vanguard333

Again, it was supposed to be just one example of how it differs, and it wasn't even my main point in that paragraph. Why are you so fixated on one tiny statement that I tried to clarify as to what I actually meant and then just ignoring the clarification? So it was a hyped up buggy mess with insane loading times? That certainly does sound terrible, but given the way everyone talked about it, I thought there would've been more to it than that, like broken gameplay in the main levels or something like that.

I keep hearing from many different people about Sonic 06 being essentially the terrible Sonic game; the worst of the worst; the one that not even the biggest defenders of the more recent Sonic games would ever even try to defend. But I've never heard anyone say why that is; what it was about the game that made it so terrible. I don't know anything about the game other than its reputation, so I am curious.

I know that BOTW did not invent the idea of using towers as a gameplay mechanic in an open-world game as you described, but you have to admit that BOTW towers are different from Ubisoft towers in terms of mechanics (for instance, to find things on the map, you have to look for them, whereas Ubisoft games automatically fill the map section with icons indicating things). Plus, when I said that the Sonic Frontier towers look a lot like the BOTW towers, I was largely meaning in terms of aesthetics; they look like BOTW towers with stone rings attached to them. The towers were also just the one example I decided to give of the game looking like it's copying Breath of the Wild's template, with the intended implication that there were others I could easily point to. That is an excellent point. If they had said something like, "To help make the game, we partnered up with [insert dev team that knows how to make a 3D open-world game here]", then that would've been at least somewhat reassuring. And that Cyberpunk comparison is an interesting one, as that game was made by a team that had previously made a semi-open world game in The Witcher 3, and we all know how Cyberpunk 2077 worked out.

I don't remember that, but it is very likely that he said that, and that would be another example of Madara breaking rules for the sake of power escalation; their reanimated selves are supposed to be stronger because they have unlimited chakra, and yet, an eyeless living Madara is somehow stronger than his reanimated self. I think the most recent episode of Boruto being the last time we'll see Konohamaru lead team 7 was about as fitting a sendoff episode as they could manage; Konohamaru was not well-utilized at all as their leader, and this episode feels like the first one to actually give Konohamaru some dignity.

I will admit that I'm not a Sonic fan and I haven't played any of the games, but I seriously rather doubt this. Don't get me wrong; in the hands of a competent and creative team that's given the time that they need, theoretically, a good 3D open-world Sonic game could be made. However, at best, an open-world Sonic game would only really be better than Breath of the Wild at movement across the map; I don't see how it could be a better overall open-world game than BOTW. Not only that, but the precedent for 3D Sonic games being well-received in any lasting way, shape or form is... not great. It's still a game being made by Sonic Team, and the last Sonic game to get decent reviews was Sonic Mania, which was made by someone else entirely. Finally, it can't exactly be more innovative than BOTW if it's using BOTW's template, and, from the look of the trailer, that's exactly what it's doing. The towers even look almost identical, just now with rings.

@Etrurian emperor I'm not a fan of the Bakugo character either. He's a different take on the typical antagonistic shonen rival, but he's still ultimately an antagonistic shonen rival. The fact that it took so long for him to finally apologize to Midoriya for how he treated him also didn't help. At the very least, he did cause what is quite possibly the funniest moment in the entire series: him having to be chained to the 1st place podium at the end of the Sports Festival arc. You'd probably like the character Yuno in Black Clover: he's initially presented as a typical shonen rival, but as early as episode 1, it's made clear that he actually looks up to Asta a lot and that his faith that Asta can succeed is absolute, and that he's a friendly and supportive rival rather than an antagonistic one. Anyway, I'm not sure if this aged really well or aged really badly.

It was actually a case of me misreading the awards list. Thanks for pointing that out.

I completely missed the Game Awards as I had no idea when it was going to happen, so I ended up having to read the awards on Wikipedia, and I still have yet to see all the announcements. I will say that I did get some laughs; not nearly as many as I got in 2020 when every award was given to The Last of Us 2, but I did get some laughs: 1. Seeing that the voice actress for that giant lady from Resident Evil 8 got the best performance award got a laugh; I admittedly haven't played the game and I'm sure she probably deserves the award, but I'm almost certain that they gave her the awards simply because of how famous the character became for a while thanks to all the memes. 2. It was kind-of funny seeing the list of nominees for Best Family Game consist entirely of Nintendo games except for one, with that one being the game that won (It Takes Two). I didn't play It Takes Two, and it won Game of the Year, so of course it was going to be given every award they nominated it for, but it is still funny. Seeing Halo Infinite win Players' Voice award was surprising rather than funny; I admit that I know next-to-nothing about the Halo series, but I thought every new Halo game made after Reach gets tossed into the garbage bin. I honestly expected Metroid Dread to win Players' Voice. EDIT: I have now seen the Star Wars Eclipse announcement. Let me get this straight; there's an upcoming Star Wars game being made by the same studio that made Detroit: Become Human among other David Cage games?! That is hilarious! Easily funnier than the awards somehow. A David Cage Star Wars game; just the concept sounds like a hilarious recipe for disaster. I also have now seen the Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak trailer. The werewolf monster looks really cool, and I am definitely interested in this expansion of Rise. I also saw the Sonic Frontiers trailer. So, the next phase of Sonic is to take some notes from Breath of the Wild like everyone else? I've never been interested in Sonic; I hope for the fans' sake that the game is good, but precedent gives me reason to doubt that it will be.

I think most people would agree that, by the latter half of Shippuden, the power scaling became all out of whack, and Madara was the epitome of it. Normally, I would quickly point out that the Madara that beat five Kage was a reanimation Madara with infinite chakra, but the fact that he was still shrugging off attacks even when alive and without any eyes retroactively means that him being a reanimation didn't mean much. That said, it was established all the way back in the Chunin Exams arc that using all eight gates would make someone powerful enough to beat a Kage in exchange for it being the person's last fight, and I think that's a real biggy: it isn't power in exchange for a few years or a power that would kill a non-Uzumaki; it was power that would kill the user as a certainty if not for the healing power Naruto got from the Sage of Six Paths.

Outside of the ballisticians in the Archanea games (Shadow Dragon and Mystery of the Emblem), there haven't been any examples of mobile physical long-range artillery. We often see FE games have 3-10 range spells that can be used by mages for damaging an enemy from a safe distance, but we don't see physical-damage versions of that.

Yeah; there are a ton of things they could do. For just one example, other than Leo's unique spell in Fates, has there ever been a plant spell in Fire Emblem? That could be really interesting. I personally would still want light magic to have offensive options (in terms of offense, light magic's niche could be stuff like dealing more damage to monsters), but stuff like fire magic having greater accuracy in forest areas sounds really neat.

Thank you. I don't think I ever used Fimbulvetr, so I never would've known that it was also an ice spell. …You're right; how did I forget that Sagittae is also in Three Houses? Now that I think about it, there was also Agnea's Arrow, which is really similar. …I really need to replay Three Houses if I'm forgetting these spells. Actually, after watching a video showing Sagittae, I realized why I had forgotten it: instead of being the series of energy arrows that it was in SoV, it instead was just three tiny simultaneous blasts of magic that could easily be mistaken for an ice spell or a light spell and just plain easy to forget. Bring back the arrows! Anyway, what did you two think of my overall point (that, if they're not going to have the elements matter in gameplay, they may as well come up with more non-elemental spells)? I agree that it needs to not be terrible; outside of seraphim (and even then, seraphim's only good against monsters), the offensive light spells are almost useless; white magic really is the healing & utility type of magic. I suspect that the developers probably thought that, if the offensive white magic spells were great, then there would be little reason for a character to learn black magic. Of course, there are obvious reasons I can think of for still wanting black magic spells: having more spells (since spells have limited uses), some characters aren't good at learning white magic, different spells having different benefits, etc. I agree about the dark mage class system being a mess; the class system overall is something I really hope they take the time to refine in the next game.

…I vaguely remember this thread having been about the Game Awards at one point, but it's been so long that the memory's very fuzzy. I kid, but I'm not really the person to make that joke, since I'm the one that went off-topic in the first place by asking about the Sonic sequel. Anyway, when I said earlier that I consider the Game Awards to be a joke and that I just hope to get some good laughs out of it, I was mainly talking about the awards themselves. But now, with the knowledge about the Sonic 2 trailer, I can easily say that I hope to get some laughs out that as well, and who knows; maybe the trailer will surprise me and have me laugh at something intended to be funny. Yeah; Detective Pikachu was actually really good. Pretty much, although the outcry about the Mario movie is more than just "Chris Pratt bad"; it's also, "Illumination bad", which I actually agree with. Illumination made one decent film: the first Despicable Me movie, and that's it.

One thing I am certain of is that the next FE game is probably going to reuse a lot from Three Houses; they spent a lot of time on all those assets, so they're probably not going to toss them aside after one game. As for the magic elements specifically, the thing is that they're really decoration. In terms of gameplay, they're categorized into white magic (light), black magic (fire, ice, lightning, wind) and dark magic (dark). I could see them reusing this categorization, but with new spells (especially for dark magic, as I doubt they're going to once again have dark mages be associated with advanced technology) and that could result in different "elements", especially for anima/black magic (whatever they choose to call it in the next game). There was only one ice spell in Three Houses and it wasn't very useful, so I could easily see that disappearing. Wind will probably reappear since that's always the anti-flying magic, fire is pretty much assumed in any fantasy game involving magic, so that will undoubtedly reappear. Lightning is similarly pretty much assumed, so it will probably remain as well. Now, that's what I predict will be the case for the next FE game; as for whether or not I think it's good or should be changed... I honestly think that, if they're not going to separate the anima spells by element in gameplay, then they shouldn't limit themselves to "elemental" spells, and the next game would be a good opportunity for them add other types of offensive spells. One thing I actually liked about Shadows of Valentia was that, in addition to the "elemental" spells, it also had Sagittae: an offensive spell where the caster unleashes a series of energy arrows that aren't of any "element". I think it could be interesting to see stuff like that be included in the list of offensive spells for the next FE game.

I figured "because money" was probably the answer; my surprise was largely that the film made money. Don't get me wrong; I'm normally all in favour of accepting criticism. I'm just surprised that fixing Sonic's design at the last minute was enough to get the film in people's good graces.

So, basically, because they fixed the most glaring problem, people decided to overall be a lot more forgiving toward it than they'd normally have been? Anyway, just a quick correction: the Sonic movie is not the highest-grossing video game film: it made $319.7 million, while Pokemon: Detective Pikachu made $433.9 million.

Seriously? They're making a Sonic movie sequel? Why?

Recently, I initially thought I would replay Ocarina of Time on my GameCube (using the collector's edition). However, after playing it for a bit, I decided instead to replay something I hadn't played in quite some time, and that I genuinely consider to be my favourite game of all time: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I have made played through the game many times in my childhood and early-to-mid teens, but it has been a long time; if I'm remembering correctly, my last time playing Path of Radiance was before my first time playing Fates. One of the reasons I decided to replay was to see how much of the game holds up; I often say that I prefer the gameplay of Path of Radiance to later games in the series, but I wanted to see how much of that, if any, was simply nostalgia or due to Path of Radiance being my first FE game. So, I started up a new file, selected "normal" difficulty and "random" stat gains. One thing that stood out to me right away, as I watched the opening cinematic (the one before the main menu), was simply how well the game's artwork has held up over time. The cutscenes have not held up well, everything else looks okay, but the artwork is still fantastic, and since the opening was mostly artwork, it has held up extremely well. Speaking of the cutscenes, the voice acting in them is mixed; Greil is pretty good, but Ike and Mist really are not well voice-acted. It isn't distracting; it just makes me glad that only the cutscene dialogue is voice-acted, and not any of the in-game dialogue. Today, I played the prologue and chapter 1; not a lot of progress, but still enough for a first impression. One thing I noticed almost immediately was the lack of one convenience a lot of new FE games have: the one where, if you select one of your units then scroll over to an enemy unit and select that unit, the game will move the playable unit next to the enemy unit. In Path of Radiance, you have to select a tile next to the enemy unit. It's one of those little conveniences that I honestly forgot was not in this game. I don't miss it at all, but it was still interesting to notice. I've seen people say that the battle animations in this game are slow, but I honestly have never considered it slow, and I still don't today. That said, I can understand wanting a fast-forward or skip animation option; I can't remember if the game has either of those or not, and I completely forgot to check even though that was one of the things I wanted to check. One thing that definitely isn't nostalgia is the music; Path of Radiance has quite possibly the most memorable music in all of Fire Emblem. Overall, right now, a lot of the things I liked back when I was younger, I still like now. And the one thing I disliked back then, I still dislike now: the game has two things to indicate which tile the cursor is currently at; a white, glowing outline around the tile that's easy to see and doesn't get in the way, and a giant floating yellow triangle that bobbles up and down over the tile and gets in the way. Every time I see that triangle, it is very distracting and it does take up a noticeable chunk of the view. Fortunately for this playthrough, I can easily ignore it, but if there is a remaster of the game, I would want that triangle removed; I genuinely find it irritating whenever I see it. EDIT: I also decided recently to purchase a game called Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King. The game has existed for a few years now, but I just found out about it today. It's an indie game that's very heavily inspired by old 2D Zelda games like A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening. It looked interesting enough, so I thought I would try it out. The gameplay is very much like typical 2D Zelda: exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat. One thing I do like is that the sword combat has more to it than in a typical 2D Zelda: if you press attack again while doing a spin attack, the player character will then do a jump attack. However, the sword is mapped to the same button as contextual actions such as talking to NPCs and picking up objects; picking up a jar instead of simply cutting it with the sword does get annoying after a while, as does talking to an NPC instead of cutting a jar next to said NPC, among other little annoyances that do add up. I haven't gotten very far in the game (I've only beaten one dungeon so far), but the items so far have been typical Zelda: bow, bombs, shovel and the shield. I'm not a fan of that, but I do like how the shield is an item you have to press the button to use, rather than an automatic thing like it was in Zelda 1 and A Link to the Past, and I also find it interesting how, instead of ammo, the bombs and the bow use an A Link Between Worlds-like energy meter. The story is deliberately wacky and told through the framing device of a grandpa telling his grandkids a story. I'm torn on whether or not this kind of framing device really works for a Zelda-like game. On the one hand, it does allow for a lot of fun gags through the grandkids commenting on various events, and it allows for some interesting replayability in the form of the kids deciding which enemies the protagonist will face in an area and stuff like that. On the other hand, every time I veer away from the main story to do some sidequests or some exploring, or when I read through a lore book, I can't help but think, "Is the grandpa telling all this stuff to the grandkids as well? 'And then the knight Lily read through a book detailing a bit of lore about the swamp. It read-' 'Grandpa! This is boring!'"

So do I. I think there's a reason for that: does anyone actually care about the awards? The only time I cared was the time Fire Emblem Three Houses won the player's voice award, because that one meant people actually voted for Fire Emblem. Most likely.

Well, Nintendo didn't exactly remember Metroid's 25th anniversary. Even with Dread making Metroid more popular than ever before, precedent is not exactly in favour of Nintendo doing an anniversary celebration or re-releasing the Prime trilogy for the Switch without doing something blatantly anti-consumer. What's Metroid Prime Hunters?

Oh, I see. Of course those games are available on the Japanese version of Switch Online. You know, if they added translated versions of those games to Switch Online, it probably would increase demand here in the west, but I have a feeling Nintendo isn't going to do that.

I tried the one-week free trial of it, and I managed to play through all of Super Metroid and about half of A Link to the Past. I thought it was overall okay; it's a bit barebones, but at least it works without issues (cough N64 expansion cough). I wouldn't get the whole thing, mainly because there aren't enough games on it that I actually want to try. I doubt that they will add it for two major reasons: 1. They've all-but stopped adding games to it; they have little incentive to add more games to it because of its very nature; they will reach a point where the time and cost of adding more games to it will outweigh the profits, as they aren't directly making money from the games. 2. None of the old Fire Emblem games are on Switch Online; at least not in North America, because they were Japan-Only games. When Nintendo got around to localizing the first game, they didn't add it to Switch Online; they sold it as a limited-time release.

No need to apologize. Interesting; I can understand why that would be appealing. Thanks for letting me know. Why do you think I decided to buy it for my Wii U? At the rate Nintendo's been going with remasters, I can't shake the feeling that they'll pull something like releasing each prime game individually and charging full price for each one, or only release Metroid Prime 1 and just ignore the other two games, and since I don't know how much longer the Wii U eshop is going to last, I figured that I may as well get the trilogy before it closes.

Honestly, to me, the Game Awards is a joke, so I'm largely just hoping I get some good laughs out of it. Other than that, more BOTW2 footage would be nice.

Um, thanks. Interesting. So, it's classic Mega Man with a dash instead of a slide, and a wall jump? I might get it. Might; I'm still not sure. Anyway, what did you think about my little joke regarding the various woes I've had recently with purchasing game collections?