting another mage asshole -- some lady with Improved Invisibility (4th level) and Lightning Bolt (3rd level), meaning she's at least a CL7 mage. Fortunately, that one was less awful just because she doesn't come with horrible anti-melee spells that she could cast almost immediately, so my five party members eventually broke her concentration often enough to tear through her 20-something HP before she nuked the party with lightning bolt (I have a character with 20 con -- at level 1, even he is often dealt so much damage by lightning bolt that he gets taken down to -10 HP and perma-killed lol). Now I'm just going through the forest nearby, killing guys for pitiful EXP rewards (mmm, marginal...).

Aside from that... the scrolling in this game is crazy sluggish, something they smoothed out for Baldur's Gate 2. Baldur's Gate 2's pathfinding AI was pretty damn bad, but it's even worse here: party members are pretty damn likely to try to pass through other characters moving towards a target, and they often get caught between two characters already in melee range of the target, just standing there unless I have them manually and inefficiently have them back up and go far around the target. Baldur's Gate is, of course, locked to 640x480, so it's small as hell even on the rather low resolutions I tend to use on my monitors. Honestly, I don't like mods in general, but I might have to throw on some quality-of-life mods to make this thing more expedient, because yeah, this isometric RPG from 1998 is very janky lol

EDIT: stroll into the next town battered and bruised, go to the inn, oh look, another assassin! Oh look, they killed Kagain! Like, with the guys in Candlekeep, at least they attacked me alone in empty houses, so if they actually did successfully kill me, they at least had a chance to get out before they got caught. These guys are just gonna get killed by the Flaming Fist even if they did kill me. Why the hell are they attacking me in public places, in front of like a dozen witnesses? gj Bioware.

I've got BG1 on Steam but never got around to playing it whoops.

Level 2, yay~. Now I have two spell slots for the day lol. Both are sleep at this stage.

Went into Nashkel and saw Minsc soliciting assistance in rescuing his ward. Naturally, having Minsc in my party is pretty much necessary, so I hopped on board. I didn't entirely realize how far we were supposed to go at the time, but I went through like, five areas before actually reaching my destination. One big divergence between Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 is that there are a crapton of locations on the world map that are just open, barren wilderness. There will be like, a few fixed encounters or items in any given location, but finding them largely requires combing every last corner of the area, staggered out only by thinly-stretched, hilariously impotent mobs which give like, a middling 7 EXP per character (the first level for a mage requires 2500! even the fastest-leveling class, thief, requires 1250). Baldur's Gate 2 threw that out in favor of a more expedient world map with only major destinations and a few squares of wilderness, most of which housed a rather lengthy dungeon that was attached to one of the many larger side-quests in that game, and just packed all of those major destinations with those aforementioned fixed encounters/drops instead of spreading them out over 40 different nondescript patches of forestland. That was pretty much a unilaterally wise decision.

On the way, I aimlessly stumbled into another quest I had, where I had to hunt an evil CL5 Cleric surrounded by a ton of skeleton minions. In what is kind of an interesting mechanic for a Bioware game, you can go down a specific tree in the dialogue prompt that causes him to have a breakdown and destroy all of his minions, leaving him alone. Of course, I didn't actually expect that, so I just lured most of the skeletons away from him and manually killed them. At least I totally got EXP for each of them as opposed to nothing! The cleric himself was funny, one of those deals where I kick his shit in on the first go, forget to save and stumble into a random encounter that kills someone in my party. And then every subsequent try, I miss a bunch of swings and he just paralyzes my whole party, has one other guy confused and hacking away at the paralyzed guys while he takes potshots with a +2 hammer. Took quite a number of tries to take him out -- the attempt that finally did it had him confuse Minsc, who could easily one-shot damn near anyone in my party even without a critical hit (yay getting a +5 modifier to damage rolls!), so I had to kite him on top of fighting both the cleric and the mob I accidentally stumbled into right after killing the cleric as I desperately tried to stay away from Minsc. Kind of a miracle I actually survived.

Reached my destination, the Gnoll Stronghold. Here, I discovered one other divergence between this game and pretty much every single Bioware game made after it, including Baldur's Gate 2: enemies respawn. In fact, they respawn pretty god damn fast, often while you're only about 10-15 seconds worth of distance away from them. So while this place isn't hard, since Gnolls are hapless chumps and all of my party members have picked up a hit die by this point, there's a crapload of Gnolls and it's a slog to get around, especially as they respawn. These guys give miserable EXP rewards, like 7-11 per character depending on the variety, and even then my MC went from 2500 EXP to 4000 EXP during my stay. Eventually rescued Minsc's ward, Dynaheir. Had to dump Kagain for her, as I'm not done with Minsc yet. Simply put, Dynaheir sucks: She's an Invoker, so she's specializing in like, one of the shittiest wizardry fields while losing access to almost all of the rest. And well, wizards blow at this level -- her only options are equipping like, 3 casts of magic missile as she does a paltry 6 damage with any given cast while Minsc outdamages every last shot combined with a single swing of a greatsword. Gotta have her in the party if I want Minsc, though. We'll see if I don't dump the two of them in the near future -- giving up Kagain, whose AC I had gotten down to -2 with these gauntlets of dexterity I picked up earlier (with the HP he has, that means he's completely unfuckwithable in melee combat), for a lady who exists to spam magic missile hurts quite a bit.

Almost have my second level arcane spell slot woooooo

I pretty much changed my mind about Minsc and Dynaheir and basically dropped them at the end of the Gnoll Stronghold. Retained Kagain instead, because he's a dauntless behemoth, far more useful than Minsc would have been anyway. But since I'm short on another melee DPS beatstick, I went to hunt down Shar-Teel and recruit her. So I did, but one thing I didn't expect is that she's in an area with Basilisks -- you can probably guess what they do. There were two variants, the lesser basilisks and the greater basilisks, the primary divergence between them being HP. The thing about them is that the lesser basilisks give 1400 EXP a piece (which is then split between the six party members), and the greater ones drop 4000. At the time, I had never killed an enemy that gave 1400 or more EXP, and there were like, eight of those things, along with two Greater Basilisks. The game also plants a friendly zombie nearby that you can command (undead are flat out immune to petrification), so I had him charge forward, eat up aggro and slaughtered the basilisks. Went from halfway through level 2 to 4 by the end of it, so that was pretty damn lucrative.

Dumped Jaheira and Khalid for Viconia and Edwin. Along with Kagain and Shar-Teel, this means 4/5 of my party members are evil-aligned. A month out of Candlekeep and already are cute little Lucien L'avide (http://i.imgur.com/fvMWDt1.png) (I'll level with you, I still have no idea if that custom-made mug I found on google image search is supposed to be a really girly boy or a boy-ish girl, but I'm just gonna say it's a dude because I'm awful) and spunky Imoen getting themselves caught up with the wrong kind of people. I guess it's kind of fitting, since he's named after one of my D&D characters who actually is Neutral Evil (that name really doesn't make any sense when it's on someone who isn't evil or at least chaotic neutral, but it's pretty~).

Finally doing the main story quests. Bandits here, bandits there, etc. My party was fairly overleveled for the first two chapters, but I think the game is starting to catch up. Party is half-way to two-thirds through level 5, aside from my dual-classed Shar-Teel and Imoen, who are both level 6 (that thief EXP, man). Kagain has -7 AC now, which is absurd. Few things have any chance of hitting him short of a critical hit. He also has 69 HP (nice), so he basically never dies. In a pinch, if I need to burn a spell-caster's spell slots, I just throw Kagain at them until they run out lol. Shar-Teel has a hide score of 165% does like, 40 damage on a backstab -- I sometimes just send her ahead alone and have her hit and run enemies that are inelegantly scattered and have a chance at sneaking around to feast on my backliners. Edwin has +2 spell slots from his amulet/being a specialist mage, so he provides a lot of support. Viconia has some fun cleric skills like Hold Person as well as -4 AC -- she's fragile thanks to her miserable con, but she's hard to hit. Imoen is basically just an archer and is there to use thief support skills, and Lucien is comparatively worthless thanks to not being a specialist mage lol. I also gave him terrible stats too, not knowing that dex and con mean nothing unless they're 15+. Oh well, he's another mage so he can help Edwin maximize the odds of a target failing their save against a chromatic orb, I guess.

Getting a hang of using this fragile, weird party though. Starting to enjoy myself after suffering during the first few hours.

(http://i.imgur.com/wcIPgnU.png)

Oh, the things you could have been, Lucien...

Tempted to call a mulligan and just start over. Lucien is just so irreconcilably bad lol

just think about all the gay elfsex you could've had

nah, this is an RPG from 1998, gay romances didn't exist yet. or romances period, that started with baldur's gate 2 lol

actually, i think every woman you can romance in baldur's gate 2 is some kind of elf (half-elf, winged elf, drow), so if you mean straight elf sex then yeah, lots of that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE2LJjAvtG4

uggggh this song makes me so hard. why the hell can't his submissions to IIDX be this good anymore?

Okay, that one's actually pretty freaking sweet.

(http://i.imgur.com/fvMWDt1.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/aDiuOR4.png)

like night and day

Wow.

You weren't kidding about your old character having a terrible build.

(http://i.imgur.com/M4T3lNb.png)

the best way to win a fight

So, when I stopped playing as Lucien, I had just entered Baldur's Gate proper. Didn't spend any time exploring it before I rolled up Yiri out of my dissatisfaction with Lucien and saw the difference it made. So now that I've caught up with my first run, I'm actually moving around Baldur's Gate and this city is a fucking mess. It's made up of nine districts -- in terms of landmass, it's probably bigger than Athkatla in Baldur's Gate 2, albeit less densely populated and with fewer points of interest. There's a wall arbitrarily bisecting the city, so depending on which district you're coming from, you may end up in a dead end and have to play around with the map to reach your destination. Unlike with Athkatla, none of the nine districts are labelled (much like almost every region in the game, which has lent itself to some substantial confusion already), and also unlike Athkatla, there doesn't seem to be a general theme to most of them.

This causes a rather big pain in the ass: A lot of sidequests tell you to go to a specific inn, or temple, and don't actually tell you which district that place actually is in. One egregious example is with a sidequest you'll probably stumble into during your time there, where you encounter an assassin who runs off after threatening you, and you'll eventually find his associate in another district afterwards who tells you that this guy has somehow poisoned you, and that you will die if you don't obtain the antidote in ten days. This leads to a chain of fetch quests where you're told to go to this temple, and then that temple, and then to an inn somewhere, and then a completely different inn somewhere else, and at no point does that quest tell you where to go, and while one location is in a rather fitting location (the evil goddess of the seas has her temple in the docks, of course), there's no actual way to tell where any of those destinations are without brute force. I just decided to use a guide to find my way around, but god this would be a pain in the ass to do without one (and since this game came out in 1998, chances are you didn't have one back then lol). Time elapses pretty slowly unless you rest, and no time is spent when traveling around the city, so you're not really under the gun here, but it's a rather rude way to introduce you to the city in which you'll spend the next few chapters.

(http://i.imgur.com/SqQB48F.png)

and it only took almost 100 summoned monsters under the effects of haste and a few shots of resist fear to do!

I can't even fucking see him under that pile of corpses.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrBitWdVYAEYVcK.jpg)

starting in a few hours, IIDX legend good-cool at mogra. Dunno if they stream Diverse System release parties, but I really fucking hope they do because I miss good-cool.

also DJ Shimamura and Maozon at mogra on the 18th. reaaaally gotta catch that, too. this is one damn fine month to be watching japanese nightclub streams lol

no i'm totally not derailing my video games topic, all these guys contribute to bemani. it's relevant!

EDIT: this is an excellent 777th post

they didn't stream it =(

since they didn't have a time schedule, it was probably an all-in kind of deal anyway. i probably didn't miss much. i will be upset if they don't stream that show on the 18th, tho.

EDIT: down with listening to the other show they had planned and are streaming. playing the first kara no kyoukai movie opening right now~

on an unrelated note: my diviner now has more exp than if I were to roll a new character for baldur's gate 2. that metagaming, yo (I will only gain one more level before I hit the EXP cap, and my next spell level is the level after that one so :x).

Kenichi Chiba! Nice.

now where the hell is Ryunosuke Kudo!?!?

Alright, I have finished the super dungeon from the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion pack, I have defeated the dreaded Demon Knight, and now it's time to fight the ultimate superboss of all! This is so excit--

(http://i.imgur.com/c7FPjwC.png)

...

(http://i.imgur.com/6nmnCfh.png)

...

(http://i.imgur.com/ZO3BswV.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/yiQsSCr.png)

Baldur's Gate is done~

Baldur's Gate is old enough that it'll be graduating from high school this year. Not a whole lot of games can really stand up after that length of time, but for the game that spawned Shadows of Amn, unequivocally one of the greatest games ever made and one that absolutely does stand up even 16 years later, it's really surprising how jank the first game is. On one hand, it's still kinda fun to play. It's not bad in terms of game mechanics even with the weird balancing issues one would expect from low level AD&D 2.0, it provides a diverse arrangement of character builds for both alignments (Shadows of Amn is guilty here -- no pure thieves who aren't temp party members, very few evil-aligned characters, all of whom are mutually exclusive with other party members, etc), and it's pretty customizable and fun to break. It's a good experience in terms of showcasing D&D mechanics, really. But on the other hand, it's a flat, ugly world with poorly-laid out cities, bland dungeons and vast stretches of absolutely nothing, filled with characters that are about three dialogue boxes and five voice clips away from being nothing more than stat blocks and portraits. It's a technical mess, sluggishly slow and surprisingly resource-draining, with miserable pathfinding AI and innumerable scripting errors even by its sequel's low standards.

Baldur's Gate was worth playing just for the sake of completion, and I suppose for the sake of dovetailing into another playthrough of Shadows of Amn. I don't feel like I wasted my time, but this is absolutely not the classic that its proximity to its sequel would imply. At best, it's a good proof of concept set in the forgotten ages when Bioware released non-RPGs that nobody remembers like Shattered Steel and MDK2 (Quickly doctor, pick up the toast and I'll show you how to eat it...), and as a foundation for a sequel that practically obsoletes this game. I'll probably never play it again, alas.

(http://i.imgur.com/FkQc9RG.png)

Gonna play with the character importing thingeroos and see what kind of silliness I can pull. Dunno if I'm gonna get deep into Shadows of Amn that quickly, but I prolly will lol

(http://i.imgur.com/Jn5s98L.png)

we in

(stole a new portrait from than isandir guy yet again because he does good work. also because half of the returning characters look nothing like themselves from the previous game, so I may as well do the same -- one of these party members is one of the party members in those BG1 screencaps, can you guess who lol)

EDIT: brb spoiling persona 5 for myself b/c whatever

the thing i knew was gonna happen, but didn't want to, of course happened

Destiny raid is a highly valid excuse for pretty much everything

note to self: don't date random, he might ditch me for destiny/overwatch

._.

just kidding, i love you bro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816KeqES240

final boss song for copula, this time for real since it's the one more extra stage. spoilers, it sucks. it's actually kind of a shame since there's something in there that doesn't suck (adapting a candy rave song for the final boss is actually a neat idea), but the momentum of the song jumps off a cliff 30 seconds in and never comes back. bet that was ryu's idea.

"Guys, great idea: Ryu should be involved in the OMES." - my bemani senpai (although Ryu☆ actually has an okay track record with OMES songs)

copula was the worst fucking style. can't wait for sinobuz to be no different because konami doesn't give a fuck

lol

i would still totally date random tbqf

he's out of my league honestly

same

blushu

S2TBTANO*C going on right now. Wish I could watch that.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CseA7UqUMAAb0pe.jpg)

This is also a thing! You know, DJ Shimamura is playing at S2TBTANO*C, and he has this show tomorrow. Yikes.

EDIT: Random fun fact on the subject of DJ Shimamura: I will eternally associate this song with fighting Aldrich in Dark Souls 3 because I was playing it the first time I fought him. It fits surprisingly well, given how many (lethal) rave lights Aldrich throws out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhK4hdAypI

Every subsequent playthrough, I've played some kind of rave song over that boss fight. Usually DJ Shimamura songs, if it can be helped.

You know maniac, sometimes I just don't get you.

You say you like the bemani games, and you're certainly excited whenever you talk about these Japanese DJs...

But everything you post about the games themselves is negative

That's because the only game I've talked about is copula, which is a pretty bad style. A lot of the in-house veterans like Nekomata and Taka just half-assed it real bad, if they didn't outright skip it (second game since his debut in 6th style without any new songs from TOMOSUKE, but that might be a good thing given what he's been doing recently). Among the commission artists, even folks whose tracks I generally enjoy like Noriken, Myosuke, Dirty Androids and Shimamura put out some pretty mediocre stuff. Usually there's an internal event update every month in a IIDX game, maybe a bit longer between events -- this one went without updates for like, 4 months aside from cross-over events and the regular shuffling of its extra stage. My favorite song is a Ryu☆ track (granted, it was easily his best song in like, almost a decade or so), and I usually hate that guy. Think the only really good thing to come out of this style is that they brought back DJ Mass for a bit, and I'm wholly expecting Konami to drop him faster than a lump of burning coal. Like, it was kind of a disaster, I'm not exaggerating when I say it might be my least favorite style to date.

By contrast, I was pretty okay with PENDUAL (the previous style), and liked SPADA (two styles ago) quite a bit.

went over to 4chan to see if they had any juicy p5 spoilers. don't do that, folks

did get some juicy goro image macros, tho

baka
Alright, maybe go ahead and explain this whole "style" thing, since I'm not really getting a good feel for it from your previous posts.

https://youtu.be/bybkLlNbaaw?t=46s

maozon is like, one of the only guys with any sense of how D&B should flow. got bored as hell listening to the DJs before him, but his sets are always great. helps that he's beautiful and omg omg i wanna marry him

glad they have maozon and old man shimamura back to back, it's pretty expedient. don't have to stick around for kan takahiko's worthless ass lol

never seen a shimamura set. he always has mc stone with him at every fucking live show he goes to, so let's see if I come out of this hating his guts lol

EDIT: pretty good set. MC STONE can jump off a bridge, tho :T

EDIT: EDIT: https://twitter.com/AkiraComplex/status/777562863544045568

have i ever mentioned i want to be akira complex?

this explains very little and is horrible engrish

lol that's the point. style just means like, "edition", or like 24th style is the 24th game

so, I think I got all the p5 spoilers I needed. debriefing ahead in case gfloyd or someone else has also been following literally all of the spoilers or something, including very late game spoilers:

So, the token Maniac-bait character, Akechi Goro, in all of his cuddly, fluffy-brunette-ness, turns out to be evil. Not only is he evil, he's a giant unhinged, sociopathic asshole on top of it. He's a Shinjiro kind of deal where he joins for a single month (and like Shinjiro, he's a pretty good character in combat, which goes far in making everyone resent having to lose him) before he betrays you, leading up to the video that has been spoiled for everyone since where he (tries to) blow the hero's brains all over the wall in graphic fashion and make it look like a suicide. Through trickery, he fails, gets outed and is fought in the next dungeon twice, growing progressively more unhinged before he rambles off his impromptu tragic backstory (which is disproportionately light compared to what a huge psychotic jackass he is) and hastily sacrifices his life to save the party, having gone from 0 to 100 back to 0.

So, I'm not sure if that's everything, but christ that is a waste of a character. It's a waste in the obvious manner only Maniac gives a damn about where I wanted Goro to be my beautiful cinnamon roll, too good for the world etc. But it's also a waste in terms of how really hamfisted that entire exchange is -- it doesn't do much for a character when we only understand him for literally all of three minutes before he dies. That probably would have been a great opportunity to pressgang him back into the party and see how his deranged, yet desperately-craving-affection personality contrasts itself among a party that barely trusts him, especially as it contrasts itself with his previous two roles as a bitch in sheep's clothing/outright villain. But no, I guess he has to die? nevermind that adachi got his redemption arc in the arena games despite being a worse human being and despite actually being a gainfully-employed adult who has far less justifiable reason not to have his shit together. like, there might still be some kind of perfect sequence of flags that might change that, I suppose, but I doubt it. no dialog mechanics in any of the recent persona games have had so much nuance as to block us from say, a party member, without someone having found out by now. like, this whole deal pretty lame, and while it's obviously not gonna discourage me from playing P5 (a lot of 4channers sure have been dissuaded because they're shitflinging manbabies), that's a pretty lame usage of a traitor/major villain and it does totally disappoint me.

also fun fact: apparently the game has anti-LDP undertones beneath it, which is pretty cute.

EDIT: also
(http://i.imgur.com/xTNJNvh.png)

holy phuck

(still never played persona 1 or 2 and don't much care to. both of the persona 2 games seem interesting, but that gameplay is asssss)

Persona 5 reminds you it was released for the 20th anniversary every time you start it up.

I thought Innocent Sin was worth it for the story, but then I could never be bothered to play through Eternal Punishment. Maybe one day.

i imagine there was a ton of promotional shit about that 20th anniversary thing, but somehow i didn't actually notice it despite noticing that it was p3's 10th anniversary over in japan pretty much immediately

so, who's your waifu thus far, ahriman

Lots of quality waifus to choose from. Makoto is probably #1 so far, but Futaba is pretty good after only having done her dungeon

i have 1 and 2 on ps1 from a binge of collecting a year or two ago but never got around to playing them much

2 at least played better than 1 and has a way cool cast from what i can tell

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsvUhF3WIAAREfQ.jpg)

the best P5 waifu husbando waifu

i am very much a goro boy

the save transfer thing requires my copy of SMTIV, and that's long gone. thought they'd just use a save file from my memory card or something :T

lame

i have my copy still but played it on a different 3ds so i guess that works out for me if it just needs the game

also just saw that his raidou costume is the villain from soulless army so i think its kind of amazingly funny how transparent they are with his role in the story

i guess they figure that everyone knew it was gonna happen, since they were so quiet about discussing literally anything about his character -- a lot of spoilers for some of the evil deeds goro does came out during the time 4chan/most of the ongoing streams still had him in the party, so now I'm wondering if the game even tries to hide it.

also the first armor you can buy in apocalypse is a kung-fu outfit and i love it. you can even buy stereotypical martial artist hair.

just got home and was able to transfer my saves so cool i'll be sure to get the kung fu outfit

(I'm a roll with posting my **** in the wrong topics lately)

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cs77nk_XEAUxdef.jpg)

i miss tryhard advertising from the late 90s/early 2000s

i want that framed and put on my wall honestly

one of the admins of my main internet community was convinced by his girlfriend to stream amnesia: memories, an idea factory-published otome game. he's normally a straight-laced "i play old nintendo games because i'm almost 40 years old" kind of gamer, so that's a pretty wild choice for him to play. she specifically convinced him to play toma's route, where your token creepy-as-hell-yet-still-pretty-so-its-okay childhood friend toma gaslights your amnesia-riddled heroine, traps her in his house, drugs her and eventually locks her in a dog cage in his bedroom. it's one of those stockholm syndrome-tastic routes where like, your captor is really pretty and has a handsome voice and he blatantly feels kinda guilty about being driven that far, and the imaginary friend you've manifested is all "man, he really does love you even though he locked you in a god damn cage", and it's really funny seeing a bunch of rather normal 30-something year old nintendo vets experience that and go "uh, wow" over it. they decided to narrate the script at some point, and the streamer's friend, a jolly man with a southern christian kind of voice, decided to give bishonen toma this barely coherent, buffalo bill kind of sick fuck voice and it was incredible. they ended up running into a bad end (no, being locked in a fucking cage by your childhood friend is not part of the bad end); pretty amazing experience overall.

Is this game the story of idea factory's relationships with their girlfriends

let's see... the other guys are, in order, an abusive jackass who calls you a moron every few minutes (you are, of course, a complete fucking moron, but that's beside the point), an autistic mathematician with a tenuous grasp on human contact, an idol who has zero individual personality and a murderous fanclub, toma, and a guy with a spiritually-induced case of bipolar personality disorder. so maybe, give or take a few too many points in the "physical attractiveness" stat

otome games are special

Sounds hilarious

video games are weird

ffxiv + expansion + free month for $15.

have to throw away my old account but uggggghhhh that's kinda tempting. never had the expansion, that's apparently the level/difficulty range where the game gets fun...

might hop on that. if nothing else, sitting in DPS queues is a good way to demarcate enjoyment and study

(http://i.imgur.com/VvIEOT0.png)

yup. that's the good shit.

at least now i'm off steam, so random and every other steam buddy doesn't get to notice that i'm sinking literally all of my life into playing this game

(http://i.imgur.com/p1RO7EA.png)

nopenope, that's the good shit.

for whatever reason, my university took a huge, bleeding cut out of the bandwidth budget. it's felt to varying degrees across campus, but it's miserable here. it crashes every 10-20 minutes for about 2-3 minutes at any time not between noon and 8 pm. so that's how I go from a rather brisk 10 GB over 2.5 hours to struggling to get any progress done since it doesn't even start acknowledging that I've downloaded any amount of memory unless it's over a gigabyte.

man, i didn't think the day would ever come when I'd consider college internet worse than the **** I had at home ._.

Oh, banananac

i feel your pain

https://twitter.com/MangaGamer/status/782419637875204096

lol that thing was kusoge. i also already own it because of course i do

ahriman, why are you guys bringing this over again

(http://i.imgur.com/ZWzzSsY.png)

to nobody's surprise, i chose a pretty similar character design

the main difference is that while you can't really tell in that lighting, his complexion is inhuman. he's the same kind of elf as Abigail was, the drow-ier cave-dwelling variety, but now he actually has an appropriate skin tone for a drow

playing on a different server this time, so no alt-right-leaning newbie network this time around. mostly been quiet (haven't gotten an invite to this server's NN), aside from the fact that i've gotten an invite from a guild named after an otome game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabolik_Lovers) four times now. got back just in time to see that yo-kai watch event finally end, and leveled quite a number of my classes up to snuff by joining the zergs hastily rushing to finish collecting all the shit they still needed before it was gone forever.

People still love Umineko for some reason.

that's tragic. but then again, even my bookstore had copies of the umineko manga despite only reserving one side of a bookshelf total to manga, so i guess someone wants that

oh yeah, related fun fact: within about 11 hours, everyone on rokkenjima will have been dead for 30 years. time sure flies huh

make that six times now.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7arUHUIAEzZss.jpg)

This one I remember seeing before online. A masterwork.

might as well give in already, they've obviously got your number

it's been radio silence since. prolly because they changed their name and shed like, 100+ members; this is why i'm not interesting in joining a clan that sounds like a horned-up 16 year old's pitiful attempt to be in charge

never mind, now we're at nine.

also this (NSFW)

http://imgur.com/y3QG8XR

...classy

(http://i.imgur.com/CFhtTuN.jpg)

ME: he looks so adorable in this goofy outfit <3
SANE PERSON: uhhhhh wtf are you wearing

don't ask maniac for fashion advice unless you like dressing like a clown

and now i think she got her wires crossed and tried to invite me to her weird placeholder guild that only has one of her alts on it

ten fucking times, man. keep in mind, not once has she actually messaged me to say "hi" or "wanna join my guild" or whatever to me. better yet, not once has she ever even been anywhere near me at any given point when she has sent any one of those requests, so it's not like she's just wandering into me at random and sending me a request each time she sees me for whatever reason. i don't know if she has a mandate for guild members to tell her every time they see someone without a guild tag or what, but either way it's pretty annoying and actually kinda creepy. she's just sent unsolicited request after unsolicited request over and over, sometimes multiple requests over a span of a few hours, and I've smacked each one down only to get another like, two days later. i'd block her if I wasn't vaguely amused by such a shameless attempt to get another total rando for her guild, and if I wasn't ardently unwilling to block anyone but gold sellers and the most abusive shitheads ever to grace this planet.

guess it's time for me to find a guild so i don't have to deal with her, then =|

(http://i.imgur.com/QjFvFu2.jpg)

purple hair now

helps deflect the fact that i'm wearing black armor and using the one class with a one-to-one correspondence with always choosing reaper in overwatch

beatmania IIDX 24: SINOBUZ out next week. Cautiously optimistic, hoping for some some heavy hitters in the default songlist that weren't in the location test 'cause that location test was pretty barren. They're coming off the worst entry in the series since possibly ever though, after a rut of okay-ish entries in general and a number of bad business decisions parallel (worst pop'n entry ever was parallel to copula as well!), so it's kinda hard to stay optimistic.

also that game cut like, one of my top 3 IIDX songs so yeah. Not entirely enthusiastic about that.

Last 10 days of FFXIV. Gonna renew for another month and then see where I go from there. Haven't joined a guild yet but that one that kept sending me requests seems to have imploded so w/e. They also announced their next expansion for summer 2017, so I guess I know what I'll be doing then if I live long enough to see next summer.

So, that Berserk Warriors game comes out in Japan in four days. From what I can tell, it's just gonna have eight characters: Guts, Griffith, Casca, Judeau, Serpico, Scheirke, Zodd and, of course...


I took that whole thing as meaning that the roster was gonna be pretty expansive, since Wyald is probably the 30th or so Berserk character I'd think of when mentally mulling down the list of characters I'd want to play as in a video game. But no, someone actually thought it was important enough, with such a sparce character roster, that Wyald was playable lolololol. Between that bit of stupidity and the marketing (pre-order to get a towel costume for Casca!), that game looks sketch as hell. The odds of it being kusoge, even by licensed musou game standards, are rapidly approaching 1 as we speak.

Also, this exists and it is glorious: http://skullknight.net/roster/

https://twitter.com/Sir5000/status/788444727175634944

i didn't know this was a thing and now i'm 1000% more excited about sun and moon

(had to find this the day after pete burns died, of course)

So, SINOBUZ dropped and I spent the last two and a half hours listening to the whole song list.

In no real order per tier:

TOP TIER: *crickets*
GOOD TIER: Music is the Answer (C-Show), Umbral (Maozon), ROTTERDAM SHOGUN (DJ TOTTO), (This Is Not) The Angels (Hommarju)
MID TIER: Affection (ni-21), Magical (Snail's House), Seize the Day (DJ'TEKINA//SOMETHING), The Commanders (USAO), ¡Viva! (Ryu*), XINOBIKILL (SOUND-HOLIC), 焱影 (RoughSketch/NiActivity)
--------THE ENJOYMENT CUTOFF--------
WHATEVER TIER: Amazing Mirage, Seaside Labyrinth, Selfish Sweet, OOO, 獅子霞麗ノ舞, shuriken, AsiaN distractive, Beyond the Seven, DISAPPEAR feat. koyomin, Super Rush, #MAGiCVLGiRL_TRVP_B3VTZ, TOGAKUSHI, OTENAMI Hurricane
--------THE "I WOULDN'T LISTEN TO THIS EVEN IF WERE DISTRACTED AND NOT PAYING ATTENTION" CUTOFF-------
LOW TIER: elemental bender feat. Kanae Asaba, Believe in you, Papayapa Bass, Remedy feat. Kanae Asaba, SINOBUZ Fantasy, Modular Technology, 次葉- -turn the page-, BREAK OVER, Sarutobi Champion is 拙者, SAY BAY
COMPLETE SHIT TIER: ちらちら・はらはら, 冬椿 ft.Kanae Asaba, Be A Star, お命ちょうDAI！901娘,
L.E.D. DRUM & BASS TIER: 鴉 (fuck yeah remaking the same song five times in less than three years!)

I think this default songlist might be a bit better than copula's: there's more songs above the enjoyment cut-off line at least. Dunno if the best songs are as good as the best songs from either PENDUAL or copula, but they're strong nonetheless. Seems like damn near every guy with a reputation for being good that struck out in copula struck out again in SINOBUZ, most of the best songs are from folks I don't usually rank among the best musicians around like C-Show and DJ TOTTO (and I can't say I'm rather comfortable saying songs from SOUND-HOLIC and RoughSketch were actually okay). Interestingly, a lot of the better tracks are throwbacks to older styles from much younger artists - Umbral is some old Taka-ish trance (Maozon does a better Taka throwback than Taka does!), (This is Not) The Angels calls back TaQ and ROTTERDAM SHOGUN is Shinji Hosoe worship down to the name. Think we're off to a better start than I expected, although my expectations were pretty low anyway lol.

Just so that this list actually matters to people who don't play IIDX, I'll throw out some videos to accompany it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cio343t73EA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bvqALRcK4I

First one's pretty good. Other one's okay...ish.

(http://i.imgur.com/wupHdjU.png)

light 'em up.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/15573669/

got quite a bit more done in my first month than I ever did with abigail. quite a bit more wealthy, too. i guess that figures since this account actually had the expansion and could actually hit the level cap lol. since I have the expansion, I haven't rammed the cap of worthwhile content just yet, so I'm not done playing this fucker, but the presence of a subscription service kinda made it less encouraging to do anything else, and there's quite a few other games I've been wanting to play:

1) Gotta finish up Apocalypse, it'd be a waste to play straight into the endgame without even finishing the job.
2) One of my friends sent me a randomizer tool for the GBA fire emblem games. can randomize basically anything, from classes to base stats to character names/portraits. Seems pretty damn wild, and I want to give it a shot.
3) Wanted to play more Baldur's Gate 2 as well.

so yeah. FFXIV is done for the moment. probably not for long, but I'm just gonna push it to the side for now.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwwvPOnUoAA8uN2.jpg)

please kill me

As of yesterday, Todestrieb (https://remywiki.com/Todestrieb) is now five years old. I know what I must do.

(Some things never change)

(http://i.imgur.com/NAFefo5.jpg)

did i ever mention i made an alt in ffxiv

i love him with all my heart

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyXGNIZW8AQNk2v.jpg)

he knows he's sexy

(i want to scratch him behind his ears)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fbO2-egZ3U

oh hey this exists

for a bit i kinda thought the game looked kinda slow and was wondering if they were just gonna go with that, but a few clips seemed to show it at what appeared to be full speed so i guess that was just done for the kineticism of the trailer. so i guess all that's left is the potential uncanny valley of mimicking animations from 1996 in a 2017 remaster lol

His expression seems a bit vacant, but I've never been a Crash fan, so maybe it was always that way.

90's levels of anthropomorph 'tude are simply difficult to recreate in the modern era.

i'll probably still buy this and laugh at the "break out the butter i'm gonna make toast" line in warped like an idiot regardless

i think my biggest problem with the aesthetic is that it looks like a generic unreal engine 3 remaster: increased brightness all around, heavy bloom, generic assets with little substantial texture, etc. The "side-by-side" comparison part is pretty silly, where it goes from the original version's eroding, textured architecture (from levels made in **** 1995, when making an environment that detailed was hard as hell to do) to pristine squares and circles all around. but then again, I expected that to be how it'd work anyway since that's how every remake works -- at least we're not talking about a remake of a game that game out three or four years prior looking lazy and shitty like how a lot of the ongoing remasters today do.

haha that sh(http://)it looks awful

(http://i.imgur.com/gOazRrR.png)

this is the best character design ever and i will fight anyone who disagrees to the death

(well, except for the buns and the mini tophat. those are a bit too much)

(also this game is on sale on PSN right now and I'm tempted to dip)

persona 4 came out in the U.S. today 8 years ago

seeing as i pre-ordered it and got it at launch, i imagine this day 8 years ago is a dark day in BP history

EDIT:

nope, i got it on the 9th lol


how things change

I actually don't recognize that character, but it is a pretty sweet design regardless.

p.s. that's a guy

sasuga manananac

i want to fu(http://)ck that guy

(http://i.imgur.com/7ATLNlY.png)

i was gonna post a picture of this guy anyway, but i had to modify it in order to be relevant to the current conversation at hand

Rundown for 2016.

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright
Way of the Samurai 4 (didn't get best ending)
Dark Souls 3 (x4, god I wasted my year)
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (x3, finished through expansion content x2 times)

Completed replays includes: GTA: San Andreas, Psychonauts, FTL, Rogue Legacy, eXceed 3rd, a couple of AliceSoft games (hi Ahriman) and a couple Touhou games. Generally a lot of short things I usually play through at least once annually, if not every two months or so like FTL and Rogue Legacy.

Was substantially more thorough with completing the big purchase games I made over the last few years, but this year saw me just outright abandon several games right before the final boss. Most of them were Shin Megami Tensei games, so I guess I've come a long ways towards not giving a fuck about those games.

Planned on doing my Persona 4 Golden run over the winter break and I still wanna do it, but I'm just not feeling it right now.

(http://i.imgur.com/PzvQ4Ml.png)

i am damn sure giving handsome jack or vaas a hug would have cleared things right up

who the fuck picked these games?

community nomination of course

i voted to teach the murderous AI compassion

like, i guess handsome jack has fans who totally gloss over what a pile of puke he is because he's witty and funny and i guess has a "nobody to villain" backstory, but who the hell voted for friggin' far cry 3? oh man, those insane slavers, they're so sympathetic

also, it's the release date for rance 5D and 6. congrats to ahriman for pulling off something i didn't think we'd ever see like, 5 years ago (and also a belated happy birthday). definitely plan on jumping on that release when i get a job.

I'm just glad it's done and I can stop thinking about it forever

that's kind of depressing

hope you get more rance projects in the future, though. well, those or some of the better offerings in alicesoft's library.

I am working on something pretty good at the moment

When's the announcement?

I guess AX, but I'll probably be done with it by then so I don't know if they'll want to announce it sooner.

what is this even from

steam's gimmick for this winter season is "oh hey, game awards, as nominated by the steam community!"

we're off to a great start

ughhhhhhh

When I first heard of that award from a friend, I was all "I'm sure Undertale is gonna be there".

Then he said, "It's not even a nomination" and mentioned like three guys who very much enjoy their shenanigans.

What the hell are they even doing?

There's only two villains in Undertale.

And you get to hug one of them anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkD4w5h-6Pc

really weird dj mass song

it'd be good if it didn't have the random trap nonsense around the half-way mark and an ending that is super incongruous with the tone of the rest of the song. i still kinda like it 'cause the melody throughout is quite strong and this is pretty nonstandard in tone for someone who basically makes party breakbeats like dj mass. between this and re:BounceKiller, it sounds like dj mass's style may have changed a bit over the five years he was gone

also, there is no fucking way on earth that chart is an 11. that's a god damn 12 -- that's about as hard as another dj mass song from copula that was a friggin' 12.

i'll be goddamned if i can find a consistent melody in that thing for more than 15 seconds

a lot of bemani songs are kinda like that since they're all compressed into two minutes and often have to change tone to justify spikes or lulls in difficulty, usually around the midpoint or the ending. that song's a really big victim of it since not only is it just all over the place, but a lot of the different melodies clash with each other. that ending shouldn't be there, those random trap beats shouldn't be there, etc.

of course, a lot of guys in the periphery of bemani music like the club/doujin music scenes will do that anyway because dubstep and trap should be in every song apparently, no matter how incongruous that crap is in tone with the rest of the song. sorry guys, a 30-second dubstep break in the middle of my silly, upbeat drum and bass song or my pretty, navelgazing trance track doesn't suddenly make me want to jumpdafuckup

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JAipaVEAAsLzO.jpg)

i would give so much to see this

(also seeing "badass" written in katakana is kinda funny)

(http://i.imgur.com/eX2EjlU.png)

every ideal i could possibly have for a D&D character in one stat sheet

not being content with being named after a game featuring domestic abuser vampire bishonen or being maid cafe-themed, that one fc that kept spamming me with invites has rebranded themselves in a hip new manner:

(http://i.imgur.com/9QaLTcc.png)

really dodged a bullet there

Man, they really did have your number, didn't they?

...wait, you're still playing FFXIV? Thought your free months expired and you retired your toons.

where do you think this came from

i waited like a week or two, did nothing in particular during that week, and then resubscribed and have been going since. just have little to say outside of me posting pictures of my characters rocking pink hair, some garish coat and harem pants, pictures that i think have worn out their welcome here

mang, i don't track the minutiae of your online life

that's a hell of a response

guess who made a new character

(http://i.imgur.com/Rt2gwnQ.jpg)

i am terrible

cute af

as much as I keep slagging every new IIDX style for being filled with middling doujincore shit, their choices for CS transplants and revivals are top notch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He83tDYQMSw

did not ever expect them to bring back sequence cat. this almost makes up for them cutting life scrolling

EDIT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcD-BZ6SsZQ

hahaha go ahead!!'s chart is hilarious. if clickagain still updated, this would prolly beat FAXX in terms of having the greatest disparity between normal and hard clear. might actually beat icarus for the title of "easiest 12 to normal clear"

also this song would be totally legit if it didn't have that really boring intro, but a song is probably better off starting shitty and ending well than the reverse.

that second song would actually probably be great if it weren't for the stupid robot voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT-haKyIArs

it works for a happier song, just not that one. like, at all. really, if that song wasn't a go beyond!! sequel and if they weren't obsessed with copying that song's incredibly artificial, "we composed it this way because we wanted to make the chart super bullshit" structure down to the most meaningless minutiae, it'd prolly be the best non-default song yet.

uh

what the hell was that chart

has any human being ever managed to actually full combo that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdgSnXcjLNw

searching for full combos for that song comes up with like, 5 results.

there's a few folks out there who have have full combo'd pretty much everything. prolly the most well known of them is RAG, who is so good that he's moved on to trying to full combo 12-rated charts (the highest rating) one-handed. here's him full combo-ing iidx's most infamous chart (not one-handed of course, but still):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RVRMz4AZQM

when you could be a great musician with your sense of rhythm and coordination but instead choose to be a master at some random jap game

a lot of newer, younger doujin scene folks contributing to recent bemani games are exceptionally capable IIDX players and largely got into composing music because of bemani. one of them, DJ Genki, is apparently supposed to be one of the best of the best with full combo credits on some impossibly hard charts

https://youtu.be/g8nV5H3-E1g

except he's fucking terrible and I hate his music and wish he'd go back to playing IIDX all day long again

Now if only they bothered making good mu-
why must you ruin everything

my punchline is better anyway.

10 years of...

(http://www.siliconera.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/b14gold.jpg)

even if its signature song was shit, IIDX GOLD was a really good style, one of the best. pretty much every song in it was some varying degree of good, it was fuckin' amazing. think i'd only put it behind EMPRESS and Resort Anthem for best style ever. they actually apparently tried to bring this one over to the U.S. -- some trial machines apparently popped up, but that plan wasn't successful enough and they haven't tried since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l6Ep9ma1SU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SFVrf715fg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDhqs5yRYJY

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(https://remywiki.com/images/thumb/e/ef/Djyoshitaka2014.jpg/574px-Djyoshitaka2014.jpg)

also this means that it's been 10 years since dj yoshitaka more or less took over bemani. it's so hilarious how he's styled himself to be a fancy, well-dressed bishonen these days (taking good care to airbrush his skeletal cheeks out of every promotional image) when he looked like a gangbanger only 10 years ago. let's pay homage to the old yoshitaka, the way he deserves to be remembered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bybkLlNbaaw

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DJ TROOPERS turns 10 in December. The very last year with two IIDX releases.

breath of the wild costume spoilers oh no

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5xVY7HWYAAZASw.jpg

if shirtless link is an automatic 7/10, this is like, an automatic 7.5/10. good sh(http://)it, game

that's pretty much all I have to say about that game for quite a while.

baldur's gate 1 solo run has commenced. i'm using an add-on that, among other things, raises the level cap, so I'm probably gonna stampede over this once I hit a specific level, but hey. the add-on also adds baldur's gate 2 class kits, and I'm using one that has a consumable ability that makes me immune to pretty much every status and lowers my AC and THAC0 by 2, so I'm just broken as all hell since the spell diversity for wizards and clerics are so narrow and tend to be frontloaded with status effects like hold person, horror and rigid thinking and is deficient in protection spells (wizards die so fast to me 'cause I have a THAC0 of 4 with that aforementioned ability which is a hit on anything short of a natural 1). already trying to get some nice early EXP by solo-ing the ultimate bonus dungeon and have gotten some nice, deep cuts into that.

hey gfloyd when are you gonna play baldur's gate

sometime between now and the heat death of the universe

i guess more realistically when i have time to learn 3e stuff and also have a better set up than just "laptop on couch" for playing a pc game

It's AD&D 2nd edition, which is thankfully pretty minimalistic compared to 3[.5]e's extreme number crunch, even moreso than 5e. The biggest divergence is the weird, unintuitive stuff you've probably heard in hushed tones, like THAC0 and how AC goes down instead of up. Stat modifiers and penalties skew to the very high and very low sides respectively and generally don't come into effect between 6-14, so stat distribution prefers minmaxing. there's some other business going on in a normal role-play, but Baldur's Gate is heavily skewed towards the combat side of everything, so any basic knowledge of how D&D works will largely get you through the mechanics. The game is just incredibly inhospitable and will throw some dangerous shit at you if go off the beaten trail too early depending on your party composition, so you'll mostly just grow heavily acquainted with the quicksave key ,and you might want to look up where you can pick up some party members.

I'll almost assuredly look up where to find party members when I do start playing.

and yeha i keep seeing THAC0 and i'm not sure why but it scares me i don't want to look it up

https://youtu.be/AVseQ3RDa6s?t=9m50s

was there ever an 8.8 moment for skyward sword? i swear, with how more and more detached the internet becomes, nerds freaking the **** out over a zelda game getting a "good, but not great" rating will soon remain the only cosmic consistency

I don't remember much about Skyward Sword, let alone a review controversy. This one's got a higher profile, though, plus the machinery for this type of fan response is well oiled at this point.

I vaguely recall a lower-ish one for Skyward Sword. I want to say it was 1UP back when they were still around.

Gamespot gave it a 7.5, but I don't really remember that causing as much of a stir as the 8.8 that TP got.

That being said, I don't think BotW will escape the Zelda cycle.

It was not as big as the 8.8 for Toilet Paper but there was still backlash, at least on GameFAQs and a few other websites I was using at the time like a lifeless ho.  I remember some severe hissy fits and people trying to boycott the website.

also am i the only one who thinks sharkbro looks really gross

like i'm kinda tired of seeing memes and fanart for him on my twitter timeline. i guess this is what i have to pay to see tons of crossdressing link too

https://www.facebook.com/Kdogsarcade/posts/1854607577898199

i think i just jizzed myself

i don't blame you man new silent scope

wow

holy crap that is a lot of sweet cabs

somehow that was honestly less fun than I expected, although it didn't help that I injured a leg and had to stay home today. somehow i'm even better at reflec beat despite not playing it for a year. managed to clear a bunch of 9s, but I didn't get to clear any 10s. predictably, i still suck horribly at IIDX and struggle to clear 3s and 4s.

http://www.greatlakescrossingoutlets.com/news/2016-12-21/michigans_first_round_1_bowling_and_amusement_center_coming_soon_to_great_lakes_crossing_outlets

somehow I missed some three month old news that Round1 is building a location in Michigan until some dude told me yesterday, so that's hype. prolly won't actually be up until 2018, but that means I won't have to go to chicago to play BEMANI.

old DM's friend recruited me for an AD&D campaign he's doing 'cause his burning wheel campaign slowed down to a crawl. dunno how long it'll be, but that'll be interesting.

(http://i.imgur.com/SAGAwy2.jpg)

elf update

i think he's reached the point of twink-iness that i'm the only person on earth who could possibly be attracted to him anymore

https://fireemblemsorter.tumblr.com/

i sifted through almost 3000 match-ups to come up with this

(http://i.imgur.com/IR2JRay.png)(http://i.imgur.com/eE6SRb5.png)

judging from the quality of this list, that wasn't time well spent.

what is this i don't even

i don't understand

jesus 3000 that's madness

watching a stream of the new dark souls 3 dlc

Demon Prince looks hard as hell. If I ever play this DLC, I'm not looking forward to doing that myself. Although one of its forms looks like it has a super lame weakness. Slave Knight Gael, on the other hand, looks like the most boring, lamest boss with which to close out the entire franchise. I fully expect to kick his **** in on the first go.

like, i don't plan on co-oping anything, not even with NPC phantoms. those demons are essentially the same enemy, just going through different rotation phases, so it's gonna be hard to isolate them and their movesets don't really look like they have enough lethal openings to get in on one without the other spewing poison at me or something. not looking forward to managing them by myself.

the demon prince actually has two different forms, depending on which of the demons you kill last. one of them fires a laser, which has this huge, grotesque weakness where they're locked into firing the beam for like, 15 seconds and can't turn around, so you can run behind it and take a bunch of shots at it with impunity. stalling that form out and only going in on the beam looks like a quick, easy way to pick him off. the meteor form looks like a total pain in the ass and even after seeing it in action multiple times now, I still don't know how I'd manage it

actually getting real tempted to replay dark souls 3 again, independent of DLC and all, but my controller is broken (gonna replace it soon), and my desktop is getting to the age where its hardware is breaking down and it's beginning to run like shit, and it barely ran dark souls 3 to begin with. so I'm gonna be waiting a while to do that

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3064060

reminder that ANN's forums are still incredibly bad

the third annual anime club game tournament happened. this tournament was originally the brain child of the former president who graduated last fall, so this time it was organized by three of the present officers (the old president did show up to watch, though). they made the decision to announce it only about 9 days before the date and announced only the prequalifiers two days ago, and they appended a $3 enrollment price too. the former president was also very good at hyping stuff up and getting everyone's attention, which prolly helped the tournament out. As a result, the attendance was about half that of the last two. Since most of the really good players in our club didn't show up, I placed first in three of the prequalifiers and second in the fourth. Also meant the tournament only took about three and a half hours, as opposed to about 12 hours in the first year and 10 in the second.

Prequalifiers were: Shovel Knight (3 minute time attack), Mortal Kombat Trilogy (3x3), Pokemon Puzzle League, Super Monkey Ball 2

Flunked out in the semi-finals, which was the recent Bomberman game for the switch. I suck at Bomberman, so I didn't place. The officers decided against continuing the tradition of the final round being an anime fighter and put in Nidhogg instead. I was the only person who placed in the top four who had actually played Nidhogg, so that was kind of a downer. Placed third out of nine. It was really short and there were only nine contestants (and one bowed out after the second game), but it was still pretty fun. Probably better than last year, where all the officers who chose all the games were also playing and pretty much stomped everyone else, but it wasn't as fun as the first year.

of course, i got stupid shit out of it:

(http://i.imgur.com/pzD2Vx6.jpg)

the real thing I got for placing third is uh.... quite something. NSFW:

http://imgur.com/a/gTPbo

they apparently got this by accident. i was originally gonna get a funkopop (fuckin' eww), but they said "we can also give you this". because I'm a moron who is obsessed with ironically collecting dumb ecchi crap, I took it. for good measure, the former president knew I was gonna do that. they also bought more pizza and soda than we ended up consuming, so I got to take home a full pizza and half a 2-liter of pepsi.

all in all, a pretty good day.

that's somehow less awful than a funkopop

I want to do a game tournament some day but a lowkey one, there's fighting game torneys in Philly but I don't want to spend money/get embarrassed on a public stage. So BP game tourney is the answer obviously.

a dark souls 3 pvp free for all sounds like it'd be fun as hell, but I don't have a PS4 unlike all of you

(although i kinda hope to get one over the summer and will prolly rebuy it for it for the PS4 anyway 'cause my computer can hardly run that shit)

it would be a horrible shitshow so yeah i'm all in for that if it ever happens

i dunno how to describe it, but I'm weirdly anti-hype for Persona 5. i'm sure it'll be fun to play, but every indication i get is that the story and the character cast aren't interesting, and like, one of the bigger spoilers everyone was interested in, including myself, turned out to be horribly executed. and like, that's a game that still wants to be "woke" like persona 4 did, but seems to have made exactly zero progress since persona 4 and seems to embarrassingly trip over its dick in trying to be that way. i have like, $30 to my name right now, so I couldn't get it at launch even if I wanted to, but really that's just as well since I really don't have any interest in this game right now.

http://www.thejimquisition.com/persona-5-review/

oh yeah, also people are freaking out over an 8.5. like, looking at gamerankings, there's a dozen 9/10s, but an 8.5 is a bridge too far. gas all nerds

8.8 bruh

also the game's translation is apparently a machine translation-level disaster, which is pretty damn amazing

after final fantasy, persona is like, the closest thing to a japanese AAA game. you have to knock that one out of the park, not completely shit it up in a manner uncharacteristic to even the most fodder Atlus translations.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8vBjufXkAAqpxI.jpg)

My favorite thing is that it's voiced, so people had to say things like 'girl of rumor' out loud and they still didn't change it.

hey ahriman, what's your take on this impression? is it pretty spot on, or was there something about the plot or cast that kinda worked for you?

I think they really dropped the ball on the ending and it's not really as profound as it might be attempting to be, and in general the plot has some serious problems (such as how you're basically going into and permanently altering people's minds, but the morality of this is only briefly questioned like once), but I liked the cast a lot more than P3 or 4 and I was entertained the whole way through anyway, so I'd still say it was a great game and worth playing regardless.

A lot of people weened on second-hand information back when the original spoilers were coming out had the impression that the ending felt rushed. Did you have that impression when you played it? If so, did it feel as rushed as the post-game shit (e.g. the Izanami reveal and how that played out) in Persona 4?

(p.s. thanks for answering that question)

The entire thing with Goro feels to me like there was cut content that made his whole arc irrelevant, and the guy who's the main antagonist instead has next to no interaction with the main cast, so that whole part of the game comes off like it got shat up in rewrites, I'd say. The very end-game stuff feels like a better fleshed out and at least somewhat more set up version of the Izanami stuff in P4. I thought that part was done alright but it's still a little awkward, and not much more than thematically connected to the rest of the game.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1316193808463223/

...pretty meh line-up this year, like 2016 was. Don't know if I'll be able to scrounge up the money to go, but seeing this, I don't think I'm gonna cry about it.

the internet is doing good things with the p5 battle ui

(http://i.imgur.com/1zpSD44.png)

behold, my bard outfit

every elf stereotype in one thing

his head looks tiny

where's the arrogance and treachery?

also oh dear god this reminds me that i've been playing this game for almost a year


you know, i've been thinking: if you made a male elf character that wasn't arrogant or treacherous, but took every other stereotype to its furthest extreme, would it still be a mostly-original character?

I actually don't know why I said forever when I specifically didn't want to ask because it had been so recent :X

So a few months ago, I finally splurged and bought a 360 controller so I could stop destroying my usb ports with broken PS3 wrappers, and in no small part because my PS3 controller is getting old and had started to malfunction. I also got a new laptop as a birthday present that is crazy strong and so I've been making a game of seeing what kind of PS2 games I can get to run on it. As a result, I've been replaying a bunch of old games, including:
- Tony Hawk's Underground 1 and 2 (THUG1 is way worse than I remembered, but THUG2 is pretty okay. Both run at half-speed, so while they're just barely playable, their pretty dope soundtracks got ruined by that)
- .hack//INFECTION (runs at full speed and be brought up to around 180% speed. strangely it runs better on my laptop than it does on my desktop. I beat Infection and Mutation a couple of years ago, but the memory card those save files were on is long gone. As a result, I didn't have a fun go of replaying this game so soon and I don't look forward to replaying Mutation either)
- Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (runs at near full-speed, but some specific graphical effects from the psychic powers slow it down to about a quarter speed. without knowing, i decided to replay this game on its 13th birthday. still a really good, underrated game that I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't heard of it or played it, although the last few levels blew)
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Duelist of the Roses: (runs at full-speed, can be sped up to 200% speed. actually kinda fun for a yu-gi-oh game, albeit way too easy)

I have a couple more ISOs on my harddrive as well like the G.U. series (I'm really surprised those games run at full-speed on this thing) and Star Ocean 3, as some other games I never played like Way of the Samurai 2, Suikoden 3 and Armored Core 2. Also been replaying a bunch of PS1 platformers on the side, like all of the Crash Bandicoot games, Spyro 1 and 2 and, gfloyd's favorite, Jersey Devil. Spoilers: Jersey Devil somehow isn't actually that poorly designed, it's just clunky, unwieldy and maybe one of the single ugliest PS1 games ever.

Still trying to test PS2 ISOs just for shits and giggles, so if any of you have any PS2 games you really liked and would recommend, I'm all ears.

just like i remember it, such beautiful memories

I never did beat it, I think the max I can remember getting to before giving up to play something else was the sewers.

got no real recommendations other than like gradius v but i unno how that would run so

I never owned PS2 so I dunno really. Weren't some of the Onimusha games good?

I remember liking III and it had Jean Reno which was neat.

the first one was awkward, but the latter two are supposed to be good-ish. might check out 3

for now, it's time to finally bite the bullet and make my way through mutation before i re-sub to ffxiv tomorrow

jersey devil was my sh(http://)it as a child. i didn't realize it was actually that bad.

****, what did i actually love on the ps2

iunno, make a go of Odin Sphere?

ps2 odin sphere is definitely not a good game

oh shit i missed my 1-year anniversary since i started playing ffxiv

i made yet another character on a different server

(http://i.imgur.com/g98ttbS.jpg)

this one is a girl tho. at least my gigantic homosexual crush on the main villain of the new expansion makes it hard to tell i'm actually a dude playing as a smol dragon waifu

there are two servers that my main internet is spread out across, but i happened to pick the wrong one even though it had the "official" guild of the community. that was the one where the newbie network was pretty much packed with gg chuds that came rather close to making me want to stop playing this game. The OTHER server, on the other hand, turned out to be the right one. My closest pals from this community recently decided to start playing this game and chose the unofficial server, so I made a character to help them go through content and it's been pretty fun. I ended up sticking with this server long enough that I decided to do the new expansion on this lady. honestly thought it was a step down from the previous expansion, but I guess I'll see how the post-expansion storyline goes

what do you think about those dudes who cornered the market on a bunch of houses on some server

i'm kinda surprised that was high-profile enough for you to have heard of that. it's p. lame and the rant those guys put out after people started finding out about it was even lamer.

housing tends to attract some real shit people. i think my favorite thing is whenever new wards or w/e come up, it's actually a tactic to mass send trade requests to prevent people from interacting with the placards you get the houses from, so players actually have to put a macro on their hotbar to toggle busy mode to avoid that. i can't wait for the new housing district to come up in a few weeks so I can meet some of these folks while trying to get a house for myself

yeah I don't remember where I saw it

I see lots of articles about FFXIV though. Pretty popular game.

good luck fighting the slumlords, though

same actually, I know like for or five people that play it and I feel like I know more about it then other MMOs just by proxy

no i do not like adam's long, beautiful white hair or eve's immaculately chiseled body, why would you ever ask me this

http://www.rpgsite.net/news/5862-hack-g-u-last-recode-will-have-brand-new-4th-volume-out-in-japan-on-november-1

alright they did the thing i wanted maybe i'll bite

it'll prolly only be like, 4 hours long or something because hell if they have much material left, but i could totally use some new .hack anything

(https://remywiki.com/images/b/be/CANNON_BALLERS.png)

oh yeah also this

TWO DEE ECKS CANNON BALLLLLERRRRRRSSSSSS

holy wait what more gu yesssssss

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGWf814VYAAffQT.jpg)

this game is gonna suck so hard

ill take your word for it

they're making a sequel to this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YlvZ0W1350

dammit, I have an urge all of a sudden to replay nocturne

well, I guess I could...

edit: gotta respect a game whose hard mode gives you a not-insubstantial chance of dying to the first tutorial fight

Still need to play it on hard mode.

18 year old me would probably just balk at the idea of hard mode being unreasonable because I liked stroking my e-penis, but my replay a few years ago made me think otherwise. It gets dumb in a lot of places, where it's a dice roll whether or not the game decides to TPK you before you even get the chance to do anything.

Also brought the wrong kind of party to Matador because I forgot that in general, Nocturne bosses are far more likely to have Dekunda than Dekaja and that Matador specifically is quick on the trigger for Dekunda. So I brought a ton of debuffs like War Cry and Fog Breath, and he just laughs at them as I piss away all my MP in three rounds and he just no-sells my Dekaja rocks by immediately re-upping Red Capote. Fun guy.

new hard mode strategy: buff up to max and then smack the boss to hell with 3000 damage in a round before bosses start using their most dangerous skills

the best strategy imo

oh hey official english sengoku rance localization


and now you're re-translating it

sometimes i still can't believe you're living the life you do

Life has come full circle

remastered, retranslated, rearnahamed

well, not so much remastered, but the other two things i guess

there's something i like about the tone of, at least from what I saw from the fan patch, sengoku rance's script where it's deadpan, yet glib. it's kinda weird because a lot of that comes from sentences that tonally sound like they should have an exclamation mark instead of a period or kinda come off as non-sequitors, so I never really knew if that was the intention of the writers or just a happy coincidence that came from an N3's shoddy translation work. i guess ahriman's translation should clear that up

When I look back at the Sengoku Rance fan translation, it looks like the most translationese thing ever, much like the Fate translation. It's definitely not supposed to sound the way it does. As far as eroge go, Sengoku Rance's writing is pretty good and tight, like someone actually edited it.

careful arnold, talk like that is how you end up getting assigned a job officially translating Fate/Stay Night

i wonder if an official fate localization would be "good" (as good as a translation of that game can get, at least) because it's probably the most famous vn in general, or bad because some shifty outsider company would probably be the most likely to snatch it up if the opportunity ever came up

If that ever happened, it'd probably have to be a console port done by Aksys or something.

(http://i.imgur.com/4xX5BKy.jpg)

dragon waifu has her own house now

also reminder that crypt of the necrodancer is still fun as hell

are you sure that's not elfdragon really-a-guy-fu?

male au ra are over 7 feet tall and look/act like this:

(https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/c/c4/Dark_Knight_2.png/revision/latest?cb=20141220152728)

the idea of playing as one makes my balls curl back up honestly

(http://i.imgur.com/HBVotgq.jpg)

ruh-roh rhaggy

dang, man

new guild wars 2 expansion on the 22nd, eh...? i'll see if I can get on that. it's in the desert region of that game's world, so it's probably gonna be full of arabian nights glamour **** and that's just my candy

also i signed up for the college's tabletop gaming club and depending on what day they meet, i might actually do something there

niceeee

i've essentially given up hope of tabletop rpgs ever happening in my life again and its bumming me out majorly

tabletop gaming club met yesterday. it's kinda awkward: of the games all of the DMs offered to play, the game i'd want to play the most is Pathfinder. D&D parties are usually made up of four players, and are playable for up to five and as few as three, but here we have two DMs and 5 players who wanna do pathfinder. if we had 1 DM, we'd have six players, but if we had two, they'd divide into 3 for one and 2 for another, so the player count isn't particularly viable right now.

i don't think any of the other 4 players who came up have ever played either 3.5 or pathfinder, so there's a chance that some of them might drop out once we do the test one-shot campaign next monday. they also took everyone who hadn't played a tabletop rpg before into another room and thus they weren't in the selection pool and theoretically could still join in, but both of the DMs unanimously agree that it's unlikely that a newbie would really wanna begin their tabletop gaming career with pathfinder. in the meantime, i'll prolly need to ask around tomorrow in anime club among my old party members to see if any of them would want in. if nothing else, one of the DMs is one of the anime club newcomers this year, so we would all know each other.

5 YEARS AGO TODAY:

(https://remywiki.com/images/c/c7/Tricoro-logo.png)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZyCSNniZdU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92XzI-BDsyg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TziFfg0k9Dw

(just ignore how all of these videos were taken from like, spada or pendual lol)

i just love how my first iidx style was also the one that heralded in the degeneration of this franchise. it's nowhere near as bad as it is now (tricoro is probably still better than the style before it, even), but god tricoro has so much shit lol

EDIT: tricoro was the style the guy who got me into IIDX streamed the most, streaming it pretty much at least once a week. i think my burgeoning interest in the franchise actually encouraged him to play even more than he would have otherwise. tricoro had a bunch of different system bgm themes as was the norm back then, and this is the one he used. this theme will be burned straight into my brain for the rest of time

https://youtu.be/taPNRMryN5E?t=7m19s

second tune was the best, but that third was alright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uImrwSbOLH8

well i'm sure glad they're apparently adding new content to this thing because jesus fuck is this ugly. it's not konami remaster levels of lazy, but it's pretty close

"alright, so we got this pathfinder campaign thing going or something, i dunno. it's gonna be on tuesdays..."

*two people email the day of to say they can't do it on tuesdays*

¬_¬

from the wording of their emails and just from intuition, since none of us know each other and there's no real adhesive making any of these people stick around, i don't think there is a "magic" time for them. like, i'm just some guy in all this, so i'm kinda afraid of saying what i think we should do and just write them off and look for some other people, but we're probably fucked if we don't

EDIT: oh yeah, also the last club meeting that could have efficiently filtered any stragglers who hadn't got matched with anyone yet was yesterday, so gj to both of those guys for telling us only today. yeah, this is fucked.

people that pull that shit are the worst

the girl i went on an awkward date with a few years back invited me to replace a bunch of people who couldn't schedule in her custom-made, discord-hosted campaign today. so we were gonna do that, i spent all of last night and this morning researching how to play 5e all for her sound card to break like, an hour before we were supposed to do this thing

i might be cursed

cursed, but at least it's the other people who are flaky and not you

http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/group-finally-schedules-conversation-much-fun-play-dd-time/

this might as well be me

sinobuz OMES. wrap 'er up, she's done

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtgGkEv2_Vw

this came out with the OMES and should have been it because it's a way better song. probably the best song taka has done since... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

also taka has a beard in this video holy crap

That video made all of no sense but the song was okay i guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Ei0EHZPUw

i'm sure this will make perfect sense then

Not at all, but hey, at least this song was better than the last one

i miss akira yamaoka

same

alright, pathfinder campaign has 5 people again. our third player dropped off, but the other remaining player got another third and we did a short session yesterday afternoon for a bit. he seemed more into it than any of the other folks we played it with, so i think he'll stay on. the barbarian from my old campaign said he could join if we switched back to tuesdays, so we did. we also pulled in someone else from anime club who overheard us talk about it last night.

so maybe this thing is go. dunno if we can do it again this tuesday, i doubt it. but we can start going ahead next tuesday at least.

the housing rush begins right now and i'm presently stuck reinstalling all 29 GB of ffxiv because the patch broke my client

scalps ahoy

rip neogaf

oh also while i'm busy laughing at neogaf, gotta do a both sides thing and laugh at the escapist as it's going through its death throes as well

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/171005-Open-Letter-to-The-Escapist-Community

its the gaming forum apocalypse

What the **** even happened to The Escpaist? All I remember is that it basically rolled over for the Gamergate shitlords, and I haven’t paid attention to it since.

that website seems to change hands every few years so I guess it's just inconsistent management finding pretty much no new talent to keep their brand afloat, everyone who was there except yahtzee going independent, and then that gamble just hilariously blowing up in their faces

edit: oh yeah, **** is censored here lol

also shin megami tensei V for the switch

good to see a mainline game on a console at least, i'd kinda like a modern mainline SMT game stretching its muscles in a way that neither the SMT4 games nor strange journey could. let's hope that one is actually better than those three, apocalypse was a step up from SMT4 but still not really up to par

I'm only like 10 hours into nocturne and I really want smt5 already

when i stop to think about it, nocturne is kinda the outlier where it's by far and away the most essential game in the main franchise, the one that feels like it has the most character in terms of presentation and mechanics. that's not really too much of a compliment to nocturne as much as me saying that i'd recommend at least trying to experience it because i think there's something to get out of it, good or bad, whereas I'd pretty much say take it or leave it to any other game more or less. for as much as some johnny-come-lately chuds go "lol persona, fuckin' kiddie wannabe smt game", that franchise is way more consistently good than the actual SMT games

so i kinda put odds on smtv being merely okay as opposed to actually good, but apocalypse did address a lot of the bad decisions that plagued SMTIV, so maybe they're learning

I may never understand the timeline of smt games

good riddance

First SMT V trailer has me excited even though it was short and all. Apparently more details later in the week so I'm curious to see where they take it. IV was my jam but I'm more than fine with them doing something more conducive to a console after IV and Apocalypse basically did everything I'd want out of a 3DS RPG (plus the SJ remake coming shortly.)


timelines are dumb so who cares

there isn't one

the real world timeline, as in, their lineage

I can’t keep track of all the numbers and suffixes and pseudo-spinoffs

people get really wonk about it because smt fans are a unique kind of shitty. i think atlus changed their mind on whether or not strange journey is a main franchise game, but they originally marketed it as one so I pretty much say it is. so besides that, there's all the numbered games as well as if..., nine and apocalypse and that's where I'd stand. i guess you could also include the megami tensei games from the 80s as well

99% of people who actually like this franchise have never played most of the non-numbered games, so it's kinda of a w/e formality

topical

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DMzabXfWkAA0cLM.jpg)

if someone finds a meme like this where the mainline side isn't portraying nocturne, plz share in this topic

Ugh, please.

Everything associated with “chad” as an adjective is a fetid mess of internet bad I avoid as hard as possible.

(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/295/003/067.jpg)

but i love this

lol

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/persona-5-ultimate-edition-hits-ps4-and-ps3/1100-6454328/

PERSONA 5 ULTIMATE EDITION: oh hey we just packed all the dlc into this thing. also, it's 125 **** bucks

ty atlus, this is the time for me to hop on

OH wow

chad and virgin memes are at their best when the chad side is the exact opposite of the virgin side to the point where it doesn't make sense and doesn't resemble a real chad at all

(http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/262/350/a32.png)

four sessions into the pathfinder campaign and i already hate another player in it

story of your tabletops

no, the story of my tabletop campaigns is leaving, and i'll prolly do that with this one

people are now talking about game of the year choices and all i can think is "i bought two things that came out this year, and both of them were mmo expansion packs"

...and both of them were bad, too. >_>

ok i didn't. although a well-timed hit from the flu overlapping with two players saying they couldn't attend delaying the last session for a week might have helped

also we have a sixth player. this is the second sixth player we got, the last one showed up for one session and then vanished without a word. his character tried to grope my unconscious in-game sister, but the fact that every other player is fine with me beating the crap out of his character with my barbarian strength every time he does something gross might be amusing for a time

also we're all freshly level 2 in a zone that expects a 4-man 3rd-4th level party and he's just a flat level 1 caster apparently using one of the worst sorcerer archetypes means he's gonna be dead weight. also our GM is winging it as he goes without looking ahead and seeing what we might face. so this might get wild, as in TPK-levels of wild.

Ah, CR.

Can’t say as I miss that as a design element.

ok i finally bought persona 5 because $25 seems like a pretty good deal

mind you, i can't play it until the semester ends, but I'll get to it eventually.

last pathfinder session, we ended outside of a gate. this session, we ended on the other side of that gate

hell yeah progress

my last ever dnd session ended with the party getting into a manor and then it ended, that manor and what secrets it holds haunt me to this day

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQo7PaKVAAA0I2U.jpg)

i'm charmed that the game that slipped past mangagamer's quality standards was the kusoge umineko fighter

We have a manager who's a shitty dude and also generally incompetent, and he's into the fighting game scene, so he wanted to oversee this project. So this is what happened.

update:

(http://www.otomate.jp/code-realize/fd2/gallery/img/cg6.jpg)

this image fills me with happiness

EDIT: oh man this fan disc comes out on the same day as cannon ballers, that's a hype-ass day

are the green spots the actual eyes and other pair of eyes fakes used to distract people from the real ones

i mean, it'd be a waste to have heterochromia if those aren't your real eyes

hi i took a two-week break because i thought i ruined my life by being an irresponsible adult but I didn't

so yeah, persona 5. that's a better thing to discuss

just started the third palace. feels like the game has been in autopilot mode whenever a palace isn't active, which is pretty annoying. aside from one s-link I've been rushing down (and have hit a wall where I need way more stats), my s-links feel pretty underdeveloped and my stats feel pretty underwhelming. did pretty crap on the first exam even though i feel like I was grinding pretty hard for knowledge points, so I guess that would confirm my stats are bad.

the first palace was pretty damn rough, beyond even the standard of how unforgiving early-game SMT games are. probably comparable to like, naraku from SMTIV, only way longer. IV-drip exp combined with mobs who are designed to basically one-shot anything they touch don't go too well -- there was a point where I couldn't burn down one of those red mobs that were just blocking the hallway, and I had to go back to the beginning of the dungeon and grind some fodder enemies for half an hour until their miserable exp drops leveled me up. i spent the greater part of a week there even excluding mandatory plot visits/calling card days. the only saving grace was that the first boss was a huge wimp, because I felt pretty underleveled by the end of it. the second palace went way better, thankfully. i guess the second boss was supposed to actually be kinda challenging, but I stuck around in the dungeon long enough to fuse a Matador and his AoE physical attack just demolished him.

waifu tiers: uhhhhh. i guess the doctor lady is kinda hot, I've been pounding away at her s-link at least. it's at level 7 and everyone else is at 3-4. otherwise, the field is pretty barren. shogi girl is also pretty good looking, don't have access to her yet tho. on the dude side, I hate mishima way more than i thought i would. he's pretty cute, but his personality is impressively gross. yusuke's voice is way too deep for his design and his personality isn't very sexy, but since he's the handsomest guy from P3 to now who doesn't try to murder me, I guess he'll have to do. goro is still moe as fuck but uh yeah

i'm glad you did not ruin your life

hifumi is rad when you can social link her imo

same

i'm sure this three oni mini-boss fight I got into with each of my party members under 20 MP that wiped me a bit under a dozen times will have been a greater challenge than any of the actual palace bosses by the time I'm done

also props for having a save room right down the hall inaccessible until after the fight, and then having another save room in the very next room after that fight

EDIT: at least I could finish the whole palace in a single day since the segment after that mini-boss lent itself pretty well to sneaking past all of the mobs.

EDIT: EDIT: and done. kaneshiro did bigger numbers than the other guys, but he still got punked by tarunda like all the rest

i really don't regret leveling up takemi's s-link to the exclusion of almost every other person's s-link now that I've noticed that she sells accessories that give me invigorate 3 AND she sells them for half price now so I can load my entire party with them

rip my persona 5 playthrough (2017-2018)

it was a good run, rip playthrough

also i'm still using matador like, 11 levels after he was first available for fusion. been feeding him queen's necklaces so he can keep up in level, so he's consistently the same level as I am. also got lucky and trained a resist skill for his only weakness onto him as well. he has enough speed to always go first even with the massive initiative buff hard mode seems to have given every enemy, controls four elements, has matarunda and of course has not andalucia swift strike, so he's pretty much as unfair to everything I fight as he is to every first time nocturne player. might end up taking him all the way through as I keep replacing his stuff with cooler skill cards

also i found it kinda neat that the tomoko kuroki expy crazy stalker girl I would regularly check up at school on turned out to be a mementos boss

sphinx is the worst fucking asshole ever

first match: "fuck, I have no items that can cure dizzy because I used all of them on the first part expecting to be able to use morgana to cleanse that shit later (presently not in my party and unable to be brought into my party because that status ailment prevents me from changing party members for some ungodly reason), let's switch out morgana to use me patra" *morgana gets hit with despair every single time the boss uses that attack* *also the entire party gets fucking smashed by sphinx dive since she used it right after tarunda wore off*

rematch: "still don't have items that can cure despair. alright, I can kill her in two ballista cycles, so she'll only get to use her despair attack once. i'll spam tarunda every round so it never wears off. i'll have makoto help after she uses despair so he can take care of i--" *almost the entire party gets hit with despair, including MC and makoto*

boy i got so mad at that. status ailment bosses in SMT are already the worst and this new despair ailment is especially god awful. you can survive a particularly unlucky hit from party-wide charm or confusion spells in the remaining character can spam restorative spells or items, so I played loose with status curatives. a status ailment that simultaneously prevents you from doing anything AND kills you instantly once it expires is next level awful and is basically instant death if it hits the MC if you don't have anything to cure it with. I'm actually gonna have to use the option that lets me return to a few days ago and stock up a bit heavier because fuck this lady

ok good she's dead

i was gonna make a psychonauts joke but that boss soured my mood

first pathfinder session in a month, still ongoing

at present: we triggered the boss fight within the first three rooms of his castle. CR 5 versus a party with an average party level lower than 2 since one of the more useful party members has been awol all break. everything went pear-shaped after that. i originally wrote my character to be a saintly neutral good character who would never abandon his teammates, but my party members are so dumb that I went "**** it" and ran away. tpk imminent. await updates

what's a CR 5?

The expected level for a party to be on par with the enemy. An equal party average level should generally be able to handily dispatch the threat, but usually the CR of midboss level creatures is a level higher than the expected average level and boss level encounters are generally 2-3. A three level difference is considered a beatable, yet very difficult encounter with a considerable chance of one player dying, and a not-insubstantial chance of a full TPK if the party can't keep up with them. Such an encounter doesn't expect two of five party members to be running around somewhere completely different, which happened in this session so the chances of a full TPK were insanely high.

So uh, this is the most interesting session I've ever had, so big time tl;dr for all the folks who don't give a shit about D&D and even the ones who do because I'm a boring person with a negative CHA modifier:

This encounter was weird because the boss encounter was initiated by a "friendly" NPC goading us to help her take out the boss. Generally, the expectation was that they'd whittle each other down (they're both CR 5), whoever lived would turn on you, but they'd be weakened enough for a full party to bring down. Only this NPC roflstomped the boss without taking a single hit. The only saving grace was that the boss teleported back into his castle and started taking potshots out of the window while the NPC ran inside to confront him rather than all of us just hanging out in the open when she turned. The boss nailed two of my party members rather severely doing this, so I suggested multiple times, quite emphatically, that we regroup; the fact of the matter was that the NPC was gonna murder him anyway and that we should get together, heal up and get ready for whatever may come next. So let me run down what everyone else was doing instead. Both of these two are D&D newbies, btw:

- The rogue: Went out yolo-ing and opening random doors elsewhere. Got seen by a completely different midboss, got stunned by her, and then bit it when the "friendly NPC" turned on us and went around looking for victims out in the open. She offed him right there with a critical hit that would have taken him straight from full to dead. I'm thankful that miniboss didn't come out looking for anyone else.
- The sorceress: I don't even know what she was doing. She took over half her HP in damage, which apparently she didn't even notice, and ran in a completely different direction standing out on the open. So after the NPC ended the life of the rogue, she attacked the sorceress in short order. Technically she didn't die: She was knocked unconscious and successfully stabilized. But nobody came to rescue her because she was out in the open on the other side of the map, so there's no doubt she'll be finished off after the fight.

The other two party members were the alchemist and the witch. The witch was already huddled up in a building that was within running distance of me and the alchemist. Ee huddled up in a battlement waiting to see how the fight shook down. The witch has a spell that augments her sneak stat that she put to considerable use providing reconnaissance, so she followed the NPC as she ran off towards the boss. At the same time, two things happened: One, the witch went past the NPC to find the corpse of the boss she killed. Two, the NPC met up with us and goaded us outside into the open, which the alchemist did. He immediately got feathered by her and knocked unconscious just as the witch arrived to fill in the blanks: The NPC was trying to lure us outside to kill us, since she was a harpy with a bow and being in a cramped fortress wasn't an ideal battlefield for her.

I dragged the alchemist back inside into a room with no windows. The witch healed him back to consciousness and we camped in there for a while. This was a pretty good place in which to hunker down; she first tried to open a door in the room leading outdoors. The witch gave the alchemist a snare item that he hucked at her and messed her up a bit. The plan from there was for me to grapple her, restraining her and preventing her from using her bow, at which point I could do another grapple check and pin her which would leave her helpless and liable for coup de graces, which are auto-criticals. This didn't succeed, but she provoked an extra attack from me as she flew off that did nick her for some damage. We shut the door and resumed camping in there. Next the harpy tried to ambush us from a lower floor. However, I got paranoid and started spamming perception checks since I had nothing better to do, one of which outed her before she could come up. I positioned myself to smack her hard if she came up, and she obliged. Tried to cast a spell in melee range of me, which gives me a free swing. It fucking crits. If the GM let me crit multiple times, it would have done so as I rolled two natural 20s in a row, but regardless I smacked her hard enough to fizzle out her spell. She gets hit with another snare, I try another grapple and failed again, and she goes running off downstairs. I pursue to get the drop on her because she's a good 3 turns off from getting outside like this.

Unfortunately our luck runs out here as she successfully gets a spell on me that put the fear of god in me and made me run away for a turn. The alchemist followed me down -- I guess he thought she wouldn't try to attack him indoors, which I stated outright wasn't a good bet; she finished off the boss indoors after all, and I had to move far enough away that I wouldn't have been able to bail him out. He forgoes the opportunity to run upstairs after scraping her with a crossbow bolt and also gets nailed with a crit, another one that'd bring him from full to dead if he wasn't already injured. The witch is out of everything by this point, still stealthed and decides to run off. The harpy doesn't notice her and tries to escape in another direction while I'm a good ways away, probably planning to strafe us again a bit later. At this point, I really don't wanna take my chances and I follow the witch out. We dive into a few houses until the witch's luck runs out, she gets seen close to the exit and gets nailed with, guess what, another critical hit. This one doesn't kill her, but she's bleeding out in the open.

I rationalize at this point that, while I left the rogue and the sorceress out alone with a clear conscience (ya can't cure stupid by being stupid too), it'd actually be firmly against my alignment to leave the witch, a 16 year old girl, to bleed out and die. So I stop to help her. She's insanely close to dying of bloodloss after multiple failed attempts to stabilize such that if I am to save her, I'd have to stop and try a heal check. I do so and fail. But a miracle happens and the witch's familiar, a pet cat, stabilizes her for me. I pick the witch up and play defensively as I carry her through the last 100 ft to the exit -- the snares make it so the harpy has a fairly low chance of hitting me with either of her two shots. Of course, she get another natural 20 on me, but couldn't confirm the critical. She gets a few other hits in me, but I have an absolutely obscene health pool for a level 2 character so I could afford to eat them. I successfully lug the witch out and the DM intervenes with plot to distract the harpy and we get away

Pretty satisfied with that ending. Me and the witch share full EXP for the two CR 5 encounters and level up. Of course, everyone else in the party dies, but they deserved it given how that ended up going down, anyone surviving would have been a miracle. Only I dunno if the two newbies wanna play again, because both of them seemed upset when they died (I don't fucking know what they expected, but they were) so I'm kinda worried about that. The rogue was dumb as hell to do whatever he decided to do, but they seem like a fun enough guy who was having fun learning how to play, so I don't want him to go.

also it's worth noting that the alchemist joined this campaign because his alchemist got killed in his first session of a pathfinder campaign with my old group, so he wanted to live out his alchemist build in this one. weeeeeelp

Unlucky alch and witch are unlucky, but the other two...honestly, some people are solid arguments for metagaming.

That does sound fun, but yeah I wonder if it's the best experience for new players. Almost wonder if it's worth trying to give them an easy win before throwing them into the fire.

i'm half-way through august and only now have I maxed my first s-link

it was one that automatically levels up

i imagine i'm doing pretty poorly huh

i was very bad at time management in this game in general, it felt like your schedule was a lot more strict

i think the problem for me so far is balancing stats with the s-links. there isn't a portal to the meat dimension where I can just get a big bonus to almost all of my stats, so there's a few just hanging out in a game where most s-links have a big brick wall in the middle of them saying "you must be this tall to pass". for example, my kindness is ass so I'm looking forward to dealing with that re: futaba's s-link, the most important party member's s-link to complete

my winter break is over, i don't have a spare tv to bring with me and don't really wanna play persona 5 in front of my roommate anyway, so I guess I get to stop what I imagine to be a little over halfway through the game

whoops i guess i forgot to actually beat the game while I was here lol

The game felt very restrictive on time to me too. I think it tries to encourage people to do a second playthrough, because there's no way I could've done everything I wanted in my first.

i've reached the point where I've done enough in this playthrough to officially declare that I'm finally playing a new game of fallout: new vegas in earnest

just finished dead money for the second time. i didn't steal the gold the last time I did dead money, but this time a friend who is a bit too obsessed with bethesda games was over my shoulder walking me through it, so i did. the entire moral of that story is letting go of your self-destructive greedy desires and moving on and it slaps you in the face with that moral over and over as if it were a big, smelly tuna, so there's something perversely amusing about shattering that moral into a billion pieces by coming out with absolutely everything and suffering no repercussions for it.

otherwise I came out of dead money with the same impression I had of it the first time. it's a pretty neat proof of concept for integrating survival horror elements into the standard janky bethesda rpg and I can respect the tender loving care put into its setting, lore and characters, but it's not exactly fun to play. it's probably still better than lonely hearts and like, half of fallout 3's dlc, though

i should probably beat that game one of these days, my 360 exploded when i had been playing it and i never picked it back up after

10 years ago today, the greatest game ever was released:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F1cOvZ3nS8

too bad the sequel kickstarter got caught in development hell

My buddy contributed to Barkley 2 and in retrospect we should have known. It was too good to be true.

that was a really early kickstarter before we saw like, multi-million dollar projects utterly collapse, so in retrospect I'm not surprised that a 120K project fell apart too, but it's still a damn shame

my laptop's battery charger died yesterday and I only just now got a brand new one. so i had nothing to do, so I hijacked a tv in a rec room to play some persona 5 this morning. so of course the game was just on autopilot for two whole weeks and I stopped just as I got my next deadline lol. still, feels kinda good to play that again

It's a damn shame. Even before they got overly ambitious with the gameplay systems it sounds like a legitimately interesting game.

i like how the very first post of this topic made in 2015 references how I was busy playing vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, yet only yesterday did i finally beat it. hell yeah, real prompt with playing games

also new ffxiv patch finally has a good hair option for cutey elf

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUyC87LWAAAJdZC.jpg)

i love spending 10 hours trying to find a PUG that can clear the latest extreme fight that's really simple and pretty easy in the grand scheme of things and failing because either everyone is too dumb to actually pull it off, or everyone is too fucking impatient to sit around and make what plainly looks like a party that might actually do it collapse because they wiped once.

i;m sure it is actually an acronym or something but when i read that i thought pug meant the dog type and it really enhanced the visual of the game for me

pick-up group. randos

technically, i am farming for dogs though:

(https://i.imgur.com/vHnmbJg.png)

that looks like sum rare nekos right thur

i now have a computer monitor, so i can resume playing p5

coming off of futaba's pretty enjoyable palace, okumura's palace was pretty obnoxious, especially the part where I have to fetch all of the security passes. those robots are pretty damn annoying because of their phys resistances, and my party is pretty much all physical damage at this point. so every time I got a new card, I'd walk back to the save room, and since you'd have to go even deeper with each card without any extra save rooms or shortcuts, having to do that for like, the third time was a bit much. didn't have much trouble with the airlock part, tho.

i've been told that okumura is one of the easier bosses in the game, but I had some trouble with him. namely just the robot hordes and my party set-up, where all but one of my party members couldn't do a thing to the tougher robots, and I couldn't really swap them out because my MC was the only person doing any damage. it's probably not that bad even then on normal mode, but hard mode lowers my damage and presumably buffs their HP enough that I couldn't make even until I outright restarted from the save room and changed my starting party composition. i got him in the next attempt, but not without some resistance from the big robot, who hits like a truck.

alsoalso i finally maxed the doctor's s-link and I'm now dating her because despite my character being like, 17, i'm probably closer to tae's age in real life than I am to any high school kid so making one of them my "waifu" seems even creepier

Okumura was probably my least favorite boss in the entire game. Really felt like a missed opportunity. I also didn't like his palace, especially the airlocks. Cool music tho

i just spent 500K so that I could summon alice at level 51

they put a lot of hype into the whole betrayal part and somehow it's nonsensically messy for no real artistic or dramatic merit. it really does feel like the product of a bunch of rewritten plot elements that were too deeply embedded into the final cut so they decided to paint over it real pretty-like to make it seem surprising and climactic

also just as a reminder: i knew goro was the traitor before the game even came out exclusively because, despite the wealth of information and appearances literally every other party member had gotten prior to release, he appeared in a grand total of two info dumps and had so little information distributed of him that you could have put everything we knew about him on a cocktail napkin. it's so obvious that I don't even know why they withheld the "oh yeah, he's totally the traitor, let's prepare a contingency" scenes until after the fact, and this is coming from the one guy who didn't suspect adachi was a bad guy until literally the last minute

worth it imo

also yeah that reveal was really obvious. I missed having Akechi in my party though, he was fun

only i used like, a level 48 buffbot persona and a level 53 dps persona instead of her for the last boss so

my old dm randomly pulled me in for a new bi-weekly pathfinder adventure path run by the fighter from my original 3.5 campaign

we were basically chilling out in a tavern when a fucking army of hobgoblins attacked, so we went around murder hobo-ing hobgoblin raiders, helping people out and robbing their stores as payment on our way out of town. went pretty well for a while because our dm rolled trash and some of the other party members had some cute ideas that worked out pretty well.

however, we ended on a really fun encounter where we fought three mook-ass hobgoblins that were already pre-injured hunkered down in a shed, where a couple of our party members, both of whom had the lowest ACs of the party, just waded straight in. the hobgoblins were just sitting right on the chokepoint, allowing only two party members into melee range of any of them, allowing them to flank the one furthest in, and ensuring that anyone who couldn't get into melee had ranged combat penalties that more or less prevented us from ever hitting them. we had two players down by the time two of the hobgobs were dead, at which point the last remaining one started going apeshit and started rolling really good. of course, because my luck is notoriously awful, i failed an easy acrobatics check, got hit by him when he had like, a 20% chance of hitting me, missed him a bunch of times and got crit by the fucker, knocking me out and almost killing me outright. only our old gm actually hit any of them, and while he seems to have a build that's really good at least at this level and just got a pretty good weapon for his build, i'm 90% sure he was cheating, calling out dice rolls I didn't hear him make that sounded too good to be true. didn't wanna say that out loud because i sure as shit didn't want to die on the first meeting after rolling pretty good for my character. nobody died and we have a dedicated healer with channel energy so we were all back up by the end, but lol

i am extremely jealous, tabletop games/roleplaying is not an aspect of my life anymore and i desperately want it to be

if it's any consolation, the jade regent campaign is basically dead. we've passed the point where we're just going "sorry, can't fit it into my schedule" to "nobody has posted in the campaign discord in a month"

it took me one and a half years of irregularly plugging at this over a combined total of maybe 20-30 hours in-game, but i have finally completed the first stage of aria mode

and it took me another two weeks to finish it

so now i'm more or less done with crypt of the necrodancer until i buy the dlc/expansion pack

okay i'm done with shido's palace

lol goro's death was every bit as stupid as i thought it'd be

actually nonono, it's worse.

like, shido is a surprisingly terrible villain frankly. for as much as you see him scheming vicariously with his underlings, for the few cameos he has prior to the endgame, for all the heat he gets as the last act of game basically pins literally every bad thing that had ever happened to you short of meeting kamoshida on him... you don't even get to see his face until the end of the game. his schemes, his personality, his deeds, all of them are in the background until the very last second. the palace actually needs to tell you in the most ham-fisted fashion that no really, you should HATE this guy so that it could even be possible for the player to really feel anything about him, and even then it can't be bothered to say it while he's in the room. in general, of all of the human villains in the recent Persona games who came before the inevitable godlike being comes out to close the story, he's definitely below adachi and he's probably still below ikutsuki.

and in the end, goro, a character who heretofore has been present for like, 80% of the game, the character with probably the most interesting character relationship dynamics, the character who was probably written, at least originally, with the intention of being the one character everyone would remember after the game was over. not only does the game largely waste his potential, but his role culminates as a satellite around this fucking dweeb, a villain so empty that despite almost every awful thing that has more or less ever happened in this scenario originating from him, he's less capable of evoking revulsion than a lecherous high school coach. gg guys

(just an aside note, the game probably could have remedied this, and made this climax a lot more solid, if they didn't insist on joker being unable to recognize shido until the endgame. he doesn't even need to know what shido is doing or what he's responsible for, just get him in the narrative, find a reason why joker can't just go for him first and let shido actually appear in the SIU director cutaways. aside from the twist that, oh my god, that guy who the game basically all but says outright was the drunk shithead who got you your probation was the villain all along!!!!, i don't even think the narrative as written would implicate goro or reveal any other twists that matter if this was the case. it's not even that hard to write, but I guess maybe it is when most of your writers never went to college and learned how to write from watching anime)

(also speaking of disappointing things, it's pretty disappointing how shido's palace, despite being the most varied and interesting palace visually, is also one of the most boring and repetitive. it's not as bad as okumura's palace, but it's up there)

persona 5 beat

managed to finish all of the social links. didn't even have a day to spare. didn't finish all of the requests, and sadly one of those requests had a special fusion persona locked behind it, so I don't get to have 100% compendium completion. settled at 98% after a lot of grinding and then kicked yaldaboath's shit in because i was fucking level 90 and had a decked out yoshitsune in my party. dude didn't even get to use his super move. it's kinda funny how the best persona from p4 is still the best persona in p5 lol.

real tl;dr ahead, sorry for being boring gfloyd/UF:

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Persona 5 as a whole is better than Persona 4, but it's kinda hard for me to compare persona 5 as a whole against Persona 3. It's been almost 10 years since I originally played P3, and I mostly just have some kind of nostalgic fondness for that game rather than any lasting appreciation for it. However, I feel like most of the reason I could keep going with P5 was because it vicariously flared up that nostalgia, being the new thing from the series I was obsessed with a decade ago, so I'm not too warm on it either. But I'd probably tip it in favor for P3 insofar as it feels more "independent" of any prior release such that it could have a more traditional plot structure and more traditional character dynamics that worked out better than how P4 re-tooled its story and character progression into the existing gameplay systems from P3, and P5 followed P4's structure to the letter. P3 does have problems insofar as its length and calendar-based story progression spread its plot and character development too thin, but at least a coherent, generally functional plotline that is continuous from start to finish is there, and some characters actually grow up and change over time. That sounds like faint praise, but neither P4 or P5 really have either of those things.

Misc notes:
- I realized this in the middle of playing Persona 5 because it runs into the exact same problem, but Persona 4 made a real bad move when it decided that every party member should have a social link. Because there's this entirely optional sequence of events where you interact a character and reshape their opinions and beliefs, you have to limit how much that character can change in the main storyline because it would have to account for their s-link progression, which could run the gamut from zero to maxed. It also goes vice versa, where a character can only really shift by a few degrees in their s-link because otherwise a dramatic shift would have to be accounted for in the main story. So suddenly P4 has to scale back character development or characterization to a very small portion of the game, generally during the lead-up to a dungeon and throughout that dungeon, and beyond that point those characters are basically just sentient personalities mashing against each other or against whatever is going on in the scenario because the game weaved its story and its optional systems into a messy lattice that cannot allow for better characterization without potential inconsistencies. Granted, the personalities mashing against each other in P5 are far more attractive than in persona 4 (oh hey, Chie just punched Yosuke for no reason, oh wait no Yosuke's being homophobic again but Chie's angry about Trial of the Dragon, haha Kanji isn't heteronormative/straight, isn't that funny), but they're still ephemeral as hell and I will probably never think of any of the permanent party members ever again.

- Yaldaboath isn't a whole lot better than Izanami. They did realize that Izanami is a bit too obscure in the actual scenario for a character as important as she was and remedied that by giving Yaldaboath a prominent role, but like with Izanami, the game doesn't really dovetail into the endgame elegantly. Like with Izanami, Yaldaboath's role in the plot, while very lightly foreshadowed, is more or less just stapled onto the plot after the fact and it's conspicuous as hell.

- Some general heirarchies:
characters in general: 5 > 3 > 4
character dynamics: 3 > 5 > 4
plot: 3 > 4 > 5
gameplay: 5 > 4 > 3
soundtrack: 3 > 5 > 4
setting: 4 > 5 > 3
palace heirachy: kamoshida > futaba = sae > madarame = kaneshiro > memento depths/qliphoth > shido > okumura

- Futaba is really cute and I like her, she's probably the only character who I feel was written well. I like Morgana as a cat -- I love looking at him just peeking out of my backpack and sitting inside of the classroom desk and all that stuff, but I don't really like Morgana as a character. Otherwise I like zero party members or confidants. I pretty much picked Takemi as my girlfriend out of a hat, but then again, I was pretty much the same way with Yukiko in P4.

- I will brick the project director's house all the way from the United States if the P5 expansion doesn't utilize Goro better. Even if I wasn't mad that I didn't get to have my best boy because of bad writing, I'm too OCD to possibly accept that as the best they could have done with that character. I could have a blood-alcohol content level of .2 and do more with that character than Atlus did.


- motherfucker where's my main man dan woren as the real igor

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so yeah, okay game that has some problems, looking forward to p5+ not resolving them in another 3 years i guess

i enjoyed this read


ii agree and i think its a limitation of the social links as a whole but for a lot of people they are the main/only reason the play the game so i guess they're in a weird spot, obviously people would get pissed if they couldn't link with party members they like and i really have no practical solution for it but yet

they really do need to revamp social links in general. not this kind of half-assed "oh, we'll add unlockable mechanics to them, all of which should frankly just be there by default" thing that persona 5 did, something that actually alters their structure. it's a good concept, but it has grown really stale in its present incarnation and it's beginning to hold back the rest of the game.

also it warms my heart to know that i still agree with ahriman on almost everything