8 Years later my Steam Link is still getting regular updates
Parasite Eve and Persona 2: EP were always a bit striking to me in this regard especially because they are in modern-day settings. Also, they both don't have a young child joining the party at any point, which is a thing in a lot of the games in this list.
The high school shift is certainly jarring coming from a team of professionals in the Crossbell games, though at least it does shift to a mixed focus in Cold Steel 3 and 4, and then back to professionals in Reverie.
Yeah, I figure the best a showroom is going to do for me is just quickly eliminate a couple options.
High-end office chairs (Steelcase is another popular brand) can be found used for $500ish. Been thinking about making the jump myself lately but I'm insanely picky and I don't think I'd know for at least a week if I've found a good match (dunno about returns at that point).
I have played Tactics Ogre Reborn, yes. I think it depends on what you're looking for. The story is one of Matsuno's better ones, and the way to navigate its branches is still to this day not a device that's been used much in gaming. Parts of the gameplay are still dated, and the equipment system is on the obtuse side.
On your specific gripes, yes, the permadeath works on a "heart" system, so it's not one-and-done. That's kind of necessary too, since there are some instant death situations (mostly in the game's side areas). The good news is that everyone is qualified to use resurrection items, so the limitation for that will be money, especially early on. The game's battles--especially the story battles--have fewer rounds than FFT does. There is a generous rewind system that helps, too. Between those two factors, for the most part, it's going to be less of an issue of permadeath and more whether you can actually clear the battle.
Unfortunately, Tactics Ogre has long been notorious for NPC AI issues. It seems somewhat improved in this version but it can still certainly be a problem. Here it's not going to impede your story progress (unlike a couple of fights in FFT where it's Game Over if a guest goes down after you picked the wrong dialogue option to start the fight), but it will close the opportunity for recruitment temporarily. Rewind helps again here.
Amusingly, the game specifically warns you about softlocks, so as long as you're not accidentally deleting saves it won't be an issue. It's possible you might find yourself deep in a long dungeon and can't handle the last floors, and in that case you'll have to go back to an outside save.
Overall, I would rate the difficulty higher than Final Fantasy Tactics. As you found, FFT gets to a point where player knowledge equates to a massive power increase. Player knowledge plays a role in TOR, but not really to that degree. A solid grasp of the tactics is required, and the game does offer a far smoother difficulty curve. It's really only a certain early sidequest involving some undead that has a difficulty spike, and that's mostly because players may not realize it's a battle they can come back to later.
Definitely one of those that needs a new release. The underlying system that continued into the Advance games is still one of the best sandboxes for fans of Final Fantasy jobs. Just not being able to undo moves feels ancient today. A lot of the rest of the jank was just how Matsuno did games, though. He's one of those that thinks players should grind a bit, even on Twitter recently defending a notoriously difficult recruitment quest in Tactics Ogre Reborn.
Unfortunately, despite the otherwise reliable Nvidia leak, it's sounded like a remaster for this one isn't coming any time soon.
That Kayran fight is one of the most unfortunate things about Witcher 2. It's far too difficult a fight for a first boss, and almost all of that chapter is a drag to boot. The game is so much better after that point.
I finished Control and immediately fired up AW2 and so far I'm exactly with you on both, heh. I didn't know how good AW2 was going to look, right up there with Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077 as some of the best-looking stuff I've had on my PC.
The series is an interesting rec, I haven't seen Peter Krause in anything other than Six Feet Under.
If you're into card-based games at all, give Cobalt Core a shot. Gave me more of an FTL buzz than Into the Breach did.
This profile is oriented towards the simpler style of combat in Japanese-style role-playing games (though they do have their own subgenre of strategy/tactical games). Fewer factors in making decisions can allow for quick pacing, not something one can get on the tabletop. Katsura Hashino, the director of the latter Persona games, once described it as akin to composing manga on-the-fly.
I understand the feeling, though. I think something with like Baldur's Gate 3, one has to be excited by the visual and audio presentations to drop something much more similar to tabletop into a video game.
Picked up Control again. Had a couple people get me interested in Alan Wake 2, and I'd already played through half of Control earlier in the year before I lost interest. I'm more into it now. Not planning on playing the first Alan Wake, but I'm playing the crossover DLC in this right now.
I can't give feedback without specifics on what exactly you feel the downsides are of federating.
I will say this: in my six months on kbin and Lemmy, I have seen more assumption of good faith in interactions, and I do believe Beehaw's users has been a significant part of that. It would be a negative for the Fediverse if Beehaw defederated. That said, the users are of course under no obligation to provide the emotional labor to make those kinds of efforts.
If the reason is because your mods are saying they can't handle the workload, I get it. I think that's a 100% valid reason for defederating, whether or not it's temporary as Lemmy's moderation support matures. It's already a challenging assignment, even without a stricter ethos like Beehaw's in place. In general, there are a lot of new mods across Lemmy, and it's a significant vulnerability, in my opinion. The next big surge of users, whether from Reddit imploding again or something else like a major publication's story on Lemmy going viral, won't be about creating more buckets for users like it was this past summer. It will stress the buckets themselves, and some of the mods holding those communities together won't be ready for it.
It's light on exploration and close to a visual novel, but for non-linear narrative, it's possible you might like 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
I don't want to say too much about it, but Undertale is more about a different kind of loop structure, something unique to gaming. If you like it, you may also like Pony Island, which does work with loops a bit.
Chrono Trigger's time travel works more like crossing timelines that are in parallel but are also in motion, all with some impact on each other. Still a great game in general, though.
It's also one of the few series where I unconditionally recommend the English dub, which may make it more accessible to those that don't necessarily watch a lot of anime. Part of it is that the script relies so heavy on localized, niche cultures and science jargon, and partly because there are some crazy good performances.
I'm usually better about patient gaming, but I sunk a lot of hours into a certain very popular new release this year. The older releases I did finish:
JRPGs
- Atelier Rorona. Very chill game, enjoyed it once I got into a groove. I wrote up a more detailed community post on it earlier.
- Atelier Totori. Simultaneously more funny than Atelier Rorona and more dramatic. Went some places I didn't think it was going to go. The UI/UX in this was rough, which makes me think I've yet to play my favorite in this series.
- Shin Megami Tensei IV. I really had to fight to get through the first few hours of this one. I may not have if it wasn't my Discord server's game of the month. Had a good time with it otherwise, aside from the occasional unwinnable random encounter. Excellent soundtrack.
- Triangle Strategy. Solid gameplay, though it had fewer RPG elements than I'd like (equipment options in particular). There being a branching story was interesting, as that's not a common thing in this genre. Not easy on the ears: atrocious English voice acting, forgettable soundtrack.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2. If I said I found the gameplay uninteresting, the quest design dated and that I was annoyed by the overall look of the game, one would think I hated it. However, I sunk right into the story and got very attached to Pyra for an overall (surprisingly) positive experience.
- Xenogears (replay). Still one of my favorite stories in gaming. Desperately needs a re-release with an English script revision.
The Rest
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. What you get when you pair a visual novel with exceptional, detailed sprite art. The combat sections are meh and I ran into more than a couple annoying chapters early, but the story has really grown on me since I finished it.
- ⭐ Hardspace: Shipbreaker. My favorite in this post. Relaxing gameplay and great unconventional storytelling. If the game had a way to import my own music, I might still be playing it.
- Metroid Dread. Super annoyed by the first couple hours, loved almost all of the rest. I also had a writeup on this one.
- Night in the Woods. Cute design and dialogue. On the other hand, I'm very uncomfortable with how plausible the story is.
- Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies. Not the best Phoenix Wright. This one took me a few years to get through.
- Unpacking. Surprisingly moving. It's an interesting way to tell a story, and I did enjoy the game, but I don't think I'll be jumping at playing any copycats this might spawn.
Sometimes, “investigative” journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier’s brand of “I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff” coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn’t clear that bar for me.
This is how the sausage is made, unfortunately. Schreier has to work with the same kind of currency any investigative journalist does, and sometimes that means publishing a piece as part of an agreement. I've seen this happen for decades in sports journalism, and in turn, that facilitates a lot of what labor has needed to survive in that industry. Considering professional sports is one of the very last bastions of collective bargaining in my country, I find it easy to overlook there.
Schreier's work has similarly been important for labor in making games, so yeah, while there's garbage sometimes, I have zero problem with it.
Went back to college and I've had a 4.0 GPA through two semesters. It feels weird because I was never this kind of student before. I always did the minimum and that was usually enough for B's. Now I'm actually showing up.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet is that Chrono Trigger is going to be 25 hours or less for most first-time players. That alone probably makes it less intimidating to spend an hour or two towards the end getting ready.
Yay! I hope the instance blocking feature eases things for you a bit.
I wish I had one of these 😩
I used to run the service through the app on my Samsung TV and it ran mostly ok before Samsung pulled the plug on it last year.
I tried setting up a second PC to run it through but I get awful frame loss even on a wired connection, and even in the Steam menus!