lenticular

Personally I would count Archanea and Valentia as all being part of the same continuity. It's the same world, the same time period, and has multiple crossover characters. If you'd prefer to classify them differently, then that's fine. There's not a lot to be gained from nitpicking terminology. But at the very least, I think it would be uncontroversial to say that Valentia is more closely related to Archanea than Elyos is to Fódlan. That said, you are right that I forgot about Archanea Saga. Though, as you say, that's also a weird special case that doesn't offer much in the way of precedent.

For me, as someone who liked the monastery but disliked the Somniel, I think there were two main differences. The first is that the monastery felt more like a real place populated by real people. If you walk around it and talk to the people then they'll have different things to say each month that will be at least vaguely relevant to what's happening in the plot at the time. Try to do the same thing in the Somniel and you just get the same generic lines repeated over and over. The second is the resource management aspect. In Three Houses, you have a limited number of activity points and have to decide what to spend them on. In Engage, all of the stuff was just there, and the only decision was whether to bother with it or not. And doing all the things was clearly the "optimal" choice, though typically not the fun one. Engage also leaned more heavily into minigames than Three Houses did. If I want to do choir practice in the monastery, then I press a button and it's done; if I want to do strength training in the Somniel then I have to play a minigame for it. Basically, they made the entire Somniel work like fishing in the monastery: no resource management cost to it, but a time-consuming minigame instead. And fishing was my single least favourite thing about the monastery. Now, don't get me wrong, the monastery wasn't a world-beater in either of these aspects. Both the dialogue and the resource management were pretty simple and rudimentary. But they were there and, for me personally, that was enough to make the difference.

In the past, when FE has returned to settings, it's typically been in the immediately next game. Excluding remakes, the only time that FE has ever returned to a setting after having moved away from it is for Awakening, which is a weird case which comes with all sorts of caveats and asterisks. So for them to make Three Houses, then go off and do Engage, then come back to Fódlan would be largely without precedent. This doesn't make it impossible, of course, but I would be surprised.

It is the far future. Far beyond the events of Awakening, even. Aliens have invaded the planet (they look like dragons, of course). They have travelled back through time and abducted and cloned legendary figures from history. Not just Alm and Marth, but Sigurd and Chrom too. Now, they are forcing them to repeatedly fight to the death and making a TV show out of the spectacle (and then resurrecting whoever died). To start off with, you play the different heroes as they are pitted against each other in progressively more and more contrived and ridiculous scenarios, but eventually they start to figure out what is going on and join forces with each other, breaking out of the TV set, and ultimately fighting and defeating their alien dragon overlords and reclaiming the planet for humanity. Also, it's the future so there are laser swords. Is this ridiculous? Yes. Is it a terrible idea? Absolutely. Is it any more ridiculous and terrible than what the original premise deserves? Not remotely.

I play a mix of "mainstream indie" and "weird and obscure indie" (aka, "hipster indie"). Like, yeah, I'm currently playing Stardew Valley and Balatro, which are extremely and moderately well-known respectively. But then looking at other games I've played recently, there's also stuff like Regency Solitaire II and National Park Girls, which probably nobody else here has even heard of. And then the full spectrum of mainstream/obscure between the two extremes. Though I will add as well that even for the most mainstream of indie games, they mostly tend to reach the mainstream on merit rather than through corporate marketing juggernauts. If there's a widespread buzz over some indie game, it's probably because a lot of people like it; if there's a buzz over the latest title from EA or Activision, then it's probably because they spent a lot of money advertising it. So even for mainstream indie, I do think there's still a meaningful distinction, for the sake of this discussion, from games made by big corporations. Fair enough. I wouldn't argue with that. But if that's your position, then I think you were vastly overstating it originally with the way you worded things.

That's something that I tend to see more from fans than from writers. Writers usually (not always!) manage to have a bit of a more nuanced take on things, but I've definitely seen who will scoff at anything with a lighter tone and call it immature or unrealistic, which, yeah, definitely comes across as immature. It has the same sort of energy as a teenager who is desperate to avoid anything that can be seen as childish. I broadly agree with this. While there are definitely tropes and trends that I roll my eyes at, I do usually find it pretty simple to avoid them in favour of other media that are much more to my tastes. The only caveat that I would add, though, is that it can be somewhat tricky to do so when there's a work that is mostly to my tastes, but then has one trend-chasing section that's been shoehorned in (often but not always by a meddling studio or similar). That sort of thing can be harder to avoid and does get frustrating. Speak for yourself. My main media consumptions are games and books. For games, I mostly (maybe about 90%?) play indie stuff. For books, I do tend to skew towards more recent and towards British and American, but far from exclusively. I probably have a couple dozen or so different nationalities of authors that I've read over the last year or two, at a guess. And while I haven't read anything from 1878 recently, but I did read At The Back of the North Wind last year, which was published in 1871, and is at best the fourth most famous book sold in England from that year (behind Through The Looking Glass, Middlemarch, and The Descent of Man). Which isn't to say that this is the right way or the best way to consume media. If all you want to do is watch the latest movies from Disney and play the latest games from Nintendo, then that's great. But if you're going to watch movies that you know are going to be bad, then that's your fault, not capitalism's. It really only requires the tiniest amount of effort to ignore the stuff that corporate marketing puts in front of you, and acting as if they're impossible to exist is crediting them with far more power than they actually have. I don't think there really is a default state for media consumption. By and large, what tends to be "default" changes a lot over time, as well as being different from one medium to the next. A steady release of new content over time is pretty common for TV or for comics, but is much rarer (though not unheard of) for books or games, for instance. So the problem isn't really with how we consume media overall but with how people are accustomed to watching TV in particular. If I buy a new game -- let's say that it's a pretty chunky RPG like Fire Emblem, for instance -- then the default assumption is that I'll go through it at my own pace. Depending on how fast I play and how much time I have to devote to it, maybe I'll get through it in a week or maybe it will take me months. And that's just expected and normal. Nobody is suggesting that Fire Emblem would be better if it had a staggered release with only two chapters coming out every week. And personally, I feel the same way about TV. Like, I know that season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery has started to be released, but I'm not going to start watching it until the whole thing has come out, because then I'll be able to watch it all at my own pace, whatever pace that ends up being. Which isn't to try to discount the psychological pressure that "must catch up on this!" can exert. If you do fall into that mindset then it absolutely can stop you from enjoying something as much as you would otherwise. But I do think that there isn't any inherent problem with the release schedule, more just that people are needing to adjust their mindsets, which inevitably takes time.

Grimdark. Definitely grimdark. We have passed peak grimdark at this point and it's on the wane now, but there's still too much of it for my tastes. I don't mind fiction that has a dark edge to it, but I need for there to be some sort of light in the darkness if I'm going to stay interested. Unending doom and gloom just doesn't do it for me. And there's also the related phenomenon of "edgy for the sake of edgy" which is extremely tiresome. I'm also not really a fan of "enemies to lovers" style romance stories. Of course, last time that romance novels came up on this forum, I think I was the only one who had any interest in the genre, so probably nobody else here cares about the trends in tropes and subgenres there. Ike is/isn't a commoner, maybe? I've seen that being argued from both sides by people who are convinced that their take is Objective Reality and not just their interpretation.

One of the nice things about Fire Emblem is that it's pretty easy to just ignore the characters that I don't like. Unless I hate the main protagonist or something, then I probably just have to grit my teeth and sit through a chapter or two, and then the annoying character will either be permanently benched (if they're a minor player character) or dead (if they're a minor villain). So while there are characters who I dislike (Oliver, Virion, Framme, etc.), it's generally difficult to muster up too much conempt for them.

I think it largely depends on exactly what the opinion is. For instance, I've never played Genealogy. If I state my opinion that I don't really care for the art style of the character portraits in that game, then I think that's pretty reasonable. I have seen a lot of the character portraits, after all. Maybe I should equivocate and disclaim a bit by saying that I've never seen them in their original context and for all I know maybe they work better there, but at the most basic level I don't think this is an unreasonable opinion for me to share. On the other hand, if I started to express opinions about the game's pacing or difficulty or story then I would rightly be laughed out of the room. Or another example: I know from past experience that I am susceptible to the sort of psychological manipulation tricks that are common in games with microtransactions/loot-boxes/gacha/etc. They mess with my head and I end up spending more on them than I want to. So, these days, I just flat out won't touch them. So I hold the opinion that Heroes is a trash game, purely because of its business model. I don't think this is an unreasonable thing for me to think, even though I've scarcely touched the game. But I am in no way qualified to talk about the quality of its tactical combat, for instance. Basically, I think that you can hold opinions about things you have very limited experience of, so long as you are circumspect and nuanced in those opinions. If you're willing to be upfront about having not played the game and frame your opinions in that light then that has the potential to lead to interesting discussions ("yeah, I know it looks that way from outside but it's actually different when you're playing" or "yeah, that's a problem that a few people have with it, so if you think you won't like it for that reason then you're probably right", for instance). But this is the Internet and there's no shortage of people who want to claim complete expertise in all sorts of subject matter that they really shouldn't. And I do agree with either ignoring those people or pointing and laughing at them.

Oh boy. FF7. I was waiting for this one. Or rather, I was waiting for the chance to rant about this one. I didn't play it when it was very first released, but I was only a few years behind the times, probably around about 2001. It was the first Final Fantasy game that I played (and I'm pretty sure the first one that was released in Europe), and is directly responsible for my utter disdain for the series, and my complete bafflement about how it is held up as some paragon of the medium. Of course, having last touched it nearly a quarter of a century ago, I can't actually remember much about it, but in finest Internet tradition, I'm not going to let that stop me from throwing out my crappy hot takes to the world. There were three main things that made me hate FF7, some of which were tis fault and some of which were not. First: I hated the PS1. So much. It might just be my least favourite of all the consoles I've ever owned. Early 3D graphics of that era were ugly as sin and felt like such a downgrade from some of the great spritework of the previous console generation. And then there was also the problem of having to constantly be reading game data from a x2 speed CD-ROM drive. Given that my other gaming options at the time were an N64 which was still using cartridges, or a PC where most game data was on a HDD, doing anything on a PS1 was just. So. Interminably. Slow. And man, did the whole experience suffer from it. Especially since this was still an era of RPG design philosophy that thought that grinding was a great idea. So that was the first strike. Second: that one part that is just weirsly and uncomfortably rape-y and transphobic except was totally just played for laughs. "You're a man except you have to wear a dress and that's completely hilarious and now this man who doesn't know that you're a man will want to rape you and that's even more hilarious because normally only women have to worry about that stuff!" Or, y'know, something to that effect. As I said, it's been over 20 years. I dunno what 2024-lenticular would think about that scene (best guess: get mildly annoyed, roll my eyes a lot, and make snarky comments about it on Discord to my friends), but 2001-lenticular was pretty much livid about it. I have talked with a few people about that scene over the intervening years and one sentiment that I see brought up pretty often is basically "oh yeah, that part didn't age well". To which I say that no, that's not the problem. The problemis that it was always dreadful but that anyone who was a straight 13 year old boy when they first played it probably didn't notice it. Anyway, that was strike 2. So picture the scene. There's me, circa 2001, playing what I have been told was an all time classic, but not really enjoying it all that much. It had its moments, sure, but overall it was ugly, pretty slow, and it had that one part that really enraged me. And then someone spoilered me for The Big Spoiler. I don't think they were actually trying to, but it was basically the equivalent of "I'm finally going to see Empire Strikes Back tonight!" "Oh, cool, I can't wait to hear what you think about the reveal that Darth Vader is Luke's father" followed by an eternal facepalm. And with strike 3, I was done. I put the game down, haven't picked it up ever since, and still hold a grudge against it to this day. It's probably a perfectly fine game. I wouldn't know. I've not played it in decades. But never let it be said that I'm not the sort of person who is capable of nursing even the pettiest of grudges for decades. I have no idea how it would be possible to come up with any sort of quiz about interpreting the Bible that everyone would agree with. There are so many different branches of Christianity who all interpret things differently, and that's before you get to other religions, or to non-believers who are reading it as a historical/cultural/literary work. It's bad enough for something like Shakespeare. I have unpopular-but-genuinely-held opinions about how to interpret some of his works. Midsummer Night's Dream? I am convinced that Helena has the hots for Hermia. I don't think Shakespeare intended it, but she talks constantly about how amazing she is, so I can't help but read it that way. Or maybe The Merchant of Venice? Which I think basically just falls down entirely because Shylock is an ineffective villain because he's kind of an idiot because Shakespeare was too cowardly and/or bigoted to make his Evil Jewish Stereotype actually be smart. So if you put a multiple choice quiz about interpreting Shakespear in front of me, I'd probably end up rolling my eyes a lot and muttering "ok, but that's not how I interpret it". Then take that same problem, move it to the Bible, which people are far more passionate about, and it just seems like a recipe for disaster. They could keep things entirely factual by framing it as "what did Thoman Aquinas say about this?" or "what did the Council of Chalcedon decide about that?" but that just defers the bean counting up a level of abstraction. Or they could pin their colours to the mast, pick a single denomination, and go with that, but I can understand why they wouldn't want to. So while I do agree that a trivia quiz is pretty much entirely useless, I'm not sure if any other options would actually be better. Of course, I'm not actually Christian myself, so my opinion about that Bible is probably worth even less than my opinion about Final Fantasy 7.

My first thought would be to use it to pick up extra laguz in Tellius. Capturing Seeker or on of his crew would actually give us a playable Raven in PoR. Or maybe have the Dawn Brigade capture a Tiger from Pain and Agony's map to give them some extra bulk (though that is immediately before we get Volug, oh well). Capturing and recruiting Kezhda would also be pretty hilarious, if not actually useful.

My working assumption is that it's for SEO. It doesn't matter that we can't read it; it only matters that Baidu's algorithms can. And running spam bots is cheap enough that it's probably worth taking a chance on them, since they probably just have to move their site up just a single position in Baidu or Google's search result for them to make back their money and then some.

I'm at least glad that we've managed to collectively stop using the word "clone" to describe game genres, as used to be the case with "Doom clone", "Breakout clone", and the likes. Let us be thankful for small mercies.

I guess my unpopular opinion is that I don't think that "2D Mario" is a single coherent group of games that it makes sense to talk about collectively. I'd split them up into at least three different groups which are sufficiently different in how they play. First, you've got the classic Mario games released between 1985 and 1992: Bros, Bros 2 (both versions), Bros 3, World, Land, and Land 2. Then there's the New Super Mario Bros (NSMB) games released between 2006 and 2012: NSMB, NSMB Wii, NSMB 2, and NSMB U. And then finally, there's the two Mario Maker games released in 2015 and 2019. These three groups feel different enough to me that I don't see the benefit of trying to group them together. (There's also Mario Wonder, but I haven't played that yet, so I don't know where it would be classified.)

Something like that would fit perfectly into one of the weird fourth-wall-breaking endings. There's already one where a bunch of different developers talk to you, so it would be easy enough to riff on that and include some time-travel discussion to honour Toriyama, and anyone else who worked on the original game but has died in the intervening decades.