This is where I've been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that's not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren't exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.
If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I'm all for it.
Didn't finish any JRPGs this month (again!). I'd actually been going at a decent rate the past few years, finishing around 9-10 JRPGs in a year, but I don't think I'm hitting that mark again. In October I got sucked into Hades 2, which is probably going to be my personal game of the year.
Right now I'm playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, having a good time overall and settling into a very familiar old rhythm with it. Playing through on Tactician difficulty, I just finished Chapter 2. I've been frustrated by it here and there, but I did want a challenge on replay #15 or whatever the hell it is for me at this point. A couple of minor changes caught me off guard, like how the best/worst zodiac compatibility works now. That's going to force me to rethink my Riovanes Castle strategy.
Speaking of which, I can't believe they omitted the in-battle zodiac reference chart. At first I thought they'd color coded, which seemed like a great addition...until I realized it was just cosmetic. Overall, the UIs are very thin compared to the earlier versions. You used to be able to hit SELECT and get info on literally every single part of the UI, and that's all gone now. I was pretty surprised by this considering how it looked in early screenshots. Looks pretty, but functionally, it's a big downgrade.
That said, there are good additions. The revamped poaching system is a nice QoL upgrade. The way job info is presented now should be great to help out new players. However, the voice acting is the standout: it is phenomenal. It's a step up from Tactics Ogre Reborn, which was already largely good; I think Creative Studio 3 might have the best dubbing team in the business right now. Ramza, Agrias, Milleuda, and Folmarv have been great so far. It's funny, a long time ago I used to think Chapter 1 was on the weak side, but it hit so damn hard this time. That part of the story is just a fantastic stretch of the game now, wire to wire.
Yeah, I'm also considering doing Chained Echoes for Seventh Heaven's game of the month. My track record with indie JRPGs isn't great though π
Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.
Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.
It is even a valid strategy early on to have your characters throw rocks at each other and have one character with the monk class use Chakra to heal and revive anyone. This is quite literally aura farming.
Cute.
I'm playing this now. I've played the earlier versions so many times that I used to be able to get through with minimal grinding if I wanted, but hoo boy, not on Tactician mode. Those enemy Summoners in Chapter 2 are no joke now. I didn't go the full Arithmetician route but I definitely couldn't mess around. It helped out that Mystic Arts got like a +20% hit rate buff, a nice workaround for the reduced damage my party does on this difficulty. Also got a nasty surprise with the zodiac changes. It used to be that Pisces was the safest route for Ramza on certain bosses, but in The Ivalice Chronicles, it's the most dangerous.
I just got to Chapter 3, so with poaching open I can do all the busted things, including Chantage, which everyone (!) can equip now. Chapter 3's also a lot easier than 2. Well, until THAT part, anyway.
If an Internet infrastructure giant can't make MMOs work, I don't see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn't getting funding.
It's too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don't know if it's going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.
I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it'll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.
Maybe it's because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital "J" journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I've always put the games press in its proper buckets of "previews for access" and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I'm rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).
If I had the money I'd definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I'm being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it's not being run through a vote algorithm first.
Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this π
I moved to a web browser but I can't even get push notifications working.
More iteration on the combat would be good; Limit Breaks not being missable is my #1 request. I really did not like the combat in Remake and I was glad that they smoothed out a lot of the rough edges for me in Rebirth.
The soundtrack for Rebirth was an all-timer, too, so it'd be great if they kept that energy going.
Oh, I definitely didn't have the money for it myself π My local library came through on this one. Usually it takes them more like six months for me to get new releases.