Oh ok. Yeah the act 3 bosses are harder than Lace and Grand Mother Silk at least

Nah Silksong doesn't really have any super hard bosses. I'm sure it'll happen with the DLC though. That's also when the fucked up bosses started popping up in Hollow Knight

This game is gonna make you so mad

The cat does not like nu-FE

Not nearly as common as loving it...

If only you had made it past FE Awakening on your journey before this...

Most of the improvements they've made so far sound good but re-blockading sounds lame. It's a giga open world that takes 500 hours to complete, I don't think you need to be un-liberating places to make sure I don't run outta content like the blood moon in BotW/TotK (which I also don't like lol)

If Yoshi is coming in May and Rhythm Heaven is coming in July, I wonder when the new FE is actually coming out. I've been saving Tear Ring Saga in case FE sucks and I need to cleanse myself with some boomer SRPG kino afterwards, but at this rate I won't even get the chance to play it this year.

Nah you're definitely right about that. Filler or meaningless content design isn't a concept exclusive to turn based, that's just what I was inspired to talk about there

Yeah, P5 dungeons were really fun to optimize and clear in one day. Same with the ones in Metaphor, including some of the tougher sub-dungeons in that game. It's just a winning formula in general.

Hopefully this doesn't come off as "I hate JRPGs/turn based." because I don't. But I do wish there was a reckoning of some sort, because turn based RPGs can have great combat and some do, but too many are all too happy to LET it be filler in between the story and I don't enjoy that design anymore.

I was able to beat all the optional dungeons and even Omega Weapon, which was a really fun and challenging fight like this. I enjoyed it so much more than I did playing FF7 or 9 as intended and doing hundreds or even thousands of battles where none of them had any meaning.

So I don't do any random encounters the whole game, just bosses and other event fights. In this way I get a JRPG experience where every battle is a meaningful encounter but I still get the fun of my party growing stronger and customizing them, being rewarded for exploration and side content.

This is one of the reasons FF8 is my favorite FF. That game has level scaling and you can turn off random encounters with a guardian force skill. When I play it that's what I do, and then I power up my party through drawing junctions from bosses, triple triad cards, and the junction spots in areas.

I think a lot of RPGs would be better if you cut almost all the fights and instead of having a fight every 10-15 seconds that you consume on autopilot, you had 1 fight every once in a while. 1 for every side quest, only a few fights per dungeon, etc., but in return they require more from the player.

But a lot of games have nothing like this. Healing items are so plentiful you can stay topped off forever or the dungeons will be littered with healing areas, or enemies will be so toothless you can just destroy them with auto attacks before they do any real damage to you. I find this very boring.

This can also be seen in other Atlus games like Persona where you want to optimize to be able to clear every dungeon in 1 day, or Atelier back when it was good and had a time limit. Basically, even great combat systems like EO or SMT need this external pressure to give meaning to normal encounters.

This turns every battle into a mini optimization puzzle where you have to make choices on whether to spend MP on your powerful skills to take out enemies quick or conserve it and use normal attacks, risking the fight dragging out and taking more damage, requiring you to use more of your healer's MP.

That's why the turn based games I like have ancillary challenges to complement the experience. EO has a great battle system, but you also need to conserve enough resources to make it to the next shortcut or fully explore a dangerous side path so you can make it deeper into the dungeon next time.

Even in games like SMT or Persona where you need to figure out the weakness against mobs, once you fight a demon the first time and realize it's weak to fire you'll probably still encounter it 20-30 more times and just nuke it with Agi on autopilot. Is that interesting? In my opinion, not really.

Many (but not all) turn based RPGs have some degree of strategic depth against bosses that require you to observe patterns etc. and formulate a correct strategy against them, but mobs are very rarely threatening and you just wipe them effortlessly by selecting a few skills or even auto attacking.

Massive rant incoming, but turn based combat can be really good (for example: Etrian Odyssey) but in a lot of JRPGs, like every Kiseki game or even famous ones like most FFs, normal battles are treated like empty, disposable content that doesn't add anything to the game except playtime.

I think that's over a year old at this point. Haven't seen it in ages. Is it making a comeback?

I've been digital only for years already and have no plans to ever buy another physical game unless I see a limited edition with some collectible I just NEED to have so this is cool for me

It took me several hours to add all my games. It felt like a herculean task but eventually I just put some music on and got it done.

I score my games for categorization purposes. It makes it convenient if I need to sift through my list of completed games for a recommendation. But at the same time I don't want to be an "I play games so I can score them on the media cataloguing site" guy, which is why I never mention my profile.

Very very true lmao

There's a lot about Crimson Desert that seems interesting, but it sounds like one of those games where the move is waiting until the 2.0 version comes out next year and you buy it for 50% off and get a vastly superior experience compared to launch.

Still on my hands and knees begging for the Switch 2 edition of this game to be fixed because what the hell is this, man?

I'm pretty curious about it but I'll be away for the weekend anyway so I'm gonna see what people say before I make any decisions on it. I probably won't be done with MHS3 by then either