Cleretic, FFXIV Lore Dork 🏳️‍⚧️

Quark's got serious fashion sense, that's at least one point in his favor.

Yes, this is terrible, but does this mean only 2,456 people SENT them data?

That's less people than watch my Youtube videos.

Prompto taking a selfie with Prompto

Specifically Craw Wurm is the one to the left of the forest, above the dice. You can make out the yellow underbelly and it has the right border treatment and roughly the paragraph shape.

The nonland that Mikey's already played looks to be Craw Wurm!

I think they might be real cards, but at such low detail that it'll be damn near impossible to ID them. At least Mikey playing monogreen narrows down the options; I don't know where to start with Lita's cards.

I mean, that IS what the game's canon says. We've got like three and a half facts about Azem, and 'left the Convocation' IS one of them, so it's not too weird people stick to it!

They didn't call up the neo-nazis to stand with them this time?

Yeah, RatM both fits the overall vibe and, if you use the acronym, the meter.

My favorite part is that Prompto can level up his photo-taking, giving him more complex filters and framing and all that, but the game can't use those tools for shit so his photos get worse in exactly the funniest ways.

Also they didn't actually 'throw everything out', for a long time you could clearly see logical design throughlines between one game and the next, even if they got WAY weirder about it than any other series would.

Don't ask when exactly that stopped unless you want to start a minor war, though.

Actually, another thought on XII: I think Final Fantasy is a series where perception of a game comes from its biggest fans. People love X loudly and proudly, so we all know it's good.

XII might suffer from being a 'second favorite'. People mostly like it, but they put other games before it.

It's also a game that's known for having a lot of development issues (especially if you were paying attention at the time), which I think hangs over it reputationally.

Similar to XV, but I think XV clearly shows those development issues in play in a way XII doesn't.

I'm thinking more in audience response, and XVI hit a lot of people REAL weird and bad thanks to basically being a DMC game instead of an RPG. It's hard to describe, but it doesn't feel like 'part of the family'.

XII I always thought was great, but I also never felt like it was fully embraced.

I (obviously) love FFXIV, but the worst part is that the expansions keep getting pitted against each other when 'selling' the game.

I know plenty of people who prefer other expansions to Shadowbringers! But you can't know which expansion someone will think is the best until they play ALL of them.

At least in this case it feels more 'that's on a different axis' rather than 'they don't count'.

But I do think it's more valid to recognize that the MMOs have largely been stable and popular in their thing (minus 1.0) while the single-player games keep failing, rather than just excluding them.

Honestly they mostly didn't, it's just specifically the Final Fantasy corner of S-E.

Dragon Quest is still doing its thing, Atlus is doing great, Pokemon's never dropped its stride. You've even got stuff like Bravely and Octopath.

They just decided that ONLY Final Fantasy shouldn't be turn-based..

The worst part is that it's like, 50/50 on how many of those are self-inflicted wounds that we can all see in retrospect, versus how many were earnestly good games that somehow sank like a brick.

I am not a violent person, and yet I felt a visceral need to hurt something at those opening notes of the video.

I hate this song with more of my being than I realized, and I have no idea why. Hopefully the rest of the video will tell me why!

There's also a solid angle that Wyll would reasonably be less forthcoming, because he's got his own shit going on AND is a noble's son so he's more used to politeness and respect as a conversational default.

It actually is pretty rare in modern games, which are often player-pleasing to a frankly off-putting degree.

BG3 has basically the entire party throw themselves at you at more or less the same time if you're kinda nice to them. God damn it would've been a relief if just ONE of them didn't like you.

I can't wait to find out what parts of the Elder Scrolls that you just assumed were essential and will always be there that they'll cut from this one.

My money's on 'healing magic'.

But the kami of Shintoism aren't polite. The fae folk of European myth aren't polite. But you're nice to them, because they bring good fortune if they're happy and cause floods and volcano eruptions if they're not. That's the Elementals' vibe.

And everybody ELSE gets it.

Oh, they're as 'friendly' in Egnlish as they are in any language. Which is to say 'they're not gonna hurt you if you don't hurt them', but they're not saying hi and please. Which might also be a factor, perhaps the English audience expects more pleasantries from an ally.

Broadly, it seems they get the intention through source material better. 'Oh yeah that's a kami/fae, I get it, they're friendly folks you don't fuck with'.

Part of me also thinks American exceptionalism is involved, but that's a thornier one since 'English-speaking' is not necessarily 'American'.

Nah, with the mass use of AI and overt data scraping, it's artists that I think should leave HARDER.

While it's more on story than game design or balance, the best example there is the Elementals.

You'd think they're hated by EVERYONE, but it's really just the English speaking audience.

Actually, in that case there WAS a reason, it was 'because the main plot requires it, Mario is up the top'.

It's actually Oblivion that had the 'you could climb that and the story won't tell you to' mountains. If I remember right, the highest one had an invisible troll boss fight at the top.

An important thing to keep in mind here is that the Stormed copies aren't cast, which means Y'shtola does not ping for every single one.

Still a great fit if it fits your game plan, though, I've had Amphibian Downpour do SERIOUS work in Y'shtola.

In many cases, it's shown that spoilers make people MORE invested in the thing, not LESS. I think there's valid discussion about what kind of contexts and spoilers that's not true for, but I think that Starfleet Academy episode is basically all 'good' spoilers.

It baits the hooks really well.

Without that, the games are so open as to feel kinda meaningless. Even the good ones feel empty and frictionless if you just use whatever's good.

But the moment you go 'I'm only using hand-to-hand' or something, then you suddenly start seeing the game has... like, MECHANICS, and DESIGN DECISIONS.