Interdimensional Observer

Had to send in my laptop for a possible repair, so I’m stuck typing on a tablet for the next few days. I shouldn’t excuse the faults of various games simply because developers faced deadlines and whatnot, but there is a point here. I’ve heard of modders and fans of game mods and fangames who whine “the dev team at *insert company here* is incompetent” because of what fans have done. It’s not always fair, if not always wrong either, to make this criticism. Fans do what they do in their free time, no constraints, because they want to. So they give us an actual FFVII remake, but’s gatcha? Well, this is Square, and Nomura is the guy who made a gatcha with important plot details for the future of KH. It could simply be the nature of the Japanese gaming market as well.

Going through most of the 3rd Stratum, my post-Legendary Titles EOV team is filtering itself out. The Impact Brawler is maddening in terms of damage with the inexpensive Titan Killer, and I'm amazed it hasn't died more often with how infrequently I heal it. So far, it's the Deathguard that has contributed the least. Since I skipped Auto-Miasma, Wilting Miasma is rarely applied because my Graced Poisoner can often act before it. I rarely use Atonement too. Despite spending a whooping 21 SP on it, the Quick Spread Chant combination for Omnimancer hasn't done anything yet, but I do like the class. The Flying Falcon I should probably use more skills with, but the TP costs on them seem sorta high. I think I'll take a short break from EOV once I'm done with the 3rd Stratum. I've got to get back to my Switch. It seems pretty much everything at this point is destined to beheaded by the filibuster. You name the legislation, and the morgue will issue the same certificate. The Covid emergency bill slipped through b/c emergency, and doing anything else seems impossible. Meanwhile, states go ahead restricting voting rights and the rights of protesters. The decline is irreversible.

CNN said it several times that the judge will determine the sentence, which they said pleased the defense if he was convicted.

Hopefully Arise does do well, I'm concerned for the franchise's future if it doesn't. And there is no aspect where I don't rule out the possibility of failure. I wish I could I play it to judge it myself, but no means to do so ATM. Speaking of playing Tales, why hasn't Namco ported the Symphonia duology to Switch yet? Nor Berseria- which has a Japan-only PS3 version, so the Switch could likely run it. And what about a Xillia duology package? Make the franchise's long history available Nammy. --- Tales thoughts brought a curious realization into my head. For the last ~2 1/2 hours of the 60-hour journey that Symphonia is, the villain has lost, and the game becomes about stopping the heroes from losing. Sure the villain is still around, but what they're trying to do at this point isn't a real victory for them, yet if they're allowed to do what they want, then the world the heroes are trying to defend is doomed. Now I have to ask myself whether or not the stories of other games have done the same. Why? Because I dunno, it sounds different when the villain isn't holding on in the final hour to some ultimate "I win my deepest darkest desires, regardless of whatever you've done for the past 50 hours of adventure" card. I haven't processed many plots yet, but Final Fantasy V registers as another case, after the first phase of the final battle that is. Edit: Maybe FFVI too, since the villain has lost motivation and is thinking on just what is the value of existence by the time of the final battle.

Thanks to a rescheduling, instead of having to spend about an hour driving to & fro tomorrow, it was a 10-minute drive today to get my first shot of COVID vaccine about one hour ago. I'm halfway there, thank you modern science! Well, the book I was taking notes from said that medieval professors, due to the price of parchment making it infeasible for everyone to write their books and essays in academic journals, poured their heart into their lectures. Lectures, as impermanent as spoken words are, were the most readily available way a scholar could make an original contribution to academia. Books were important to the medieval education, but there is something peculiar in how the shortage of supplies made it significantly oral as well. I think there are grounds for a Phoenix Wright spinoff here.

Yeah, that happens sometimes. I heard that was the case for Mega Man Battle Network 5, BN4 was the best-selling game in the franchise because BN3 was great, BN5 sold terribly because BN4 is the absolute worst. Did they actually perform Astra, or did they merely shout "YAAAAAAH!" swinging the sword with such brute strength that upon hitting the enemy's solid metal armor, the sword broke into four pieces that dealt the subsequent hits as they flew into the bad guy?

The final Civ VI rebalance update is a bit disappointing. Maya have a much better start now- provided the map doesn't throw too many mountains or water or snow or tundra their way. And Khmer, Mapuche, Spain, Canada, Scythia, and Georgia all got good tweaks too. As did Gorgo. But Scotland and Poland are all basically unchanged when they already were problem-plagued, while awesome Nubia and so-so Kongo debatable side-grades. They toned down Russia without improving Peter's weak leader ability, and for some reason they slightly buffed the already very strong Korea. How about a post-final update that fixes Scotland, Poland, Kongo, and whoever else I'm forgetting that needs refinement? There can never be enough revisions!

Tales, despite being Namco's big JRPG franchise, doesn't seem to have crashed like a Sonic 06 situation, but it's in a slow-burn decline, so it seems. It was on skyrocketed in popularity with Symphonia (the first 3D title) and Abyss back in the first decade of this century. Vesperia did amazing and seems to have been its zenith in popularity, though Symphonia has higher sales. After Vesperia it was Graces- good gameplay, one dud of a plot and characters, so it's meh overall. Then Xillia, which is a little unusually short by non-portable/spinoff Tales standards, though Milla Maxwell be a popular character. Xilla 2 was so-so (so I'm told). Zestiria was garbage (so the general consensus goes). And Berseria is good (I think), but the positive reception (aka sales) wasn't spectacular. The franchise needs a game to hit it unequivocally out of the park again. Tales needs to reclaim its position as AAA JRPG material.

The Whitewing trio of FE are the Golden Goddesses who created Hyrule. There are three, they are female, they have triangular powers, the colors mostly match, they venture somewhere new. It makes perfect sense. Bartender! I'll have one "Screw Attack" please.🍸 ...Now if only I could figure out what booze to put in there. I was thinking using a screwdriver (orange juice and vodka) as the base b/c name, and then floating an orange peel atop the liquid to stand-in for the lightning bolt of the Screw Attack power-up. But I don't drink and nothing readily comes to mind of a liquor that'd change the drink's color to a dark blue or bright purple to match the ball of the unobtained upgrade.

Universities seem have to have tried to do a lot of monitoring of things. Dormitories were invented in part to keep close tabs on students. Principals overseeing the residential halls would be tasked with confiscating weapons from student (no fighting!), keeping women away from the young men (b/c teenagers/early 20s = horny as hell), and making sure lectures were attended and fees paid. Or worse, a student who rents a cheap apartment off-campus and spends all day drinking at bars and goes robbing and murdering at night. Some universities made it mandatory a graduate spend 1-2 years teaching there before they could abandon their alma mater. Universities tried to regulate booksellers and parchment-makers too. Books had to be of good quality, booksellers had their profit margins capped, bans were placed on hoarding books to create artificial scarcity to drive up the price, a portion of the university grounds were set up as the official book & stationary marketplace, the number of licensed sellers was controlled. The burdens of weekly book-inspections were so onerous, that faculty assigned to the task were free of all other academic obligations for the year. The Middle Ages were primitive in some ways sure, but academia at least could be sophisticated (well past the late ~1100s when the first universities sprang up, the earlier Dark Ages side of the Middle Ages wasn't as "modern" bureaucratic, or educated for that matter). I think that summarizes Xenogears.😆 If there was one think I could tweak, it'd be Fei getting up and throwing that chair, because Disc 2 chucks so much at you so quickly it can be difficult to comprehend it all.

IRL, victorious armies did sometimes force the losers to join them en masse. They tended to be disloyal and melt away from desertion when they got the first opportunity to do so. But inflating your troop counts has its uses I suppose. Considering FE fighting is about small elite forces, I think the IRL example makes less sense. Although some generals loyally joining up if their original master has been utterly eradicated and there is no hope anymore with that side has happened.

Sounds like it to me. Student debts that only take effect when you can afford them. My own question is whether you had to pay the school back if you didn't graduate, which was more likely than not. German universities in the 1400s had a 50-80% dropout rate, only 3 or 4/10 students completed the 6-7 year program for a Baccalarius (Bachelor's) of the Arts degree, and only 1 in 10 students spent the additional 2-3 years for a Magister (Master's) degree. (Law and Medicine were two of the original doctorate fields and required 6-8 more years of study. While Theology, the third and highest doctorate program dubbed "the Queen of the Sciences", required up to 15 years of additional study and being a minimum of 35 years of age to receive your doctorate.)

If you'd care for the demographic notes: TL;DR It was mostly urbanites from the middle-ish classes ("the middle class" as we know it was created at the very end of the Middle Ages/the start of Early Modern Period). Nobles were fairly few at first, and there is no way you'd send the heir to the throne to a university, or have the headmaster be the pope. Yes, it's 3H that made me want to read a little on the subject, to see how the real thing functioned.

Exactly: As for the first major statutory offense... ...the schools totally misplaced their priorities. Look on the bright side, undergraduates didn't have to purchase a single book!* And you didn't't have put up with written exams! *Because it was entirely expected that undergrads wouldn't be able to afford their books. This was before the printing press, so every book had to be written by hand. And paper had yet to cross the whole of Asia from China to Europe, parchment and vellum are more expensive than paper, as they require the skin of many cows. Also, you were expected to take notes on the lectures since you had no books to read. Or you could be sections of the books for less, or you could steal copy them yourself from someone who owned the books, or you could buy their notes on the lectures and books. -Don't expect to borrow anything out of the library though, they're off-limits to undergrads, and open only a few hours a couple days of the week. The libraries have small, fairly unorganized catalogues, and the books are literally chained to the shelves, you can place them on a tiny reading stand in front of the shelves without any chairs or benches to sit on. As for your exams, they're all oral disputations, argue with logic to the best of your ability. If you do a quodlibeta disputation wherein practically anyone from the campus can show up and throw questions at you, expect the possibility of someone asking about a hot-button controversial topic of the day b/c they like watching the world burn. Prepare for that one person who hates you to show and throw a thinly-veiled insult in the form of a question at you as well. The faculty might shut down these offenders ASAP, but they already did the damage by asking the shit in the first place.

A small slice of the notes I had taken on medieval universities:

I thought myself similarly smart the one Lunatic time I winded on him. In my case, he never got to hex once, I moved in before that could happen IIRC. The game mustn't be explaining things correctly. Nina is an enemy and can become a pincushion for arrows and flames and swords and what have you, and she'll still be recruited afterwards. Makes things fairly easy.

Flawless, the Hippogryph was battle went perfectly. I was overprepared, and this was my fourth time going through the game, but still, not a single mishap. Four Goat Earrings equipped to make the boss's turn 1 Panic a total waste unless it went for my Botanist. The petrify infliction landed on turn 2. The Overexertion > Thunder Fist hits did over 600 damage per turn paired with Target Arrow and Volt Oiled normal attacks from my Harbinger and Rover, Bolt Smash from the Warlock, and (amazingly crappy) Volt Jars from the Botanist. Chain Blasted the Hippogryph for a total binding when the petrify wore off after several turns (which was great given it took 1 turn for one of the giant scorpions beforehand to shake it off). The binds lasted through two attempted Sky Dives, which didn't happen, and the subsequent Rests didn't last very long thanks to my sheer damage output. I didn't keep track of how many turns the fight took, but maybe ~15 at most? -The more important thing is that the boss never hurt me once. I love it when EO lets me shut down bosses like this. Because if I hadn't, I would not have been surprised at all to see it OHKOing my Warlock and cripple everyone else. So letting me truss and slaughter the eagle-horse hybrid is fair. And thus, the Master status is finally mine for the final time. Time to adopt the last of the Legendary Titles I haven't used, making my team distinct from the prior three runs and unleashing its full power. Looking at the skills and their numbers... Impact Brawler seems very SP-efficient. Titan Killer seems crazy good, 600% damage to one enemy with notably increased action speed and a mere 7 TP cost. One point in Soul Crusher for randoms will be useful. I honestly don't need any other commands right away, for maxing Fortitude for a 50% damage boost when below 50% HP can be a priority, the Impact Brawler can drop that low in a heartbeat with Overexertion and Thunder Fist. Heavenly Aid or Abyssal Killer for a charge-skill damage multiplier can come later, although I'd rather apply Overexertion to someone instead of doing that. Deathguard needs Atonement for healing and Ephemeral Reap for damage, simple enough to get and master. Not sure if I should max Atonement right away, because of TP costs can be limiting on an Earthlain. Everything else will be fairly inconsequential and no big deal on when to invest. Omnimancer is supremely SP-intensive. One point into each of Windstorm, Rockfall, and Earthspike. Max Reserve Magic for a good damage boost. Then it's the costly trip into Magi Mastery > Quick Chant and Focus Chant > Spread Chant to max. I've a quarter of a mind to limit Reserve Magic to a single point to get Spread Chant running sooner, but it'd be sacrificing randoms performance for boss performance, which is debatable. I think I'll ignore the exorbitant SP cost of Altar and go with the six main attack spells after that looong journey. Flying Falcon needs more points in old Hawk Whistle now, and after that, I get Aerial Talons and Ice Peck to the prerequisite levels for Sky Dive, which I max for FOEs/bosses. Will it be Power Shot or Million Arrows which I use while the Hawk is prepping for Sky Dive? Million Arrows can be more than double the power with only a slightly higher TP cost, but Power Shot saves me 5 SP and doesn't require the enemy be leg-bound or paralyzed b/c Million Arrows has next to no accuracy. Graced Poisoner could be as demanding of SP as the Omnimancer. The big choice I have to make is Auto-Smoke, which will cost a serious 13 SP to get. Auto-Smoke would be excellent in randoms, but means delaying my points in Smokestone and Chaos Smoke, my core shutdown skills other than Chain Blast. Status Atk Up would be helpful too. I cherish EO's class systems.🤓 If you're not familiar with Nocturne... The first, original version of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (only in Japan)- No Dante, no Raidou. No Labyrinth of Amala or Fiends or anything else associated with them. The second, Maniax, version of Nocturne (which everyone got)- Invents all the bonus content and features Dante. It was part of a deal with Capcom, Kazuma Kaneko of SMT fame draws some Devil Trigger forms for Dante and Virgil in DMC3, Atlus can use Dante in SMTIII. The third, Chronicles, version of Nocturne (only in Japan)- The deal with Capcom had expired, so they replaced him with Raidou Kuzunoha XIV from Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha XIV vs. the Soulless Army and SMTDSRKXIV vs. King Abbadon. The HD Remaster comes with Raidou. Dante, if purchased and chosen when starting a new file, will replace Raidou. Although their appearances, dialogue and context for showing up differ, gameplay-wise, Dante and Raidou are totally identical. They boss-fight the player the same way at the same times, and they much much later join in the same way, with the same stats, with the same-merely-renamed-and-reanimated skills. Raidou in Chronicles got the Pierce effect added to Raidou the Aeon, his replacement for Dante's Son's Oath passive. Dante now has Pierce integrated into Son's Oath, which doesn't make a huge difference. But this does mean Dante won't be crippled by halved damage output when taking on the final boss on the True Demon Ending -if you should want to field him in it. And it was great with Mario Kart: Double Dash!!:

SPM handled it much better than PiT I'd say. The World of Nothing and Mimi were out there, but the rest balanced it quite well, with the Underwhere being dark-ish, but not actually dark (other than the Styx river being filled with skeletal hands and creepy music). The Shroob invasion could've been lighter in tone, but it would've required them be talking villains. Their lack of charisma, voice, and focus purely on use of force all make them too serious. And yet, their forms are not menacing, the Shroobs are not hideous or scary, they fail to be great serious evil aliens too. Well, he is property of Capcom, not Sega/Atlus, presumably that $10 is to cover the licensing fee. Raidou, his replacement without the DLC, is in-house. Doesn't explain the Atlus tax though.

Sony and Sega are playing into an old meme. That you can use as a .png, or a physical sticker if you have the printing tech for that. I like it. Baby tears being the secret cure for alien... alienification was a novel idea.

Magnificent weather, 70F and sunny, warmth without heat. -But I can't sit outside and enjoy it.😑 Carpenter bees, wasps, even a yellow jacket, I can't read about Central Eurasia in peace and serenity when I worry about something flying by and stinging me every minute. The fact the dogs want to head outdoors is bothersome too, because humanity forbid they get stung and I'm stuck dealing with the fallout of that.🐝

...I miss Custom Robo.😔 Why'd the games get 6 or 7/10s back in the day? Maybe they wouldn't, had combat not so easily dissolved into gun spam from beginning to end. If they had forced effective bomb and pod use more, then maybe the franchise would've endured. ...Reading the comments watching a few OST vids reveals a Custom Robo V2 translation has a finished alpha that sounds as though it could reach completion by sometime next year, circa a post 3 weeks ago. When I get to emulating again, the two 64 games will be on my radar.🙂

"Essentially L'Arachel's dad" Not literally her father, but rather a father-like figure in her life. Her uncle Mansel could serve as one, and he likely very well did too. But, there is nothing that says you can't have multiple father-figures in your life, or mother-figures. Setting aside modern same-sex relationships, I know Leif called Eyvel a mother-figure, and another woman in an offhand conversation too, I forget if it was the Queen of Alster, or Selphina.

Developers use placeholders from older games not infrequently, they usually hide them deep in the data or remove them entirely from the final product. There was that Arwing in Ocarina of Time's data. And for Dinosaur Planet, the game that became Star Fox Adventures, had a recently leaked beta version where Fox in dialogue is both himself and also Sabre, the character he replaced, the transition to Star Fox Adventures not yet complete. Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne had unused 3D models of Lisa Silverman and Maya Amano from Persona 2 in its data. Metroid Fusion had jewel pieces from Wario Land 4 in its data, suggesting they possibly share a game engine. Therefore, it's far safer to say that IS had conceived of a world and a gameplay concept for "Fire Emblem Wii", but were still up in the air about the story. I speculate they didn't want to commit resources to the story or at least making models of its OC characters in the game itself until they had reached the point that the game would for better or worse be developed to completion. Since the game was very experimental -a real-time FE- they never got to that phase, because they never had a clear enough vision of what final form the gameplay would take.

Dozla has seen L'Arachel for a very long time, but the exact history of their relationship is not explained. However, Dozla's Myrrh support does have this: Dozla: Ah! What do I do? Wait. Just think. I must have run across something like this before. When Princess L’Arachel was a babe, and she would begin to cry… She would tug on my beard! That would always make her happy. C’mon, lassie, grab a handful of my beard and give it a good, strong yank! So he has been in her presence since she was very young. However, as a princess who we are given no indication of being hidden or sheltered from the public, there are many ways Dozla could've seen L'Arachel without having been assigned directly to her protection.

The sequel, Nights: Journey of Dreams, is generally considered inferior to the original. Naka and Naoto Oshima, the original game's director, had also left Sega by then as well, they had nothing to do with it. It should be added that the original had its own dedicated controller made for it. And the first Nights pushed the technical limits of the Sega Saturn, while the sequel wasn't a processing masterpiece that might not have aged properly in other aspects either. As for the Billy Hatcher game I mentioned, it's a quirky game, with a cheery, sunny-side up charm. It's not a great game because it's over-easy, no real story or character interactions, and the controls with rolling giant eggs are a little scrambled. I used to own this game myself.