Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Right or wrong are normally subjective

True, but if you have the knowledge and experience about certain subjects and somebody posts completely incorrect information based on their perceived biases, that's when I chime in.

You can say anything you want about medical and scientific information and I generally won't make a comment, but post something incorrect about business, governmental policies, and taxation, and you will be slapped down hard by logic and fact.

I work this out backwards usually. I'll typically play a game without even considering stuff like that and gauge how it makes me feel, and then think "Hmm, what about this makes me feel this way?"

It's something I didn't start doing until recently, but I find the introspection helps a lot more than trying to categorize things. I find it also makes reading reviews a lot more useful because they usually splay-out a bunch of the good and bad things and I'll be able to say like "Yeah! That's exactly the part I didn't like!"

I think the most important thing for me is cohesion. I'm OK with a few plot holes here and there, for example. But if something downright makes no sense at all, or if it doesn't fit within the established narrative or universe it drives me insane. My inability to overlook that kind of thing is probably why I usually don't like a lot of popular media >_>;

When I was younger I remember being really sad we didn't get to live forever, and would never see all the amazing things like hover cars, holographic entertainment, amazing movies and video games etc

Having seen the absolute state our elites are making of the world over the past 20 years I'm glad we don't live forever. Cause it's gonna suck!

I know in this particular thread, going back 3 pages is almost the equivalent of a necrobump, but I couldn't miss the chance.

I generally don't notice much about plot holes until the 2nd or 3rd playthrough (if those games get that amount of love).

Sure, you see some lazy writing on your first playthrough (example: FFVIII's inability to remember important stuff, like being in an orphanage when you were young due to GFs, that was completely stupid plot point), but if it doesn't outright kill the story, it generally gets a pass.

Not every game is perfect, by far. But most games I play generally get replayed because of one of the factors I outlined. Except III, that game absolutely suuuuuuuuucks.

I would add 15 to that list. I never replayed it, I heard a few things about the Royal Edition, but it wasn't enough for me to start the game from chapter 1 again. I remember when you actually started playing 15 and I told you the honeymoon phase ended quickly.

The only one I played and didn't like was XIII. It wasn't even so much the gameplay, characters, or "the corridor" that bugged me. It was the presentation. If you don't bother to add context to anything in your fantasy world, then you can't follow anything. You can't invent a language by which everyone speaks and not at least add subtitles.

I found 15 to be actually fun OUTSIDE of the main story quest. Going on hunts, dungeons, and epic boss fights, especially when you explore underground and have to fight 4 waves of increasingly harder boss fights at the end was more fun than the main storyline.

Then, when you finally run out of things to do and continue on the main storyline, it goes so straight that you would expect signs of Cup Noodles to pop out of the background to stop the monotonous. Which, frankly, turned me off at the end (the advertisements I mean. If XVI starts having the same thing, I'm just going to boycott every new FF game for the rest of my life).

You know what I really miss? The overworld/random battle fights of the older games (up to X).

Ever since they went to open world, it's been stupid.

I miss it as well. I can completely understand why they've gotten rid of it though. The screen transitions and victory screen slow things down considerably, and the inability to simply dodge fights by running around enemies are all things that don't fit most modern game ideologies.

People don't want a nice, enjoyably slow interactive experience anymore. Gone are the days of pacing within the gameplay. The general audience gets "enough of a break" when they have to sit still to watch a cutscene (which isn't even true sometimes if the game has QTE's). They don't want pacing, they want ACTION ACTION ACTION.

I think the success of Star Ocean 3 convinced SE to drop random encounters entirely. I'm not opposed to them returning, in fact I would be fine if they came back as soon as FF7R Part 2, but I don't see it. I certainly don't see it happening for 16, which I don't have a lot of hype for.

If I remember correctly, you can turn off random encounters in Bravely Default, right? That's a great way to modernize the concept. That way if you're just trying to run from point A to point B you don't have to deal with dozens of enemies too weak to be worthwhile.

Don't get me wrong though, I like open world games too.

But the only open world games I truly like are those like BotW.

I really hope they maintain that with BotW2.

Mmm I love me a good PS2 game.

That's seriously my favourite console. It fell into that perfect sweet spot with 3D graphics, where they were good enough to know what they were trying to convey, but simple enough that your brain got sucked into the world trying to fill in the gaps.

Yeah, it just depends on the game. Random encounters allow the game to flip a switch between "combat" and "out of combat" controls, which is about the only way you can properly make a turn-based or ATB-based system work.

That's probably what we miss the most about random encounters. It's not the randomness or the screen transitions, it's the gameplay that focused more on strategy rather than hand-eye coordination.

lol spacebar is totally broken on youtube still. that's so wild.

Literally doesn't function, how does that even happen. Anywhere you are on the site it's trying to control a video even if there isn't one.

Indeed a firefox hard reset cleared that up.

Works ok for me now, try clear cache or hard refresh.

Goodness I'm old... Please assist! please explain the following: Crung, vtubers,Titty streamers
I've never heard of any of that lol.

At least those virtual youtubers put effort to act out a character I guess, I was reading they are making ridiculous amounts of money. Millions.

Twitch is garbage honestly, only time I go there at all is to see DSP playing some new game badly and I don't do that much anymore because he is boring now.