Slumber

Don't play DBFZ, but Videl getting some love is nice.

If you go for FE4, just keep in mind it is one of the "oddball" entries in the series. It's constructed like an FE game, but the pace of the gameplay is unlike any other in the franchise. Once you get to FE5, that's the game that kind of set the mold for what FE is and has been since that game. It's a brutal game to play blind, though.

The Jugdral(Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 on the SNES) and the Tellius(Path of Radiance on the Gamecube and Radiant Dawn on the Wii) games are solid choices after the GBA games. Mechanically they're a step up in a lot of ways from the GBA games, but not so foreign or weird that they'd be off-putting. The GBA games were a response to the Jugdral games, taking their mechanics and simplifying them. In-turn, the Tellius games kind of brought back a lot of what the GBA games took away. Either way you should be able to grasp either of these sets. They're also, narratively, probably the most well constructed FE games, so that's a nice bonus. If your PC is decent enough, you can play the Tellius games. But if not, whatever you use to post here should be strong enough to handle SNES emulators. You'll need translation patches, though.

Ma bad. I guess I shouldn't assume that anyone interested in TRS had played it already. Also it's been 2 years since I played it last, so I might be totally wrong! In which case, boy are you in for a surprise.

Plum in TRS is a very weird case. Mostly because IIRC, it's the one case where Kaga is clearly playing with our expectations to mess with us. Up until the kidnapping in question, the vague words of the slaver has us thinking the worst. And if I'm remembering correctly, which I think I am because I was expecting the worst, once we get back to Plum, there's not much to indicate anything sexual happened. When Barts shows up at the bar to rescue her, the slaver immediately tells him that nobody gets to touch Plum, and once Barts is done kicking the shit out of the slaver, he's mostly upset because he won't be able to see Plum dancing anymore. Compared to the cases like Lara, which are left entirely for you to interpret on your own, and Leen, which... very much only has one real thing to take away, I think the Plum case wasn't meant to be as dire.

Pretty much my thoughts. Though I don't think Camilla is a very good example as "good fanservice", 80% because of the reason you mentioned, where the fanservice aspect completely consumes her character, and the actual justification for it is buried in obscure supports. The other 20% is because of just how over the top Camilla is with it. Even if every aspect of Camilla's personality lined up with her being a fanservice character and it all fit with the story, she as a character takes it waaaaaaay too far in a story you're supposed to be taking seriously. Of the Fates cast, I think Charlotte does a better job at being a character that fits in the world as well as being fanservice, though her outfit is possibly even more ridiculous than Camilla's. Also, a point against Camilla, IMO, is the part where she lusts after Corrin so hard and how it comes through the game. I know she knows Corrin's not her blood sibling, and I know she's entirely fucked in the head, but it's so skeevy. It's one of the biggest instances in Fates where it seems blatantly obvious that the developers didn't have sincere intentions with her, they just wanted another type of character to fulfill the player's wishes. They had every other archetype of incest pandering, so toss in the crazy lady who is violently aggressive in seducing the main character. Because those types of characters are kinda common these days for some goddamn reason.

Story promotion. Just make them promote around the time the game starts handing out promotion items.

I played God of War, Ninja Gaiden Black and DMC3 very close together. I played GoW first, then moved on to Ninja Gaiden, and then Devil May Cry 3. I enjoyed all 3 immensely when I first played them. But I went back to God of War sometime after playing DMC3 and NG, and was really disappointed. I didn't understand why I was disappointed, though, so rather than try to latch on to a number of gameplay mechanics and try to carefully determine what I thought Ninja Gaiden and DMC3 did so much better, my mind just went to "YOU CAN JUST BUTTON MASH THE GAME LOOK YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO BLOCK". There was also a dude I hated in my freshman year of highschool who kept bringing up Kratos in one of our classes that had to deal with Greek Mythology. Thinking back, he wasn't even a bad guy, but he wanted to be Dane Cook and probably thought the same thing about God of War as the dude in the video. So yeah. Just petty high school stuff.

I beat God of War 1 on the highest difficulty(Titan, I think) without blocking. Purely because I was a petty 15 year old tryhard and wanted to prove that God of War 1 was babby's first action game. As if blocking somehow separated GoW from "real" action games.

This is where I think the problem with the meta-game comes in, though. Once you acquire a skill for a General, there's 0 reason to use that class anymore. As happened with Awakening, and slightly less so with Fates due to the limiting on constant reclassing, you end up with an army of very similar units all with very similar skill sets and classes. Since there's no real restriction on skills(And the grinding to get them) like this, there's really no reason not to do this outside of arbitrarily limiting yourself. If you want a bigger timesink, then admittedly, this is a better metagame. But figuring out how to use classes and units kind of takes a backseat to just grinding out skills in these cases, which I'm not a fan of.

He's a Nintendo character. He's appeared in non-Capcom Zelda games.

They more or less fixed it with RD, though taking an innate skill off of a character, and being unable to give it back without a massive cap penalty isn't very fun. On that note, I think RD is the right way to handle skills. Every skill being treated the same in Awakening and Fates, and skills being tied to classes just ruins the meta-game, IMO.

I've always felt that Skullkid and OoT Impa would be good inclusions, but the Zelda games are kinda hard to choose characters for. With SSB's tendency to go with whatever is most relevant, the most relevant characters beyond the Triforce Trio are usually really hard to pin down. I'd say there are about 4 "Tiers" of major Zelda characters. You get Impa, who is probably the most consistent running character beyond the Triforce Trio, but comes in all shapes and sizes and really only has about one active role in the franchise. Then you get the villains, 90% of whom are completely usurped by Ganon in some form. You'd essentially have to pick from a bunch of second fiddles like Girahim and Zant, which would really be stretching. Skullkid is one of the few recognizable outliers, who stays as the sole threat throughout his game. Vaati would be nice, too, but you'd have to draw on TMC a bunch, and Nintendo doesn't seem to really respect that game. Then a tier lower is Link's sidekicks(Navi, Ezlo, the King, Midna, etc.), who are all supports at best. And finally you get Link's extended allies from each game. The Sages, the masks from MM, the Champions from BotW. And these are all very similar casts. Technically you could get some good fighters here, but these are bit parts in specific games, which would be weird draws.

Fuck me, I've been playing Smash for 20 years. That said, I just had one of my all time Smash highlights, so I guess I shouldn't dwell on it.

Fuck this sport.

The best thing to do is set the battle style to "Set". It's still pretty easy, but at least you're not able to just counter every Pokemon the opponent has without eating a hit or giving them a turn to set up.

I enjoyed Sun/Moon, but I agree that Pokemon games take waaaaay too long to get going in recent entries. The intros have slowly been getting longer and longer, and we're reaching the point where it's hampering the experience for a lot of people. Mostly the older people who want to enjoy Pokemon games as well. And I don't get it. Pokemon was selling 40 million+ way back when the games first launched, and the most tutorial you got was "Go to Viridian city to buy some stuff and come back." This quick errand was enough to teach every child I knew back in the mid-late 90s how to play Pokemon. And if not, there was the dude at the ass end of Viridian who would teach you how to catch a Pokemon, and from then on, you were pretty much on your own. I don't understand why there are now 3 hour tutorials in Pokemon games. It's not Dwarf Fortress. Kids are stupid, but they're not that stupid. If you want these tutorials to exist so that you can present a story in Pokemon games, cool. But don't make the experience so excruciatingly slow. Make stuff skippable so that people with half a brain can get to the part where the games open up a bit.

Broly brings the money.

As somebody who's a part of the fandoms of the latter two, no. They're nothing like FE in this regard. Most people in Zelda and RE tend to enjoy most, if not all of the game. In the few years after RE4, there was definitely a rift between fixed vs. over the shoulder cameras, but it has died down considerably as more and more games were done in the OTS style with different tones and atmospheres. Even RE7 going first person was only a big problem for a very small portion of its fandom, and a good chunk of the people who objected to it were won over by the game going back to the roots of Resident Evil. Most of the fandom these days, it's people going "Yeah, all of the games besides 0 and 6(And/or 5 and CV) are pretty great!" It's really just a handful of contentious games that span two of the prior RE styles. With Zelda, I can't think of any major divide. It's mostly just people who enjoy certain games, as opposed to others. I can't recall there ever being a "Man, 2D Zelda SUCKS, 3D Zelda rules!" type of fandom rift. The FE fandom's rift is far more consistent and noticeable. It's pretty much is squarely people who like Awakening and Fates vs. People who like the older games. There are outliers, but this is the most noticeable divide.

nah

I'm fascinated by any animal that shows a much higher than average intelligence for animals. Octopi, whales/dolphins, elephants, parrots... Mostly crows though. I really like crows and ravens.

Really? I can only ever recall "action RPG" referring to Diablo back in the 90s, when Diablo kind of was the only big ARPG. Since then, though? I see it being used to describe games more like The Witcher and Dark Souls. Even Assassin's Creed and God of War can be considered "Action RPGs" with their newer entries. Basically any game that focuses on melee combat that also has heavy RPG elements is an "Action RPG" these days. I think even some shooters can be classified as this, like Mass Effect. I don't think I've even seen people refer to top-down games like Diablo, Torchlight and Path of Exile as Action RPGs these days. Like @Jedi said, I see these referred to as dungeon crawlers or something arbitrary like "loot RPG" games. Anyway, my immediate reaction to a "Dragon Ball ARPG" is Xenoverse. I'm guessing this will be a tweak to that formula.

I'm an FFXIV shill, so I'll say that. Though honestly that's probably not an unpopular opinion when it comes to themepark MMOs. I have yet to meet anybody happy with the state of WoW since BFA landed.

Welcome. Your English is fine, so don't worry about it. I'm sure there are plenty of people who speak English as a first language who have a harder time speaking/typing it than you.

Pssh, nobody cares about the games that aren't 1 and 4. Armored tanks being cavalry is one thing. But in both 1 and 4, not a ton of commanders in either game drive tanks. Since I just got through it, the only major unit in 4 I can think of who drives a tank beyond Claude is Klaus. Minerva's an upgraded Scout(Until she joins your team and she's a normal Scout), Chiara and Nikola are unique Scouts, Crymaria's a Valkyria. Then there's Belgar, but he's kind of his own bag of worms. Have somebody else drive a tank. It's not like Claude and Welkin are the only tanks in the games they're in.