vanguard333

I'm glad that there is a new trailer. I'm a little sad that it was entirely cinematics without any gameplay in sight, but now we know a bit more about the world and characters. If the "my child" line is literal, and it almost-certainly is, then that would imply that the dying woman at the beginning of the trailer is both Alear's mother and very likely the previous divine dragon to battle the fell dragon (especially since she's shown turning into a dragon to protect him). If so, then that would mean that the protagonist's mother is actually a character this time around, if a posthumous one. The only other FE games I can think of that did that are Path of Radiance and Fates. In any case, I hope all the cinematics showing dragons hopefully means we will see Alear be able to turn into a dragon. It would be a real shame if they made an FE game where the protagonist is a dragon only to do almost nothing with it for the second time in a row.

The thing about the Lifestream from Final Fantasy VII was that it was a very blunt metaphor for non-renewable power sources such as coal; Lifestream was non-renewable and extracting it and converting it into electricity as Shinra does in the game directly harms and pollutes the planet. The idea of having magical energy be something that's not just within people but also within the world itself is extremely common across various fantasy stories; the first example that came to my mind was the anime Black Clover until you mentioned using it as an energy source. In Black Clover, everything created from magic is distinguishable from the substance itself (for example, lightning magic is distinct from real electricity since it's made from magic even though it uses all the properties of lightning) and eventually returns to being magic, so the amount of magic in the world is never at risk of depletion. In Black Clover, magic is used as a metaphor for ability/material authority; royals have insane amounts of magic while peasantry have very little, with the amount of magic one is born with reinforcing a classist and elitist system that the protagonist: a random peasant orphan with no magic whatsoever, seeks to tear down and replace with a fairer system. The point that I'm trying to make is that what matters is less the general concept and more what you intend to do with it: magic systems aren't just flavour for worldbuilding; they also help illustrate themes, character struggles, etc., and those are the things that help make a magic system more unique. So, think about this: what are you trying to say with your magic system? What are you trying to show? For Final Fantasy 7, it was a message of environmentalism, while for Black Clover, it's for character journeys and themes of overcoming classism/elitism and the difference between talent and hard work. Thinking about this will help make your magic system more unique and also make it tie in better with your world and narrative. These are things I've had to think about when writing my own fantasy novels (I too am an aspiring writer).

Uh... what? What did I just watch?

Last night, I watched the movie The Mask of Zorro for the first time. I never saw it before, partly because it released only a year after I was born, but because of the movie being a big success and reminding people about Zorro, probably half the cartoons I watched as a kid had at least one episode that parodied Zorro. After hearing for a couple of years now that the movie was really good, I finally decided to watch it when it finally became available on a streaming service. So, I did, and it was indeed really good. I think, between this film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and The Man in the Iron Mask, I'm pretty sure I have now seen all the attempts in the 90s to revive the swashbuckler genre.

For me, I just that the sword doesn't end up overshadowing the fact that Alear's supposed to be a dragon, like how the Yato overshadowed Corrin's dragon form in Fates. This is IS's second time that they've promised a lord character that's a dragon, so I really hope that, this time, the lord character being a dragon is actually utilized.

Recently, I watched the show Arcane. All I knew about League of Legends beforehand was that my brother plays it... and that's all I really needed to know beforehand; the show is very straightforward to understand even for someone completely unfamiliar with the game it's based on, and I really enjoyed the show. The characters were very well-written, the story was very engaging, and it was very well animated outside of one specific scene. I also really liked the way that the magical technology: hextech, was established: essentially that it's technology whose main function is to cast a specific spell. My main criticism would be the one scene where I did not like the animation:

I don't know; I know absolutely nothing about Mega Man Legends. My introduction to the series was the games Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Mega Man & Bass. I could. However, I'm rather busy; I barely have time to play the game I'm currently playing (Blossom Tales 2: The Minotaur Prince).

That's interesting to hear. Honestly, though I considered getting Mega Man 11, I never did. The Mega Man games that I grew up with were the Battle Network and Star Force games, and, while I did recently enjoy the Mega Man Legacy Collection, I don't think I ever really saw much in Mega Man 11 outside of a graphical update and a new gimmick. Honestly, the best Mega Man game that I've played in recent years is Shovel Knight. If a 3D version of Mega Man were ever to be made, Capcom could do what Nintendo did for Metroid Prime and have it be its own subseries while Capcom still makes 2D Mega Man games.

No need to apologize. I haven't really watched much anime either, so my claim should be taken with a grain of salt. Hokkaido having the lowest temperature recorded in Japan honestly wouldn't surprise me. True; from what I have read (which admittedly isn't much), it is indeed still a difficult topic. I honestly didn't know about the coalfields either until I did a quick google search about Hokkaido while discussing gen 3 and 4 with you. I didn't know about Yubari; that's interesting.

CDs and cartridges' strengths and weaknesses aren't so much a matter of which ones outweigh the other, so much as which is best suited for a particular context. For instance, in the case of portable consoles like the Gameboy, DS, Switch, etc., cartridges are clearly the better choice because they are more compact than CDs which, while flat, take up a greater surface area, cartridges being more durable is far more useful in the case of a portable console that can easily be accidentally dropped, and, for playing on the go, one needs the loading times to be as quick as possible. Only one portable console even tried to use CDs: the PSP, and there were enough problems that its successor, the PS Vita, switched to cartridges. In the time when CDs rose to prominence for home consoles (the generation of the PS1 and N64), the advent of 3D graphics and voice acting meant that new games took up far more space than ever before, and the consoles themselves couldn't store enough of the data. It was a time when games like Metal Gear Solid took up 2 discs and Final Fantasy 7 took up 3 discs; those games were never going to fit on cartridges of the time. So, the load times and inability to hold saves was worth it because the game could actually fit. Not only that, but durability doesn't matter so much in the case of a home console. Today, cartridges and CDs alike are capable of enough storage, and the technology has come along far enough in general, that either could easily be suitable for home consoles. Depending on how technology continues developing, I wouldn't be surprised if things soon come full circle and cartridges eclipse CDs.

I've recently been watching Bleach for the first time. My first viewing of this series has been rather strange. My brother began watching the show several months ago. I had no interest in watching the show, but, around the Hueco Mundo arc, he eventually got me to watch it with him, so I watched the Hueco Mundo arc with him, with him giving me just enough information to understand what was going on. He finished watching the show on his own, but, now that the final arc is finally being adapted, he convinced me to watch the show from the beginning. I'm currently on the second arc: the Soul Society arc. As a result, I made a few assumptions about the worldbuilding that were only partially correct, which made these first two arcs a bit jarring. For instance, because the only people from Soul Society in the Hueco Mundo arc are the soul reapers, who are established as being born as Souls, age (though at a much slower rate than humans) and eventually die, I naturally assumed that Soul Society is not an afterlife; that the people of Soul Society aren't dead humans; they're just a non-corporeal species. Imagine my surprise when I saw the first story arc and found out that I was right about Souls as a species, but Soul Society is an afterlife, with some of its residents being dead humans. That left me rather confused for a while, and, because I only just got to the part of the Soul arc where Aizen fakes his death (that's not a spoiler, is it? The show's 20 years old and Aizen being a twist villain is easily the most famous thing about the show), I'm still confused by a lot of this stuff. EDIT: I'm now on the Hueco Mundo arc. A lot of the things I found confusing now have clearer answers. I will say that I very much enjoyed the soul society arc overall. The standout moments were Ichigo vs Byakuya, Ishida vs Mayuri, and the Aizen reveal. The Byakuya vs Ichigo fight was really creative not only thematically with what these two characters represent, but also with how it used these two characters' abilities. Ichigo's bankai becoming an ordinary-sized sword that condenses his power rather than releasing it, giving the blade absurd cutting power and giving him extreme speed almost bordering on teleportation is very simple, yet the fight is able to do a lot with it. And Byakuya's bankai creating billions of blade shards he can control for offensive and defensive purposes was really cool; I especially liked that his ultimate move was to reform the shards into swords.

Enlightened One was alright as a hybrid class. Not great, but it was decent. Since it was a hybrid of swords, gauntlets and white magic, and Byleth only learns one offensive light magic spell, the white magic was mainly for healing while swords and gauntlets were for dealing damage, and since the class had swordfaire while also being magical, it was a good class for using a 1-3 range levin sword+. Agreed; it sounds like a neat idea, but it sounds like it can get really overcomplicated. One way I can think of to make it a bit less complicated would be to have this be for certain units, kind-of like how Path of Radiance handled it being possible for Jill to leave: it was only possible in the case of Jill, it was for important story reasons so it was extremely heavily foreshadowed that it could happen, and there was even a way to bring her back to the player's side if Jill had an a-support with Mist or Lethe. A straightforward solution to this would be for the game to not have multiple story routes. Do we really need another multiple-route FE game after Three Houses and Fates almost back-to-back?

I see. That makes sense; I myself would've known almost nothing about Hokkaido if I hadn't watched the anime Golden Kamuy, which takes place in Hokkaido near the start of the 20th century. Yeah, the remakes reverting things back to how they were in Diamond and Pearl was really dumb. When the remakes were first announced, I was saying that they should've made a remake of Platinum, as that's the version that pretty much everyone agrees is the best. Even the Ruby and Sapphire remakes bothered to integrate some of the Emerald content via the postgame "Delta Episode" storyline. That was indeed kind-of neat. By the way, since we're talking about the Sinnoh games, I just thought of another unpopular opinion: I actually like the graphics in Legends Arceus overall. Actually, perhaps a better way to describe it would be that, while I agree with everyone that the graphical quality was subpar and had a lot of technical problems, I do think that the game's art style was easily enough to make up for it for the most part. At times, the game is capable of looking gorgeous.

I agree that it's nowhere near as bad as the main Xenoblade games. In any case, I've long argued that, in a number of popular RPGs, the level-up system is often redundant and could easily be removed without substantially affecting the game (and in some cases could easily improve the game), and The Witcher 3 is one of my favourite examples to use. I will say that I think Xenoblade X handled high-level enemy placement well overall; most tyrants are in conspicuous places, and enemy units with a higher level than your expected level are generally used as a way to tell the player "Find a way around" rather than, "don't be here"; i.e., they actually encourage exploration instead of discouraging it. I still remember navigating the swamp/forest area, finding these level 30 crocodile-like enemies on the ground (when the player is expected to be level 15) and being stuck until I found a way to a higher level above the crocodiles, and I remember feeling that was actually clever once I noticed the ramp. I see. In any case, I haven't played FireRed in a very long time. By the way, what do you think of the argument I made about the Sinnoh region and Hokkaido?

It's not just enemies that are too low leveled that's the problem though; the game also has a similar problem as the Xenoblade games where, right around almost every corner and always in the most inconvenient places, there's always an extremely high-level monster that you can't possibly hope to fight until near the end of the game. I remember visiting an island to do a level 10 sidequest involving helping out a friendly rock troll, wanting to explore more of the island after finishing the sidequest, and walking maybe 10 steps before being suddenly ambushed by a level 30+ giant bird monster and being forced to leave the island entirely. Oh; is that what @henrymidfields was referring to? Huh; I honestly don't remember any of those explicit references being in FireRed (the GBA remake of Red), but I haven't played that game in a very long time. I see. I don't know too much about Kyushu. However, regarding the climate of the region at least, I can say that Japanese stories tend to exaggerate the differences in climate between their various regions; Pokémon games are far from alone in doing that. Kyushu is the warmest, so naturally Hoenn is very hot. Similarly, Hokkaido is the coldest, so naturally Sinnoh is very cold. That said, while I don't know enough about Kyushu to know if Hoenn is an accurate version of it, I do know enough about Hokkaido to know that Sinnoh is very thorough in its references to Hokkaido: Mt. Coronet is a reference to Mt. Asahi as well as Hokkaido being very mountainous in its center, Jubilife City is based on Sapporo, the coal mining in the town with the first gym leader is based on the Ishikari coalfield, etc. The only thing missing from Diamond/Pearl/Platinum is any explicit reference to the Ainu: an indigenous population that lives in Hokkaido and lived there long before Japan colonized it, and unfortunate timing might be the reason for that: Diamond and Pearl released in 2006; it wasn't until 2008, one year after the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that the Japanese Government officially recognized the Ainu as a distinct indigenous population. It's worth noting that Pokémon Legends Arceus does reference the Ainu by having the Diamond and Pearl clans be loosely based on them.

The variety was definitely good: bombs, signs, potions and sword combat (and I'm sure I'm forgetting something) were interesting. One thing I enjoyed doing was using the bomb that freezes monsters, hitting said monster with a heavy attack to knock them to the ground, and then using the finishing attack to finish them off. It rendered a few different fights anti-climactic, but I thought it was a good reward for experimenting. Remembering which forms of combat was best-suited for different monsters was also good. Perhaps my main problem with it, which is part of my main problem with the game as a whole, is that I think the game would actually have been far better if it didn't have a level-up system; if it wasn't nearly as dependent on numbers. There is nothing the level system does in the game that isn't already done by some other mechanic that better ties into the rest of the game's systems, and it actively brings down a lot of the game's systems: it discourages exploration, it discourages combat against anything that isn't at the player's exact level, and it clashes heavily with the idea that Geralt is an experienced protagonist, and this isn't the full list of problems that it causes. I'm also just personally not a fan of light-&-heavy attack combat systems.

Gen 4 is my favourite, and I sort-of agree with this. If it weren't for Platinum, gen 4 would have been a weak gen (though still stronger than half the gens that have come after it). There were definitely signs in Diamond and Pearl that they hadn't been able to fully implement all their ideas as much as they would've liked in time for the finished game. The lack of fire and electric types, for example, while somewhat fitting that the region is based on Hokkaido, definitely stands out as more a product of an unrefined Pokedex than anything else given the presence of an electric gym leader and a fire elite four. The massive level gap between the last gym and the elite four also speaks to a lack of polish in places. In short, while gen 4 was a great gen once everything about it was fully realized in Platinum, it definitely showed signs that, going forward, the games were not going to meet deadlines without making compromises to the finished product. All the Pokémon generations were based on real locations. Gens 1-4 were based on different parts of Japan: Gen 1 was based on the Kanto region, to the point where its name in the game is the Kanto region. Gen 2 was based on the Kansai and Tokei regions. Gen 3 (Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald) was based on the island of Kyushu: the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. Gen 4 was based on the island of Hokkaido: the northernmost of Japan's four main islands. Incidentally, the island of Hokkaido is also the setting of the anime Golden Kamuy. I don't understand the complaints about gens 3 and 4 feeling like "generic modern" and not like real places; they were very clearly inspired by real locations and made a lot of references to those places. I've only played The Witcher 3, but I largely agree. I really wanted to like the game, since I thought it had a lot of neat ideas, but I really didn't like a lot of the gameplay. In particular, I really didn't like the sword-combat. I'm not a fan of light-attack/heavy-attack systems, I don't like how much of it relies on numbers and levels (I'm playing as essentially an experienced hunter of monsters; shouldn't my approach to fighting rely on, well, hunting, rather than on making sure all my equipment is at a high enough level?)

I've mainly been watching Spy x Family, season 6 of My Hero Academia, and season 4 of Golden Kamuy. All three have been fantastic so far. That said, for My Hero Academia, while's there's a lot that I'm looking forward to seeing animated, the show is also getting really close to the moment where the manga plummeted downhill for me and has yet to recover (spoilers ahead for the anime-only):

Ah. He wasn't too bad if I remember correctly. He was a pain in that it took a lot of tries to beat him since I was a beginner and I was hesitant about dodge-rolling (I heard enough SoulsBorne fans say the way to win is to keep on rolling, so I wanted to see how far I could get without relying on it too much), but, after caving and relying on dodge-rolling, I was able to beat him, and then I got as far as the High Wall of Lothric before repeatedly running into dead ends and giving up. That actually happened to me twice, as I tried Dark Souls 3 twice: the first time as a priest and the second time as a knight. I wasn't sure which class I wanted as my starting template and if I wanted to be a melee fighter or someone who relies on faith spells, so I thought I'd try both and see the difference. The answer was that, at least in the first parts of the game, it makes no difference at all (the priest has a healing spell, but that's balanced out by it using mana and the knight can just not carry mana potions and carry more healing potions instead). My experience against basic enemies was the same, my experience against the first boss was the same, and my experience on the High Wall of Lothric was the same: target enemy, roll when they attack, attack when they leave an opening. The fact that it didn't seem to matter whether I was a heavily-armoured knight or a priest really made me decide to give up completely. Of course, it was only afterward that I found out that the first boss' second phase is weak to the firebombs that the player character gets just before the boss fight. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense, but that's as close as the game ever felt to being challenging or creative and not just technically difficult.

Who? I didn't get very far in the game and I didn't learn the names of any of the characters. Plus, this was quite a few years ago. And, as I said, it wasn't just that the game was brutal; it was that it was brutal without ever feeling like it was actually challenging me on anything. It felt like the only thing it was testing me on was how quickly I could press the roll button, which is not a challenge; it's just difficulty. I prefer winning by being smart over winning by just rolling over and over again.

I don't think that first one is an unpopular opinion. One thing that has been very obvious with basically every generation after gen v can be summed up with one word: "rush". It's less noticeable with gen 6 than gen 7 or 8, but they all show signs of having been rushed out the door to meet hard deadlines. Part of the problem is that Pokémon is a multimedia franchise; delaying a game in any other series means delaying just that one game, but delaying a Pokémon game would mean delaying the anime, delaying the trading cards, delaying the spin-offs, delaying the toys, etc., so the games really can't be delayed, and, especially now after making the jump to 3D, they've suffered as a result. I agree about Star Force to an extent; I think 3 was a very fitting ending to the series, with so many overarching storylines wrapped up and with Geo's dad finally returning home at the end of the game, but I do think it would've been nice to see more games in the series. Apparently, there were plans for a fourth game, but it was ultimately scrapped and cancelled because the Star Force games never exactly sold well.

1. I wanted to like Xenoblade Chronicles 1, but I couldn't. I wanted to like it because the story, characters, and especially the worldbuilding were very interesting. But I couldn't like it for two reasons: The exploration is terrible. It felt like every single time I wanted to go even slightly off the main road to explore something vaguely interesting, there would be a level 90 monster right there waiting for me. It also didn't help that the locations, while interesting to look at and take in, were boring and tedious to navigate even when sticking to the main road. The combat is boring. I really do not like the MMO-like combat that revolves around auto-attacking and abilities that use cooldowns; I find it very boring as there's practically no thinking or involvement from the player. Once you know the most efficient order with which to use your abilities, a couple lines of code could theoretically easily replace the player character in most circumstances. 2. The best Pokémon generation is gen 4, though it admittedly is mostly saved by Platinum. I'll also admit that I never played any of the gen 5 games, which seem to be the most common answer to the question of the best Pokémon generation. But I really do think gen 4 is the best: I think SInnoh is the most interesting region, Barry is the best rival: being friendly yet still a challenging opponent, Cynthia is the best champion, the story has a genuinely epic weight to it thanks to moments like scaling Mt. Coronet and confronting Team Galactic at the top of Spear Pillar, etc. It's a real shame then that the best gen had to have the worst remakes. 3. I'll join those who are saying that the Soulsborne games aren't for them; they aren't for me either. A large chunk of it is probably from the terrible first experience I had with the series by trying Dark Souls 3 for the first time, as basically every Soulsborne fan I talk to says that 3 is the worst in the series for a beginner and that 1 or Demon's Souls would be better. But, personally, for me, I think Soulsborne games really reflect something I've come to realize about the difference between difficulty and challenge in video games: For me, difficulty is just, well, how hard it physically to succeed at something in a video game, while challenge is how hard it is mentally: how much I need to understand the mechanics, how much I need to think about what I'm doing, how much I need to carefully observe what's going on, etc. I don't care too much about how difficult a game is, but I want a game to ideally have a fair bit of challenge. And when I look at Soulsborne games, generally, all I'm seeing is difficulty with not a bit of challenge in sight. That was what made my experience with Dark Souls 3 particularly terrible; it wasn't that it was brutal, but that it wasn't challenging.

I should probably point out that, from what I know, Lodoss War and Grancrest War are very different; Grancrest War is a "spiritual successor" in the sense that it was created by the same person, it has "Record of ---- War" as its title, and it, like Lodoss War, was written for a role-playing game (but where Lodoss War was inspired by an existing role-playing game, Grancrest War was created alongside a tabletop RPG that is also called Grancrest War). Other than that, they're apparently rather different in terms of story, characters and setting.

I haven't seen Lodoss War, but I've heard that it's really good. I have seen its spiritual-successor: Record of Grancrest War, which was created by the same person who created Lodoss War, and it was pretty good overall. Since Lodoss War is by far the more well-known of the two, then it's probably good.

We don't know exactly what Claude was originally planning; even in his route, we don't really learn what he was going to do if Edelgard hadn't declared war; all we know is that he spends most of his time searching for as much information as he can find, and that he calls Edelgard impatient if the two of them fight in chapter 12 of White Clouds. Dimitri is indeed a supporter of incremental reform; however, he is not in the best mental state even before Edelgard declares war, and he has now idea about the lengths the nobility in Faerghus will go to in order to prevent any internal reform that they see as a threat to Faerghus (i.e. any internal reform that means they have less power, which is any internal reform that would improve people's lives). The zealotry within Faerghus is so great that a bunch of greedy self-centered nobles genuinely believed that they were acting within the best interest of Faerghus when they (with the help of TWSITD, but it's clear from the dialogue when this is revealed that the nobles would've done this anyway without their help) arranged the assassination of Dimitri's dad and framed the people of Duscur for it just because Dimitri's dad wanted to make the very same reforms that Dimitri supports. Granted, Edelgard doesn't know about this either, but the fact remains that any attempt at even incremental reform would be met with utter hostility in Faerghus, and that does give credence to the idea that it would take a war, regardless of who won, for any reform to actually happen in Faerghus.