Samias

Danganronpa is one of the biggest fandoms I see in the anime community and managed to sell over 200K copies in North America on the Vita. I imagine a PC release on Steam will push a lot more copies. It's still a niche genre but it pushes comparable numbers to Ace Attorney, and I think most would agree AA is niche, but not consider it obscure or underrated. I think WEWY was held back a bit by low shipment of units initially which makes it more rare as a physical copy than it should have been. However sales numbers are a bit misleading as far as how many people played this game as the DS had a huge piracy problem. It is a very popular game to cosplay from thanks to Nomura's fantastic art style so I think this game found a good audience.

Heh, Dangan Ronpa underrated when it had three sequels and an anime? That sounds pretty successful to me. They are even getting a PC release. As far as VNs go, that game is hugely successful. Same with WEWY, pretty sure when that game came out on the DS it got glowing reviews and amassed a sizable fanbase. The characters even reappear in Kingdom Hearts. The HD version is on iOS with a remastered soundtrack as well. I really enjoyed Lost Kingdoms on the GCN. You fling cards at enemies that either transform into allied monsters, do some cool super move, or defend your character. You can capture weak enemies to convert into more cards. The game is not very long but I remember having fun with it. I heard the sequel was even better but my video store kept renting me the wrong game so I kept ending up with Bloody Roar instead, makes me a bit sad I never got to play it.

I personally like Tifa, I didn't really find her outfit out of the realm of imagination or character-breaking, considering her 2nd job was a barkeeper and it's generally acknowledged that service workers are often also meant to be titillating (how you feel about *that* is another matter). I also like Bayonetta. Even Camilla from Fire Emblem Fates is quite popular although personally I wish she'd put on pants as I'm sure riding a dragon in panties is very uncomfortable. I think there's very few people here who are completely against sexy women who are sexually forward but the question people are asking is this: Is the sexiness essential to the character or is the costume pointless to communicating the character's personality? I feel like being attractive is a staple of video games, as people have a hard time finding ugly people "cool". However, most women are saddled with outfits that are impractical or compromising with little reason to exist. Let's take the upcoming Star Ocean 5 for example. [spoiler=Embarrassing outfit ahoy!] The game isn't out yet, but what about this outfit is going to be essential to her character? What would be lost by filling in all the diamond cutouts? Or even half of them and just leave them open in key places? How does this stay on? I realize Star Ocean always has a token sexy mage and at least this isn't AS bad as Meracle from SO4 (which makes me feel like I'm going to go to jail for looking at her), but the game has gone from "plausible sexy" to "How is this even an outfit" ever since Star Ocean 3. SO4 also happens to have taken a huge decline in quality from SO3 so I feel like the over the top sexiness of the outfits is being used as a crutch. Meh, currently Star Ocean is an easy target for "bad RPG with bad characters". More relatably, in Fire Emblem you can just point at Nowi and all the knights. People just don't like Nowi's outfit and it has nothing to do with her character which leads to people crying about sexualized children. Sully and female great knights and generals being pantsless also rubs people the wrong way. It doesn't add to anyone's character, it's just bad design for characters who are supposed to be taken seriously in combat yet wore their shortest booty shorts to battle.

Heh, those easy mode options. I actually don't mind, if you want to just play FF9 for the story and not spend a hundred hours on sidequests then this is the best way to do it. Especially for a mobile game where battery life is at a premium so you only get to play for chunks at a time. $16+ is a bit too high for my blood though, as the original is on PSN and playable on the PSP for only $10. High speed mode might honestly be worth the extra money though. Too bad the CDN$ is crap right now.

I think those top 10 sales only figure Nintendo's own software, otherwise I feel like we'd see Monster Hunter in the top 10 of the 3DS games. Monster Hunter 4U has definitely sold over 4 million copies.

The Noire-Fuuka connection is pretty funny actually. I never noticed. I agree with P3's male protagonist being too distant and apathetic to feel a connection with. The rest of the characters are held an arm's length away and it's impossible to feel SEES is a cohesive organization. It's part of the point but the MC dating Yukari, Mitsuru and Fuuka still doesn't make me feel close to them. Ikutsuki's betrayal comes out of left field except not really because by then you have reasonable doubt about trusting him. They want Yukari and Mitsuru to have something in common after Yukari shuts herself out from other people but once Ikutsuki pulls the trigger, he's not really important to the story anymore and they kill him off with relatively little fanfare. Compared to Persona 4, P3 doesn't really come together in the end as far as understanding the goal of the human antagonists. It actually makes me mad that P3P's female route is considered non-canon "what if" considering that the social links are way more fleshed out and the female MC is much more believable as someone who can draw everyone together as a team. Ignoring the inclusion of Marie in The Golden, P4 is a lot more cohesive. It has an equal amount of pacing issues to P3 as the game is forced to follow a schedule, but your party members at least aren't trying to constantly one-up each other with their problems, their attitudes are more diverse and easy to relate to, and while they resolve their plotline through the story, you get to dive in deeper with their social links whereas in P3, the male protagonist doesn't really solve Yukari or Mitsuru's higher level problems, and Fuuka is treated as a bit of an outsider.

@FoxwolfJackson

Whoo! I don't know if you picked a server yet but if you are at least on the Primal data centre we might run into each other through duty finder. Behemoth is a medium-large server but it's usually open to character creation unlike the uber big boy servers of Gilgamesh and Balmung which are on the Aether data centre.

[spoiler=Ace Attorney 5]I liked Simon the way he was... Innocent to the act of murder but not harmless. I think given the chance at the time, Simon would have really murdered his mentor's killer. His face says everything about him, with dark marks under his eyes because he cries every night wondering if he will ever uncover the truth. As for Athena, I like her as a character who overcomes her fears. It's just her plan to prove Simon's innocence that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I think the game would have been better off without the Tenma village case, which felt like 100% filler in a game where "the dark age of the Law" doesn't acknowledge the events of the other AA games. AA5 leaves all the mysteries from AA4 completely wide open and that bugs me a ton. Doesn't even look like AA6 will tackle any existing plot threads either. Personally my top pick for strong female characters would be Alphys from Undertale. She doesn't start off strong. In fact, she's downright annoying, socially awkward and unhelpful. [spoiler=Undertale]In the true ending where you finally get her to open up to you and reveal why she's always so down on herself, you realise what a horrifying burden she's shouldered alone for so long. And then she accepts that she needs to face her fears. She doesn't fear the Amalgamates, she only fears that the families she gave hope to would turn on her when they find out her experiments went wrong. In the end, she is far more confident in herself, no longer ashamed and no longer hiding from the rest of the world. And there as so many things she has done to make others happy too. She built Mettaton's dream body. She introduced Undyne to anime. She does her best when she can. Her arc is what really sold me on Undertale being one of the best games I've ever played.

Both games are amazing but they are subscription games. They come with a month of game time when you first purchase them and you can get FFXIV pretty cheap whenever it's on sale, so if you just want to polish off the story content it ends up being plenty of time. The user base in FFXI is dwindling as it is over 10 years old at this point but FFXIV is still very active. If you ever decide to play FFXIV I am Samias Lemura on Behemoth and I play pretty frequently.

6 is on Steam, but it's a port of the mobile version and they want an obscene amount of money for it. In Canada, they want over $20! Ugh. They also butchered the player character sprites by rendering them too soft and flat, and at a side angle instead of the original 3/4 bodies they used to have. The original is on the Wii eShop for 600 points and hopefully will be on the Wii U eShop soon, probably priced like any other SNES game and be a faithful port of the original. I highly recommend the SNES and PS era of games. 4 is essentially the foundation of jRPGs as we know them today, 5 is essentially an improved version of 3, and 6 may be one of the most ambitious casts and has one of the best soundtracks of all time. Then when you get to the PS era, 7 continues the tradition of huge stories and memorable characters of 6, although the cast shrinks in favour of building up a world that truly feels like it's in despair. 8 is somewhat experimental, some may call it a mixed bag but it brought us Triple Triad, so could it really be that bad? And 9 is somewhat of a return to the ideas of the SNES era, with a bright and colourful world but a touch of foreboding and danger in its themes and villains. Once the games moved into the PS2 era, 10 brought in voice acting and some may call it the last great Final Fantasy. Others call it the beginning of the end where things began to go wrong due to its linearity compared to its predecessors. 11 is an MMO and still runs off a subscription. However they've made strides to make most of the content soloable, but the concept of MMOs tends to drive people away, which is a shame. It's still a Final Fantasy game through and through. It's also the last Final Fantasy game to be made by Square before their merger with Enix. 12 ties the series deeper into the world of Ivalice, which was once only touched upon by the Tactics spinoff series, but has a sort of MMO-y vibe to it due to the way you set up commands and navigate through maps. There are no random encounters Like 11, it's a huge departure gameplay wise and also does not feature Nobuo Uematsu's music which had defined the series for ages due to his departure from the company. It's also Hironobu Sakaguchi's final Final Fantasy game, as he also departed Square Enix during FF12's production. The first HD title in the series, FF13 and its direct sequels are generally considered to be hit or miss. Hyper linear, hyper fast ATB-style combat with X-2esque role switching, and a story that was nearly impossible to understand without backtracking to read the supplementary summaries and indexes that unlocked as you played the game. In the main line title, there's very little to do other than progress the main story, only opening up slightly when you're into the final stretch. The original FF14 launch was a disaster, trying to follow in the footsteps of 11 but having some terrible quirks that were the antithesis to fun. Menus relied on server responses leading to multiple second delays to sort your inventory. Class exp potential got worse the longer you played as one class until it was functionally impossible for you to progress, forcing people to switch classes frequently. The combat was meant to be an update of 11's, but things like not restoring MP with your weapon drawn meant you saw mages just stand around doing nothing until their spells were ready to cast. And there was a ton of polygon inefficiency in the world, making the game inaccessible to people without extremely good computers. HOWEVER... I personally think FF14's relaunch, a Realm Reborn, is a Final Fantasy essential. People missed out on 11 because its design was for the hardcore, where progress could only be made if you were on top of your social game. However, ARR made the combat easier to understand by taking inspiration from games like World of Warcraft and fixed up the interface to be far less obtuse. They stopped penalizing people for playing the classes they wanted to play. The story is top notch and progressing through the dungeons is a simple affair with a party builder that draws from all servers on one data centre. Even if you only pick up the game and its expansion to experience the story, it's worth it. It trends towards the easier side, making it a great casual title to pick up every so often, but the super hardcore may be disappointed if they consume all the end game content as soon as it comes out and burn out, as it doesn't have much in the way of horizontal progression like FF11 did. (I may have problems keeping myself away from FF14)

Yeah, Rosie and Cesar are there. Left to right, top row: Phoebe, Nana, Tipper, Rosie, Gwen Left to right, bottom row: Cesar, Sly, Biskit, Rodeo, Eugene Anyway as far as colours go, I definitely haven't pushed myself these past few months. I tossed on some greys/light pinks on here just to add some shape but not really to make it pop since I spent about 10-15mins on each, but yeah, I'm in a bit of a rut because my old school days were a lot more colourful and ambitious. But I do prefer muted colours overall. I tend to go like halfway saturated, if I don't just do B&W like i've mostly done for a year. I kind of want to go to the aquarium to draw some sea anenomes though and try to do some actual paintings as I tend to be more liberal with saturated colours in physical media.

Some really quick doodles I did of my Animal Crossing villagers if they were people. I should fix up the male side because I forgot Eugene's glorious sideburns but alas. If you can figure out who's who, I commend you!

I think the thick outlines are something I do all the time but it's usually just left behind in the sketch stage. But since I was drawing stuff at work, it's all a bit on the rushed side. It could also be my chibi style leaking. My Photoshop settings are also preeeetty fat ATM.

Didn't have much to do at work today so I got to doodle a bit.

I assume SE just gave them the rights to two songs and that was the end of it. Cloud doesn't have English VA either. It's a shame, I don't think OWA would have worked because almost every song in Smash comes in at 2 1/2 mins or under and OWA is essentially double that, but no remixes at all is super disappointing. When it comes to tourney play some stages are banned from competitive play for copyright issues while streaming, such as Windy Hill Zone. I assume SE threw a total fit assuming people might play Midgar online and "steal music", so they chose the two most fitting songs in their original format and nothing else.

Heh heh heh... Well, I guess to get the image of that one out of people's minds, here's an adorable Pokemon picture.

3D World is a great Mario game, and even New Super Mario Bros U is at least a better title than its predecessor. Along with Mario Maker I think that's plenty of Mario. The 2D games sell better so no wonder Nintendo is satisfied. Mario Kart 8 is a lot more balanced and, in my opinion, more fun than Mario Kart Wii. We got the revival of Pikmin and Star Fox, and we are at least getting 1 new Zelda title. We got new IPs in Splatoon and W101 (even if the latter did not do very well), we got a port of Bayonetta and its sequel as an exclusive, we get Xenoblade Chronicles X, a great Monster Hunter 3 port, and we have a handful of solid party titles in Nintendo Land and 8 player mode in Smash Bros. It's not all roses for the Wii U but 3 main Mario titles, 1 new Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and then a handful of other games is about right for Nintendo's output in the console's lifespan. Most RPGs moved to the 3DS because it makes financial sense. More people in Japan own a 3DS and most RPG studios can't afford cutting edge graphics. After Mystery of the Emblem, the series began to decline for the rest of the SNES era, and Fire Emblem sunk to its lowest lows on the GCN and Wii while the GBA games, Shadow Dragon and New Mystery sold decently. Why would they try to make an expensive HD game for a struggling console when they already had data that their console game development cycle and costs was inefficient? Genei Ibun Roku FE# is happening because Atlus is willing to help shoulder the risk of putting out a brand new RPG and is the primary developer. Yeah it sucks for people hyped for a console Fire Emblem but the series just performs better as a portable title.

Recently Best Buy Canada got Little Mac and Dark Pit restocks, with a note that LM was exclusive, so stock in Canada is a bit different for any hunters.

I think the Wii U selection is a bit mediocre, mostly ports or multiplatform games, but the 3DS seletion is nice. If you don't own Monster Hunter 4 U, that price is SO worth it. Same with Rune Factory 4 and Azure Striker Gunvolt, and for the people who have never played it before (unlikely on SF but whatever) Awakening is pretty damn good at that price point. But Monster Hunter 4... I'm like 80 hours in and still feel like I've only scratched the surface. RF4 is at like 200+ hours. Those are two of my top 3DS games whereas the Wii U is kind of all about Mario Kart 8 for me.

Ganondorf is a pretty common amiibo, as is ZSS and Olimar, so I'm not surprised that Falco is also fairly common among these last few waves of amiibos coming out. I think Nintendo's manufacturing has finally started to outpace demand, though they do still need to go back and do some runs for early waves. Even common wave 1 and 2 Amiibo like Fox and Samus are kinda becoming hard to find (all the Mario characters have essentially been replaced by their more general Mario series figures so we probably will not see Fireball Mario or planking Luigi anymore). While I doubt they'll revisit the commons until a new relevant game comes, it'd be nice to see more Meta Knights, Pits, Charizard, etc come out, as well as a steady stream of Fire Emblem amiibos to use with Codename STEAM and especially Fire Emblem Fates.

Armatization is strong but it has many weaknesses as well. You can res yourself if the seraph is the living party and has a point of BG, you deal a lot of damage per hit with wide attack radiuses, you have a strong recovery ability, and you get a strong finisher to use especially against stunned enemies. However, you lose your 4th combo, lose out on a 2nd character for combo juggles and have no access to martial arts, making you extremely vulnerable to seraphic arts. If you fall, both party members will fall. And your power is somewhat limited by your Blast gauge and refills very slowly in your armatized state. For a very long time you do not have much variety in what combos you can perform and are mostly stuck with mono-element artes. While you get bonus grade for frequently using your Banish Blast to defeat enemies, it is not as strong as your mystic artes used as a non-armatized character. There are advantages to armatization but also drawbacks and the key to success is to find a good times to be fused and good times to be separate. It's a pretty fun system though it does force Sorey, Alisha/Rose and 2 seraphim to be your party make-up at all times.

The Canadian dollar is extremely poor right now so everything is at least 25-30% more expensive than it was about a year or two ago. That puts the price in line with the exchange rate, however my salary hasn't changed to earn 25% more so my purchasing power is eroding away and I find it very hard to make impulse purchases. I can't stomach paying $70+tax on Disgaea 5 or $60 for EO2 or $100 for Twilight Princess.

I just picked up Little Mac today from Best Buy. Standard retail price + tax.... $17. For a SINGLE Amiibo. Well, it could be worse as Little Mac before the reprint was incredibly difficult to find, but it is getting to be very expensive. I like the Etrian Odyssey series but it was something like $60 for a 3DS game, and that's just too rich for my blood for a remake. Twilight Princess bundle for $100 was right up at the "NOPE NOPE NOPE" point for me as well. Fire Emblem Fates is $100 US including shipping and that's technically 3 games in one, but $80 for anyone in the US. Who knows what the official Canadian price of the special edition will be, let alone how much stock we'll get. Xenoblade Chronicles X special edition was something like $120? I didn't even get my hands on one as preorders opened for a single day. Bear in mind that same bundle is $80 in the US with plentiful stock for anyone who cared enough to preorder, with waves going over several days. Getting my hands on Robin and Lucina seems like a pipe dream without importing from Japan, as my local store had cancelled my preorder after only receiving 1 of each figure come in.