Chase Johnson - VA / Audiobook Narrator

You ever look back on something you wrote and then just ask "Why the heck did I use this word so much?"

somehow I just kept writing bevy for some reason.

This is the best Megaman Zero game to ever be released. I highly encourage you to check it out.

Oh Blizzard is pruning some of the excess mechanics for Midnight, say what about Death Knights and....yep, still gotta stand in DnD. Ughhhhh....

0 chance in hell but come on Etrian Odyssey. It's been 7 years since Nexus.

Fantastic for any fan of Battle Network, only thing I'd say is that this game's combat is *fast*. Way faster than BN got except for like Bass Omega. So be ready to just get rolled when you start it.

The persona 2 menu. Depecting the commands "Spell, Item, Data, Card List, Analyze, Config, Load, and Save." I will tell you there is an equipment and Persona system for every character. Go ahead and guess how to navigate there. It may shock you.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with the story and narrative and combat. But I just...I hate the menus. It feels like one of the worst I've dealt with since Persona 2; Eternal Punishment . It's not as clunky or slow, but just quickly parsing information from it gets harder and harder as you go 15/15.

Great because it allows for the whole playable cast to feel both useful and contributing. It handles this problem far better, than say P3:FES's stamina mechanic that tried to force you to use other characters as they got tired and left Tartarus. I just wish it wasn't done with *this* inventory. 14/X

And while you might say "Well just pick a core team of four and stick to it"...to the games credit, it WANTS you to swap party members regularly. Thanks to varied encounter design calling for different archetypes to handle specific threats, you can't afford to leave people benched. Which is- 13/X

Junah's Equipment page, showing she has equipped Weapon, Armor, Gear (I.E, Shoes, a helmet or gloves) and an Accessory called Elementalist's Mask. This accessory can only be worn by the Dancer Archetype. If she swaps out of it, she will equip an Innocent Amulet (I.E, Nothing) forcing the player to manually swap in a new accessory every time. The reverse is true if you swap INTO dancer, forcing you to dig through the accessory menu to try and find it.

Seven different characters, who are going to change what they can and cannot equip fairly regularly. And while the game does help a lot by auto-swapping to whatever has the highest Attack and Defense values...that doesn't help with accessories, especially with little annoyances like the Dancer.12/X

The SMT3 Magatama system with 30 different unlockable magatama that you "Equip" Only one of at a time. It changes your health, resistances, stats, and what skills you will learn on level up. It is a display of 30 glowing swirlies on a dark background with a list of stats on the bottom left depecting Strength, Magic, Vitality etc.

I'd argue this menu is the result of having too many equipment systems at once. Most Atlus games are actually basic when it comes to inventory: You'd either only manage equipment for one character, or it's just one set of armor and a weapon for 4. But with Metaphor, you have to manage SEVEN. 11/X

This sounds like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but no, when you spend 100+ hours of a video game, most of that is going to be in menus. And it gets frustrating trying to find something and not remembering if it was a Staff, or a food, or an accessory that you can't equip arbitrarily.10/X

The SMT 5 Shop menu, showing a collection of healing, attack and support items with Rags, the shopkeeper on the side in a clear and understandable manner.

The Metaphor Refantazio Item drop down menu: The icons are white, though distinct for Healing, Mana restorative, Food, and Ailment cures. But you cannot easily tell what ailments the items cure based on the names. The menu has tabs for Vendor Trash, Key items, info, etc etc.

Metaphor's In Combat item menu. All consumables are segregated into five tabs: Healing, Mana restorative, Ailment Cures, "Magic Items" and Food. All of the text and iconography are white. The tab is currently over "Magic Items" which consists of both Elemental Bombs and utility items that cleanse buffs/debuffs and Physical and Magic Reflection.

Metaphor's in-combat menu again, this time over the Food category. These are a collection of Healing, ailment cures, restoratives and powerful buffs and bombs.

For comparison: SMT 5's is easy to parse just at a glance. Metaphor constantly requires you to check the descriptive text of everything because there is no uniformity aside from the monochrome icons. But what makes this more infurating is that Metaphor's item menu changes in and out of combat. 9/X

There is a good reason why Mainline SMT tends to keep it's item names simple (I.E, Everything is a Rock, Chakra, Elemental Sutra with etc) It's that when you have a metric shit-load of them, finding what you need in a massive list becomes really hard. Especially when they all have bespoke names. 8/X

This is Stohl trying to decide on an accessory. We see a drop down menu of a list of accessories, some with an effect listed, others requiring you to hover over them to know what the accessory even does arbitrarily. Resulting in you not being able to tell from a glance what everything does quickly. There are sorting options, but they tend to be unhelpful, especially once you have nearly 100 different accessories.

The Accessories have it the worst: They all use a pendant icon and a rarity color, but most of their effects aren't necessarily accurate. When the Utilitarian Manual, arguably *the* best item in the game hands down is just a purple, it becomes obnoxious trying to find it in the sea text 7/X

Because every Archetype has a unique weapon type and a certain armor type (Robes/Light/Heavy) and certain Accessory restrictions, it leads to you having this massive pile of armor and gear that, aside from just using the highest Attack/Armor stat becomes a massive PITA to sift through. 6/X

But my biggest issue with the game is that the menu just...sucks. Atlus is known for their stylish menus, but they'd never sacrificed form over function to my knowledge before Metaphor. I think part of this just has to do with the Archetype system and the weapon and armor restrictions. 5/X

Once you acquire the Charge/Concentrate equivalent, the combat becomes utterly warped around it. By Altabury, it felt like everything boiled down to: One person buffs, One person debuffs, A float to either enable weaknesses or cover healing, and the DPS who cycles Concentrate/The nuke of choice. 4/X

But this only matters as far as the Goborns and whatever the Cyclops enemies are called. Which require Sleep to prevent them from triggering the hard enrage. Almost everything else is immune or the ailments themselves just aren't up to snuff to bother with. And like all of Atlus' games except EO 3/X

She's probably the least offensive aside from the brief amount of time you have Mitsuru acting in that role in P3. I'd just rather have an option to shut that off, but Atlas insists on it so *shrug*. The Combat balance frustrates me because it leads on the idea that Crowd Control is important 2/X

The title screen for Metaphor Refantazio. Featuring a boy in sillohoute standing before a grand city, with an ominous triangular building looming in the horizon.

Some quick thoughts about Metaphor ReFantazio after finishing it: The story is excellent, if unsubtle and a touch overwritten on it's themes. All of the characters are great with none who are annoying (Maybe you could say Gallica is, but as far as Persona Navigator's go) 1/X

Seeing mediocre steaks costing as much as a AAA video game on release might be the strongest form of vegetarian propaganda I've ever seen.

Air Ride had a surprising amount of content for a game who could be controlled with primarily just the A button and the control stick. Wouldn't be surprised if it's full of weird modes and gimmicks.

It's not really filler since it's the last original Megaman game to come out in 7 years. But it is excellent. Only issue I have is that it's gimmick is either really cool or really annoying depending who you ask. I personally am not a fan, but I prefer the Zero series and Gravity Circuit to it.

I doubt hastily. Isn't the first season of a fight game's DLC basically in the planning stages as the base game is undergoing polish?

Sega Rocket Knight is the best one.

I think it's meant to be shaped like panties.

Yeah and the side content isn't really worth the squeeze. I kind of doubt it'll happen but I hope 3 gets away from the rock-paper-scissors style combat. It just gets mindless picking rock over and over to farm a monster.

YouTube video by Cygames EN Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising – Wilnas Character Guide

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxxk... I wish all fighting game character guides had this level of passion and enthusiasm behind them.

#starfoxtober2021 #starfox #masseffect

The final piece for 2021's set of prompts. I self indulgently gave Fox and Falco another costume change with some other favourites guys of mine.