Eiyuden Chronicles
Despite playing on the highest difficulty with all extra challanges, it’s quite chill right now. Due to some quirks in how EXP works, one of my characters shot up 35 levels in a single fight. While he is lvl 55, everyone else - including my enemies - are around lvl 28.
Just looking on youtube, you can find binaural beats for pretty much anything: inflammation cure, pain relief, changing your eye colour, finding love and becoming rich. All the ones I’ve looked at feature comments from people claiming they’ve helped them.
They can’t possibly do all of the above and I don’t think there a studies proving anything but a placebo effect.
And, without truly believing in them, they never had any effect on me. I’ve tried them in my youth.
Continuity. Nothing ever matters with comics. Superman was a communist, a nazi, a zombie, a literal god and everything inbetween. But most commonly, he is about the same he was 50 years ago. Meanwhile I’ve been growing up alongside famous manga characters. I could be following Naruto to this day and he’d be roughly my age at most points.
Variety. I’m not into comics, I admit, but almost every popular comic I’ve seen is about some kind of superhero. Manga on the other hand have a wide range of topics and target audiences.
Accessibility. I can read a lot of manga right now. Offical, free and online (at least the most recent chapters). There’s no such thing for comics. And while we’re at it: Manga release at smaller chunks in shorter time intervals, which keeps more attention. Being black and white does help, I’d assume.
Anime. They are mass produced and serve to promote manga. There is no equivalent with comics and extended media like cartoons or movies and such often follow their own storyline. Assuming I’d be into the MCU, there is no single comic I could read to see exactly what’s next. If I watch a season of Jujutsu Kaisen, I can look up the correct chapter and continue the story seamlessly.
I don’t play actual shooter myself, however, both Pokemon Snap games fit your description - might be worth a shot.
It’s a pet peeve of mine, I hate stealth sections. Waiting around just isn’t fun and most stealth sections are just that.
However, that was years ago. I haven’t encountered one in a long time since I mostly stopped playing AAA games - by now these games are an amalgamation of so many worse design decisions, I almost miss the time stealth sections were my biggest issue.
Yep, there’s both a normal and a hard mode - normal is quite easy. On top of that, you can get most digimon without much trouble, I just happen to like the ones that are difficult to get.
There’s also a farm feature where you can level digimon passively. Due to a bug on the switch version, the ingame clock and therefore the farm continue running on standby if you don’t close the game properly.
My partner and I are playing through “Digimon Stories Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memories” in some kind of challange run similar to a Soullink in Pokemon games.
The Digimon Story games are basically just grinding, but sometimes I’m in the mood for that. Although, I prefered the older ones on DS.
Digimon have 7 different stages and many different paths to evolve from their first stage to their last one. Bacially everything can become everything. Each stage starts at level 1 and is stronger than the one before, with certain stat and level requirements to evolve. They can devolve too and that’s where the grinding comes in: There is a special stat called ‘ABI’ that’s raised by d-/evolving. If you need a certain amount of ABI, you will train your digimon, evolve it, devolve it right away and start from level 1 again. Repeat until you have enough.
During older games, you would accumulate power by doing so - you kept a certain percentage of your current stats when devolving. In the Cyber Sleuth games you don’t. Each Greymon e.g. has the same base stats at the same level. ABI only slightly increases a hard cap for permanent stats you can get from a different mechanic. It’s kinda tedious.
From what I’ve seen he only gets up tight about food not being prepared traditionally. And like, I don’t care. As long as I like the taste, I don’t care whether or not it’s accurate.
Half my favorite foods are versions that would probably be considered war crimes in their country of origin - at least by snobs.
It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.
Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.
While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
For the sake of adding something new, X is pareto optimal in terms of having both the best and the fewest games.
I’d probably be content with only playing games from the Xeno- meta-series alone.
Anything Dragon Quest needs to be on the list!
A rectoscope. It goes up your arse to examine it from the inside.
Despite loving the genre overall, I bounced off KoA multiple times. Maybe it’s time to give it yet another go. I just wasn’t in the mood for MMORPGs - which the IP should have become iirc -, I guess.
If you cannot trust in a randomly selected group of people making good decisions, can you trust in any kind of democracy? I, for one, prefer ‘dumb’ people being directly involved instead of having a lying contest every so often to see which actively evil person can get the most ‘dumb’ people behind him.
Politicians. Don’t get me wrong, we do need them, but I strongly oppose the existance of people who never did anything else.
I believe we’d be better off with a new set of randomly chosen citizen every so often. Kinda like jury duty.
I’m glad people are finally coming around to this. There is still fun to be had in Skyrim, but it released around the same time as Dark Souls, Witcher 2, Risen 2 and Fable 3 among others. Not all of them are better games, however Skyrim most certainly isn’t the best one.
I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.
Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.
Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.
If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.
Performance problems aside (menus take ages to load in), I like the game quite a bit. There is just so much stuff: 120 characters, two additional fighting systems for special events, a card game, a bayblade minigame, a castle/town upgrade system and probably much more - I’m not even halfway done. The combat is quite auto-attack heavy and therefore simple, but keep in mind I’m olaying with double MP cost for all abilities (one of the additional challanges to tweak your own difficulty, like the ones in Dragon Quest XI).
As for the EXP thing, there are a few things that happened to align for me. EXP works like this:
Now, what actually happened to me is: I fought a unique mini-boss encounter with 5 enemies. I was overall underleveled and got wiped twice. The third time however, I won with only my weakest character still standing - he was 8 level below my team average. He got about 1200 EXP for the level difference * 5 enemies * 6, since only he survived, resulting in about 35 level ups.