Serenes Forest's Teehee Thread

[Acacia Sgt]

And old Jimmy has reached the big 100. You were robbed of a second term, Jimmy.

[Acacia Sgt]

You know, Agate's artwork keeps tripping me up. I keep forgetting she has her mouth open...

[Interdimensional Observer]

Got back into the Civ habit whilst breaking from my XC3 false start. Did Spain on a Terra map, and then afterwards rather appropriately read a Nat Geo History article on conquistadoras- the Spanish women who contributed to the colonization of America. Now I've begun a Khmer match; I had intended to play peacefully ...but I might have gone all-in on the elephant-mounted ballistae and exterminated my nearest neighbor Gran Colombia.😆 

-Though I think I'll stop there. I had intended to actually play this one puzzle game of a kind -Terra Nil- yet I only completed the tutorial level.😅 Bought it on a sale earlier this year, as the "restore terribly-polluted environments, and then pack up any machinery you used to revive nature" concept had a low-key chill sci-fi to it. 

 

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

Monolith Soft 25th anniversary video.

@Interdimensional Observer bro some pretty big Xenoblade X acknowledgement in years, here's how we can still win.

Elma showing up all alone in the end (KOS-MOS shouldn't have been alone). -Will she always have to be this way?🤔 

Cross is too variable and too nothing (let X2 keep it that way), so I get that. Lin, well she's closer to a Reyn than a Fiora, Lin is a constant companion, but said companion isn't that significant. -Okay, Lin is a genius, and is useful as an alternate perspective to Elma's demeanor, but she's still an ordinary girl. "Significance" is also relative, because XCX's plot doesn't go as fantastical, for the most part. Given how XCX ends, I expect X2 to go all in on the typical Xeno craziness (how could it do so if it too retains the gameplay structuring of X1 -an open world of mostly sidequests with the central narrative only taking up a small fraction of the journey- is a mystery to me). Maybe then -provided they aren't too big a spoiler- Elma will start showing up with somebody else.

[Acacia Sgt]

36 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Elma showing up all alone in the end (KOS-MOS shouldn't have been alone). -Will she always have to be this way?🤔 

Cross is too variable and too nothing (let X2 keep it that way), so I get that. Lin, well she's closer to a Reyn than a Fiora, Lin is a constant companion, but said companion isn't that significant. -Okay, Lin is a genius, and is useful as an alternate perspective to Elma's demeanor, but she's still an ordinary girl. "Significance" is also relative, because XCX's plot doesn't go as fantastical, for the most part. Given how XCX ends, I expect X2 to go all in on the typical Xeno craziness (how could it do so if it too retains the gameplay structuring of X1 -an open world of mostly sidequests with the central narrative only taking up a small fraction of the journey- is a mystery to me). Maybe then -provided they aren't too big a spoiler- Elma will start showing up with somebody else.

Clearly, there's only one definite answer:

That's right, the Bestopon! Wait, no, that's Bana... ah, Secondpon best?

[Codename Shrimp]

Xenoblade 2 Spoilers

Spoiler

 

 

3 hours ago, Armagon said:

Monolith Soft 25th anniversary video.

XBC3 Spoilers

Spoiler

>Kos-mos

Yesh sure fire up the theories Takahashi xD

 

[Eltosian Kadath]

On 9/27/2024 at 10:23 AM, Dayni said:

Still true, and I swear it was even more than a hundred.

Honestly, it was closer to two hundred, but the exact number seems a little random due to random bait drops in the monetary, and it was enough below 200 that I felt more confident saying well over one hundred.

 

On 9/27/2024 at 5:33 PM, Armagon said:

When you see a guy get cooked for an opinion you agree with.

I am of a mixed mind about the mechanic myself. I think there needs to be a very strong story reason for it to be justified, and of the Personas at least, Persona 3 is the only one I think has one, both thematically and from a plot perspective (although the plot reason doesn't get explained until very late game). I don't think that mechanic should have been in P4 or P5, they were just afraid of changing up the formula too much.

 

On 9/29/2024 at 2:32 PM, Codename Shrimp said:

Lawl

First time playing Disco Elysium?

 

 

I have gotten just past chapter 11 in what is slowly descending into my reroasting of Three Houses, as I have more ranting comments about it in the spoiler box below

Spoiler

I caved, and finally decided to grind out some recruitments for paralogue purposes, but even before that I was finding the RNG related to recruitment to be down right annoying. I do not remember that being an issue before, as I am almost certain I always save scummed those RNG elements last time; actually engaging with them for this run have soured me on them immensely. First for the one I have more mixed feeling about, that there is a save scum-able RNG element to whether students would accept an invitation to tea. At first I found it kind of charming how reluctant the socially reclusive Bernie was to go to tea with me, she rejected me multiple weeks in a row before she finally would, but realizing with latter recruitment attempts that this was a random save scum-able thing, where I don't even know if Bernie's reluctance was intentional or just funny luck would take a bit of the charm out of it. If the tea acceptance rate is based on the character, that would make me look at this quirk far more positively, but not knowing for certain makes me feel rather luke warm about it. The one that really irritates me is that the B support recruitment is such an annoyingly random save scum-able feature of the game's recruitment mechanics. When I was still only going Bernie, I didn't save scum the recruitment after getting her to a B support, and I waited for over two month where the recruitment just refused to happen. I had this whole funny plan to make the socially reclusive Bernie my dancer, and thanks to one of the main ways you recruit people being tied to RNG, I almost couldn't do it in time. I ended up having to use some Faculty training (and having to save scum one into being a great at that) to pull it off in time anyway with the other recruitment method. I ended up save scumming to make sure I got the last recruitment I was going for before the end, because of how unreliable the mechanic is, and feeling that I had to do that to make a fundamental mechanic of the game to work properly sucked. Also this is a bit of a side tangent, but fuck Ferdinand's recruitment requirements, I am just going to have to see Lysithea's paralogue on a later NG+ run (so I can cheat in his support for the easy recruitment).

I don't think I would be as irritated with this save scumable RNG, if the game did also show in other places that it cared a little about the player cheesing those kind of things. The class certification is an example of that, as the RNG for that is set at the beginning of each month as a deterrent against that kind of behavior. In fact, I actually rather like that little detail, but when they show that kind of care here, it makes the save scumable element of recruitment feel more grating, as if the reason that mechanic is made to function poorly is because they did not care as much about that mechanic, which just adds to my dissatisfaction with how recruitment is handled by this game. I am moving a little beyond RNG with this one, but I also rather appreciate how the game uses a timer as a deterrent against cheesing the tea party answers, and advice box, I am probably in the minority with this, but I rather like it. I guess I can add arrow dancing not working with the divine pulse mechanic as another minor way they discouraged cheesing which I appreciate a bit (although designing the game without divine pulse in mind would be my preference).

I guess I am far enough in to have a bit of a talk about the story. First off Claude is a fraud, other characters will talk all the time about his wily schemes, and we are never shown him doing any of them. The closest we get is him cheekily foreshadowing the burning of the Grondor hill, but I remember that point latter in the game, and the closest the game comes to showing Claude make a clever scheme with planning the future burning of the Grondor hill in the battle of Eagle and Lion...AND HE ISN'T EVEN THE ONE TO FUCKING DO IT LATER IN THE GAME. The bit where he talks Rhea into letting teach attack Jeralt's killer is especially grating, as he talks up how he has a brilliant strategy, and it isn't about revenge, only to admit not five minutes later that he has no plan at all, and it totally is just about revenge. This is beating a bit of a dead horse I guess, I definitely had this complaint before, but noticing the foreshadowing about Grondor fields was a detail I didn't remember, and is such a double edge sword of momentarily thinking this was a place where they tried to show his cleverness only for the future plot to make it explode in his face. If this game had any guts at all, they would have given the three house leaders more unique personal skills, with Claude's being a page right out of Fates with a DV like mechanic that can change the map in some way with his schemes.

I guess I can add a more controversial opinion about the story, that I like how they handled the existence of divine pulse in the plot with Jeralt's death. I thought that was a good way of showing us a shorthand explanation for why that power isn't able to fix everything, so negative events can still happen in the plot. Admittedly Sothis's comment about it after the fact was both counter productive, and came across as a bit insulting, like the writers thought they needed to spell things out egregiously explicitly for the children with embarrassingly little media literacy to get it. Also the whole plot bit about teach being an emotionless robot before the story starts is just plain stupid, but that is one of the coldest and cliche takes. Onto more interesting takes, I have a soft spot for the dramatic irony of Solon basically making a greater threat to his people by trying to off teach with the forbidden timeout corner magic.

Another thing I personally disliked was how they handled the chapter with rescuing of Flayn, where you either had to make a weird story situation where you are just waiting for a month to rescue her, with Manuela bleeding out the entire time, or miss out on a full month of activities. I remember some attempts to excuse this back in the day, as this being done to reduce the writers workload, so they don't have to write alternate dialogue for everyone talking about things before and after Flayn is saved, and that excuse is made entirely bullshit by the very next week giving everyone alternate dialogue for before and after the fucking fishing contest. Admittedly this might just be them catering to other people's tastes, as I seem to remember Armagon lambasting Persona 5 for not doing exactly this with it's calendar system.

I am getting close to the end of snoring clouds (this one at least), and I plan on making a thread in the Three Houses board where I organize my thought a bit more after this, so ranting here might be a bit premature, but I wanted to rant a little more.