I’m migrating to lemmy.zip, at least for the short term. They also have public instance reports, which was the major reason I joined lemm.ee. Transparency and accountability is essential. I guess the fact that those reports got more and more sparse at lemm.ee was a canary in the coal mine here…

Still the best synthesis of story and gameplay I’ve seen. The game’s phenomenal at attaching you to characters through gameplay (and it tells you early what exactly it’s gonna do with that, too).

The sequel does it too, but in a very different (and very bold) way.

Skyward Sword was a weird one for me. The motion controls drove me nuts almost all the time, except when they didn’t and I was having a blast. Unfortunately, that wasn’t super often, and when I finally did get into a groove, it was the very end of the game. The final boss felt really good. But then it was over.

The third dungeon is also one of my favorites in the series and the story has one of my favorite Zeldas (the character) in the series, too. At the same time, there were also large stretches I hated. So many ups and downs for me.

I started a HG/SS Nuzlocke recently–first time I’ve done one–and ran into the same trouble I always do on hardcore/high-risk runs: as soon as it starts to get easy or too predictable, I completely lose interest.

Miss that era of Pokémon something fierce, though.

Absolutely. The vast majority of my sites do just fine when whitelisting only the primary domain. I consider it an essential add-on myself.

Lemmy is one of the few that needs a little babysitting, and it’s only for the purpose OP stated.

Crypt of the NecroDancer is a steal at $3. And it definitely made me feel old seeing it on this list 😭

It’s the dungeon design that’s most like Dark Souls. Encounters are a bit taxing, and there’s a bonfire-like checkpoint system that similarly respawns enemies and recharges your equivalent of estus flasks. It’s fairly generous, but there are a few stretches (especially in the side content) where you’ll have to evade combat or avoid damage enough to make it through all the encounters.

This one feels like a case of patient gaming backfiring on me. It took me a couple of years to finish Ys IX, but now that I’ve waited on this, I just want to hold out until Proud Nordics comes out.

Price isn’t the only consideration with patient gaming, there are also features and bugs to think about. It’s a good game, but there are lingering issues–softlocks (brutal in a game without manual saves), crashes, and especially sound problems–that I think would warrant patience for some players, especially on PC.

Legally distinct Super Mario RPG, eh.

Good thing this one never took off with how litigious Nintendo’s been lately.

Yeah, I had to poke at Sky FC for a couple of years, and it took pandemic lockdown for me to get through it. I didn’t get grabbed by the series until Sky 3rd. So glad I did, though. Zero and Azure are some of my favorite games ever.

I like what I’m seeing with the scenes in the upcoming remake, but my replay of FC/SC wasn’t long ago so I’ll certainly be patient on that.

It’s a lot of fun. Round-less has always been my favorite way to do turn-based. I wish they’d do more with field positioning too (like the final boss of Zero), but the character kits are almost always cool and I like that they are always throwing in a tweak or two for the battle system.

This is how I ended up almost exclusively patient gaming for years starting in 2013. I’d been locked into World of Warcraft for since its first release and Pandaria era was really the first time I started looking at other games to play. I had plenty to catch up on!

FF12, 13, 15, and 7 Remake were all big sellers. It’s more the recent, poor performances of Rebirth and 16 that have raised eyebrows (although I can understand the argument that 15 and 16 moved away from being JRPGs from a gameplay point of view).

The big names they are left with right now are FF14 (the other MMO), Nier (the brainchild of an auteur, not regular work product), and Dragon Quest. Maybe FF17 will be end up being more traditional, but with the way that series’ dev cycles have gone on top of the restructuring, who knows when that will surface.

Kinda telling that not a single one of those revealed titles on that roadmap is new. Not even a new game in an existing IP.

I’m not sure how much time they have before they start to be perceived as ceding their long-term dominance in their major genre. Persona 6 is around the corner, and RGG has also been growing.

I’ve made a conscious effort to start doing this in conversations in general instead of opening up a browser tab. Yeah, “just google it” is a thing, but asking is often enough if you’re not in a hurry, so why not?

When it comes to semiconductors, there’s always another grift.

Unfortunately, after AI, it’ll probably be military drones.

Something of mild historical interest is that Magna Cum Laude had some genuinely brilliant dialogue here and there. The abusive arcade machine and tabletop RPG scene still stick firmly in my memory all these years later, and there was solid comedic timing as well (“Are those my Funyuns?”). Unfortunately, more good lines are cut up into the minigames, which act out scenes with gamified dialogue selection. Many of the games probably have to be re-attempted to clear, too, and no matter how funny a line is, it’s not gonna be great the fourth time because you hit too many beers and can’t control the cursor. The game’s also very much a product of the irreverent college movie genre, which has aged in the worst way. Consent issues and all.

Al Lowe’s games were more highbrow, for lack of a better term, so they didn’t go quite as far off the rails. They seemed to be the kind of thing aimed at a Playboy Magazine reader. One of these, Love for Sail, remains my favorite of the bunch. I think they really hit their stride with the gameplay in that one, and the writing and the visuals were solid, though I’ve seen better in this genre since.

I didn’t see great reviews for Wet Dreams so that was an easy skip–I’ve been ignoring the series since MCL–but it’s interesting to see a high opinion of those games. I almost never see anyone talking about them, much less in a glowing way.

I ended up just switching

It’s ridiculous, and like they said, a bit too easy to break the game with. Just stack a couple multipliers and you’re one-shotting anything.