Slumber

Because Edain had a secret love affair with Lex.

If you don't like that it's that so black and white, that's cool. But a story isn't good based on if it has prominent grays. Black and white stories tend to be pretty compelling(Everybody loves rooting for the good guys now and then), and plenty of stories that try to present shades of gray fall flat.

Saudi Arabia is pretty ground zero for terrorism in the middle east. But they have money, so they get to slide by.

Radiant Dawn did a better job. I wouldn't be surprised if half the reason they scraped supports was to put more effort into base convos.

This was not in your original post, and the former still applies to Shinon much more than Soren.

That suits Shinon more than Soren. Soren gets told off, is the butt of jokes occasionally, and develops as a character, which is pretty atypical of the "edgy teenager appeal" character. Shinon's the one who's an unabashed asshole who doesn't really get any comeuppance like Soren does, and outside of his development with Rolf, doesn't really change as a character at all.

I can't remember. There were a lot of pre-release interviews that they gave to try to explain the roster choices. But I do remember one where they basically said "Yeah, we'll do a more obscure roster if we get a sequel!""

I mean, Soren definitely does have his moments. But none of those moments lead to Soren becoming the final boss of the game.

That interview that came out shortly before the game came out seemed to hint at this. Basically, they wanted more obscure pulls, but kept getting told by Nintendo/IS to pull from popularity polls and the big sellers in FE(SD, Awakening, Fates). Then they basically said "WELL IF WE GET A SEQUEL WE'D GET MORE FREEDOM TO PICK!"

Yeah, PoR Soren is where the Takumi comparison makes sense to me, though Soren never crosses that line into straight up unlikable like Takumi does. He just kind of straddles the line of general unpleasantness. RD definitely rounded him out a lot more.

I was tempted to say Skyrim as well. The RPG mechanics are super streamlined and way too simplified compared to the games that came before this. Without the flexibility of previous ES games, the core gameplay struggles to hold up a 100 hour adventure. The writing's awful, too. But I still like a lot about Skyrim, even if it's not nearly as amazing as I thought when it came out. Similar deal with Fallout 3, which I am tempted to say is a game I dislike these days. Replaying Fallout 2, and playing New Vegas after it made me realize that, surprise surprise, Bethesda went overboard with simplifying the RPG mechanics and the open-endedness that the series became famous for. The DC tunnel system ruins the open world, and the shooting mechanics are just bad. Since they didn't add iron sights yet, your only way of reliably hitting things in combat is V.A.T.S., which becomes incredibly tedious after a while. The writing of the main story(I'm starting to think the people who knew how to write at Bethesda left mid-development of Fallout 3, and never came back, because Bethesda's writing has been atrocious since) is also really bad, and the fact that they needed an expansion to address how awful and pointless the "Selfless sacrifice" at the end of the game was? And that the story of Fallout 3 is straight up a rehash of Fallout 1's, but with a really, really bad dad story? The RPG mechanics, gameplay and world of Fallout 3 hasn't aged well, and the story, IMO, has never been good. Which is bad when it was supposed to be an evolution of a franchise known for its writing, RPG mechanics and world(At least they got the spotty gameplay down!).

Kingdom Hearts 2. Another Square title, Final Fantasy XIII. Those are the two big ones that come to mind. There are probably more.

Stupid. Stupid is the correct word here. American politics are very, very, very stupid. Trump is the product of our own undoing. Every day I wake up, wondering "Could today be any dumber than yesterday", and every day that question is answered almost immediately.

The actual reason is that Berserkers weren't in the game, so IS had to cut him, because they weren't going to give some random duder who nobody gave a shit about a unique class. Which reminds me: Add Berserkers back into the game and give them a third tier.

Yeah. You know how they hold style tournaments in DMC3 at certain fighting game events? I feel like Odyssey should get something similar.

It basically is them establishing their feelings towards their jobs. Saizo feels great guilt and pain that he has to do it, saying he remembers the faces of all of his victims. Beruka tells him she feels nothing. It does a good job at contrasting the two, while also showing how they're connecting over their job. Certainly much better than a series of dots for laughs.

Right. So tell me about how exactly Beruka and Saizo find common ground as assassins and how they feel about killing? Because that support is straight up replaced with a series of ellipses in the Treehouse translation.

I've come to the conclusion that Sony conferences just aren't for me. I feel like they're all the same, and they always showcase games I really don't care for. Sucker Punch's new game could have been a cool reveal, but since it's a Sony game, we don't get to see any gameplay in the trailer. The very end when they said the last trailer was a game that was heavily anticipated, I immediately went "It's The Last of Us 2. Don't even try to be coy about it.". But as the trailer started, the tone and style actually caught me off guard and had me interested. People were using terms that weren't used in TLoU1 and I was like "Wait, maybe this is some new, interesting horror trailer or something.". And then Clickers came running out of the forest at the end and I threw my hands up in the air.

502 is probably pretty reasonable. But I never thought the length of a main game limited speedruns. Mario 64 is quick when you do just main story, too. Doesn't really deter speedrunners, though.

More time spent on actually giving the Dawn Brigade actual character and character development. Maybe give them a handful more chapters and make EXP a bit more plentiful so you aren't hardpressed to use maybe two or three AT MOST. On top of this, make it clearer that Micaiah's mistakes are a bit more out of her control than they did originally. Fix the availability problem a lot of units have "Oh hai Tormod oh bai Tormod. See you again in the last part while you're still only second tier."

Give him/her a backbone, and don't make the people around Corrin break theirs in order to make Corrin feel like a special snowflake.

Pretty damn good. I think one thing that made it sound good was that it didn't feel like the voice actors were putting on "a voice". It felt a lot more natural than the other FE games, and one thing that plagues a lot of Japanese games when they get American/English voice acting is that it feels like a lot of voice actors are deliberately doing an "anime voice". Kyle could have done a "THIS IS MY ANIME PROTAGONIST VOICE!" for Alm, but it was a lot more down to earth and it never felt grating. Erica could have done "This is my demure anime waifu voice..." for Celica. Delthea could have been one of a million "THIS IS MY SHRILL LITTLE GIRL VOICE", but it never really crossed that line. Basically, the cast did a very good job at not crossing that line that makes so many English dubs unbearable, including other FE games.

True, but again, it doesn't feel like P5 suffers heavily from it. It still feels like a solid translation with some oddities here and there. If it wasn't pointed out to me, I wouldn't notice that some lines were translated by a bot and not a human. Most of the things I did notice were something along the lines of "This may have benefitted from one more proof-read, but the game is so big that a few lines feeling off doesn't detract from the experience at all". There's a pretty big gap between Persona 5 and a "bad translation". Like, say, a game removing entire lines of dialog meant for character development and backstory for a joke *coughcoughTreehousecoughcough*.

I get the feeling that Odyssey is going to have a crazy high skill ceiling, too. Just playing the post-game Koopa races shows how insanely fast you can get around with a solid grasp on fundamentals(Speeding through whole levels in 30 seconds up to a minute). I can only imagine how it will be with somebody who has effectively mastered the controls and how Mario moves. Anyway. Post-game throws some interesting stuff at you.

Just to point out: The group of people who were harshly criticizing Persona 5's localization and made that website also used Fates as an example of how to properly localize a game. So yeah. Yes, Persona 5 uses repeated phrases and makes weird explanations to explain VERY Japanese things, but it's a 100 hour, super dialog heavy game just with the main story alone. It's a pretty damn good localization when you contextualize those weak moments.