Slumber

It was like 1/4 likes, 3/4 dislikes. The comments... Well, I'm sure you can imagine based on the like-dislike ratio.

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now.

Oh boy, Suicide Silence. Ironic, because that's kind of what I want to do and want to achieve when I hear them.

I'm actually really happy that they're giving Jumping Flash some love.

Human psychology. As people have mentioned, it makes no sense from a human perspective to see people being evil for the sake of being evil. Humans are social animals, and we got to where we are through co-operation and helping each other, spreading knowledge and resources to people who want and need them. Seeing people be good for the sake of being good isn't something we really bat an eye at, since, at face value, it's something we've been seeing and doing for tens of thousands of years. Seeing people being evil for the sake of it, on the other hand, is completely counter to how we evolved as a species. It makes no sense. It's not like we can't comprehend evil or why people do bad things, but seeing people do bad things just because is something we only see when we're trying to teach children the difference between right and wrong, or in stories that are trying to say something about it. Or if somebody has a legitimate mental illness. Fire Emblem is none of these things, so continuously seeing people be evil for no reason draws a lot of ire.

He's a 12 year old trapped in a 50 year old's body?

The new content is nice. Kind of a bad place to pick the game back up on, though. Definitely tougher than the last few major patches.

Negative feelings towards the series aside, it's always had very nice artwork and boxart.

Alright, well what do we do about Leonardo?

I feel bad for Sam Bradford. He was the Golden Boy for the Vikings for like, 5 weeks until we were reminded of his glass bones. Now he's playing for the Cardinals and getting shut out by a team people had to be paid to see. I think tickets for that game were like, $6 just yesterday.

Ravens dominate week 1, lose to a team they should almost never, but consistently do lose to. Steelers tie the BROWNS and then lose to the Chiefs. Pats will probably lose to the Jaguars. Buccaneers beat two of the best teams from the last season in the division. Browns are actually doing alright. Two ties in succession. I'm kind of happy to be a Vikings fan right now. It feels like they're one of the teams performing at the bare minimum of what's expected, even if they are contributing to some of the weirdness by getting a tie against the Packers.

... You DO realize what game Leo is from, right? That's not going to be a breaking point at all. The people who'd be bothered by that already probably don't give a shit about Fates' characters, so it probably affected him very minimally.

It's alright. It's not like RE2 Leon and RE4 Leon are actually the same character... Or RE6 Leon, or any of the movie Leons.

Resident Evil 4 is one of the most reverred games of all time, and though it came out on basically everything, it's probably most well known on Nintendo consoles(The original being first released on the GC, and the Wii's motion controls adding a lot to the game for most people). But yeah, definitely FE Leon.

They're moving to a kind of "seasonal" format after this, and they'll drop episodes in chunks like they've been doing with the finale of the Cell games, so it'll probably be whenever they're done with their other projects, and they have to do Bojack before they get to Buu. I'm gonna say early next summer.

Probably. They said that the Cell Saga was their opportunity to show how much they love the series, which ended up making it more serious than the Saiyan and Frieza sagas. The Buu Saga will be them just having fun with the series.

So they're continuing on with the Buu Saga. That's nice.

After a certain point(AKA Mortal Kombat 2), I don't think you'd find many people who'd go to bat for pre-reboot Mortal Kombat. Just a string of slightly above-average fighters at best, completely embarrassing at worst, with bad spin-offs here and there. Shaolin Monks was a great co-op game, though. It's amazing that the series survived the decade of questionable quality between 2 and 9, and I'm convinced Ed Boon had some back alley dealings with shady people to push copies of these games.

I can safely say Isabelle is the first reveal that I give absolutely no shits about. Oh well. Can't all be winners, I guess.

I used to be really into it in middle and high school in the mid-late 00s. The unfortunate era when hacks like Dane Cook and Jeff Dunham were all the rage, and the Blue Collar Comedy guys were still relevant. But also an era with plenty of legitimate talent, and the resurgence/influence of Mitch Hedberg. By college I mostly listened to it to fall asleep to. Haven't really payed attention to stand up in the last 5 years at all, though.

It's one of those things where I wouldn't have minded if it was any other franchise, since it's still a lot more open than most JRPGs these days. It's mostly that it's specifically DQ that bothers me, since they filled a pretty unique niche within JRPGs in that regard, and this game being so rigid with no real payoff in the world and story structure for the first half of the game.

Basic line of thinking for me would be "Would this person be cool being my designated driver?" If yes, friend. If no, acquaintance.

Oh boy, I've got quite a few... I'll echo Xenoblade Chronicles. As a huge Xenogears fan(Meaning I'll put up with a lot of shit when it comes to gameplay), I just can't get past the gameplay. The original game broke me at the end game, and everything I've heard about the franchise since has just pushed me more and more away. I'll also say Uncharted and toss in The Last of Us for good measure. I actually really enjoy the first two Uncharted games, but the more these Naughty Dog games take control away form the player, the less I enjoy the games, which has been more and more frequent since Uncharted 2. It really lost its charm, and it got to the point where I saw little difference in playing their games vs. watching someone else play them. They're solid third person shooters, but there are better/more interesting ones out there that I'd rather spend time with. With its recent revival's success, God of War is another Sony-exclusive series that I just can't get behind. The original games were sup-bar action games with cool cinematics and set-pieces. These are not my priorities with these kinds of games. Though admittedly, I'll say God of War 2 is very solid, and it hits all the right marks I'd want out of a GoW game. It's the most fully-fleshed out when it comes to typical action game mechanics, it leans into the idea that Kratos is an irredeemable piece of shit that is just a vehicle for insane violence(Which he is), and there are a ton of fun bosses that are more than just shallow spectacles that can really only be enjoyed once. 3 pretty much shits all over 2 by immediately getting rid of all of the stuff Kratos got in 2 that actually made the series a competent action franchise, and the series has lost me ever since. The reboot is fine and all that, but it's one of those "everything games" that just stretches itself way too thin and just makes me want to play the games it's clearly inspired by instead. And though the franchise is dead and its developers went under, Dead Space was one of my white whales of last gen. It aggravated me every time everyone called it "survival horror", as shooting was the only way to deal with problems I'd say... 90% of the time. And Isaac's pretty overpowered is even without guns. Often you got locked into a room until you killed everything, which, to me, is antithetical to a "survival" game. So what I was left with was a deliberate, slow, atmospheric action shooter. Which I don't normally have a problem with. I love the Bioshock games and stuff like that, but the horror element just made the whole thing feel... amateur, despite a clear level of polish given to the overall presentation of the game. Some of the silliest monster closets and kinda goofy designs all over the place. You could pretty much tell when a Necromorph was gonna pop up. And then the weapon variety of these games... The way weapons were handled alone would have been enough for me to go "Yeah, this is a pretty bad action game, too". You can beat the game pretty handily with just the Plasma Cutter, and in fact, it's much easier to do so, since limiting yourself to one weapon and upgrading it is a really easy way to ensure that you never run out of ammo. Whoever decided the drop rates of weapons based on whether or not they're in your inventory did a bad job. A game like Resident Evil 4 will still give you plenty of ammo for guns you aren't using, incentivizing you to try more out, and ensuring you just don't have a mass stockpile of ammo for your best weapons. Dead Space? Nah. You'll rarely get any ammo(I think you might even only get ammo for guns you have) for anything you're not using. You can limit yourself to a single gun, focus on upgrading it, and blow through the game. And this is just the first Dead Space. The second one fixes none of the core problems I had, and doubles down on several. Monster closets get way sillier, the "You have to fight your way out" rooms become more prevalent, the monster designs become even more try-hard, and it stopped being slow and deliberate. It was just a poorly lit action game. I didn't even bother with the third game. EDIT: Oh, yeah. Kingdom Hearts. I don't even want to go into my problems with that series. There's nothing more that really needs to be said about it.

As a quick snippet of what I'll be getting at: The overworld being so linear, segmented and guided is really a turn off. I've always loved Dragon Quest games because they felt like a big adventure. Often you only have vague ideas of where to go, and figuring everything out is up to you. Sometimes you come across areas that you aren't ready for early in the game that you can come back to later, or there are multiple places you can go to at once and you can complete the games in different orders. The only ones where this didn't really happen in were 7, which had narrative reasons for this, and 9, which was structured in more or less the same way as 11, which I gave some slack for for being a handheld game. The addition of a mini map with quest objectives all over it is part of the problem, and it's hard to "organically" explore to world, which is part of what made past DQ games feel like adventures. The combat is pretty restrictive early in the game. The ways you can build your characters is pretty limited, and it's really difficult to get a grasp on what roles characters can fill. Your Monk character will be a better Healer than your Healer, your all-around Support character will be a better Rogue than your Rogue beyond the ability to steal, your all-around offensive character will make a better physical offensive character than your character that's strictly limited to physical offense... Stuff like that. The only character that is really clearly defined up until a certain point is your Mage. There's just a ton of shit in the game that doesn't really add anything. The ability to move in combat is more of a nuisance than not, and it doesn't change anything about the gameplay for the better. Once you realize you can turn it off, and by doing so find out that the free-roaming in combat actually gets rid of the cinematic camera angles in combat? It's baffling that it's included, and that it's the default option. Jumping, similarly, is very underutilized, and the fact that most vertical traversal in the game is done with button prompts only makes it more confusing. It really only amounts to finding a small handful of chests in cities, and those are rare. The included Draconian Challenges are fine for the most part, but they REALLY didn't play test the Super-Strong Enemies challenge. There are some insane difficulty spikes in the game, due to how stats work in the game and that this challenge equates to a flat 30% stat buff to enemies. Some bosses cross stat thresholds that they clearly weren't supposed to cross at those specific points in the game(Random bosses that narratively aren't a big deal getting up to six turns for every player turn by mid-game). I will say, by and large, the second half of the game addresses a lot of the issues I pointed out in points 1 and 2. But I still think that these things aren't super great that you have to be about 40+ hours for it to really start feeling like a Dragon Quest game. To me, at least. 3 and 4 continue to be problems throughout the game, though. As does the unfortunate music. This game makes me hope that Square-Enix remakes the rest of DQ3 with this level of polish, though.

Time to track down my middle school buddies and relive the nightmare that was arguing over who had to be Chalice Bitch.