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Post by Youngster Joey on Jul 31, 2019 16:43:52 GMT -5
I'm playing as female, and I haven't noticed anything untoward yet. Of course, I've only put in ~6 hours and haven't played since Sunday.
Maybe this is just me and my take because I am female and not interested in women, but I find that women in JRPGs tend to be more... well, I don't like them in romantic situations in JRPGs? It's like all of a sudden they become gooey and soft and needy and nope nOPE NOPE. Male characters' entire personality doesn't turn to goo, generally.
I generally like playing as male characters and will virtually always take that option if given a choice, but in cases where there is romance, I'll play as female specifically so I can sidestep all of that. No interest in having an annoying harem, and I figured Fire Emblem would definitely have one. Alas.
I think anime/JRPGs make especially annoying female characters in general, though
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Jul 31, 2019 21:58:55 GMT -5
No, generally the males turn into morons who can't complete a sentence without stumbling over their own words... at least with Shonen. Go read/watch any Shojo and they totally become gooey and soft and needy, so pick your poison. Anime writing is anime writing: you can swap elements around, but you can never escape its pitfalls.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 3, 2019 8:04:35 GMT -5
To be fair, that's probably true to an extent. Female characters annoy me more in media, so my tolerance is lower. Not because oMGZ diSCRIMINATIOn aGainST woMeNZ, but I just never related to it, in real life or otherwise. I'm not a particularly feminine person. Perhaps if I disliked most masculine behaviors, I'd also dislike male characters in anime more.
I think if I had been given the choice of gender from the beginning, I'd have picked male*. But on the other hand, maybe being female was good. I absolutely was the awkward sort of kid you'd beat up in middle school. Girls don't beat up girls. They just talk sh*t about them, and luckily, I'm oblivious! If anyone talked any sh*t about me, I was never the wiser.
*I do not, however, care enough to change it. I seem to live the life I want as is fairly well.
It's August! And... that means nothing, because seasons are immaterial when you work. I remember August striking such dread as a kid--it meant the summer was ending! I think it was especially cruel as a kid, since obviously getting presents and getting to be one year older was the sh*t, so I eagerly looked forward to that... but it's also at the end of August, so... hey, happy birthday, also the nanosecond that's over, just remember you're going back to school in a week or two. Sucks to be you!
School sucked.
I mean, I liked certain elements of it, but it sucked.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 3, 2019 15:43:48 GMT -5
I don't think anime frequently exhibits many masculine traits in its main characters. Particularly in the past two decades or so, the trend is more towards shy, unassuming nerds who find themselves in supernatural situations (in other words, self-insert bait). Arguably it doesn't exhibit many feminine traits either -- I've often wondered where some of these tropes come from considering I've never met a single 'tsundere' in my life -- but I'm not a woman, so f*cked if I know. The challenge is finding the ones that rise above that.
On a similar note, I've been trying to back away from the phrase 'forced drama' because I think it tends to be misused by people sh*tting on something without attempting to understand why they dislike it. I used the phrase in the past because I was parroting a friend, but after getting called out on it a few times I started trying to hone in on genuine criticisms (hence A Silent Voice went from 'forced drama' to 'the FeMC has no character outside of being a victim'). Most of the time people claim 'forced drama', what they typically mean is 'melodrama that I did not like': a much murkier and more ambiguous field.
I think part of it stems from most anime/manga being YA, and YA in general tends to rely more on appealing to emotion. Flaws in structure and characters, predictable plots, and so on can be overlooked because you get swept up in the emotion of the moment. If the moment doesn't catch you, then the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards. Someone else's beautiful tale of redemption and self-discovery becomes your whiny teenaged sob-fest.
Which isn't to say that 'forced drama' doesn't exist. However it means that a character acts out-of-character for the sake of generating drama. While this also has the potential to get murky -- I've seen far too many multi-page threads of people arguing the actions of fictional characters -- I think it's infinitely less common than people like to claim. Sad music, miserable expressions and shouting/crying is not 'forced drama', it's melodrama. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't. But we should at least know what we're complaining about.
As to gender, I definitely think it's a "grass is greener" situation. It's easy to focus on the advantages and write-off the disadvantages when you don't actually have to live them. Women live longer than men on average, but on the flip side I really don't want to put up with menstruation. At the end of the day I'm fine being male. For the patriarchy, right?
I live in the Arizona valley area. We have no seasons. Just 'hot' and 'not as hot'.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 4, 2019 0:42:20 GMT -5
I knew someone who could have qualified as a tsundere once. I liked her as a person, but she had some issues.
Speaking of YA, I picked up Fruits Basket, the new reboot of the show. Only two episodes in, but it seems miles better than the awful, awful, awful, awful, awful original show. I loved the manga; sooo not my typical genre, and it has all of the trappings to be horrible (main character who does no wrong/everyone loves, reverse harem, pretty boys, gimmick of hugging making people turn into animals, yanderes, traps, etc.). But the characters are, in fact, quite fleshed out and interesting, and they grow significantly and meaningfully over time. For instance, Kyo wants desperately to be part of the Zodiac and continually defensively rejects others to protect himself. Over time, this behavior dissipates as he finds his own and lets others in. Meanwhile, Yuki starts out a typical pretty boy, and wants nothing more than to break free of the chains of his family's curse. He deeply resents Kyo because, after all, why on earth would Kyo yearn to be included in the very family structure Yuki considers a prison? Hell, there's even some jealousy--nobody cares what the outcast Kyo does; Yuki has to toe the line.
It makes a lot of sense from a psychological standpoint why both feel the way they do about their own lot, and in turn why they would hate the other--not so easily reducible to simply "oh one's the rat and one's the cat and the latter got screwed by the former in some myth". When you consider the impact of a family secret like theirs would have, it's pretty realistic that many of the characters act in the particular ways that they do. People transforming into animals is a potentially silly premise, but the ramifications the show explores aren't absurd or silly.
It's been years--10? 12?--since I read the manga, so I'm reserving any further thoughts until I get further in. So far, though, it seems pretty true to the manga, which is excellent. The original series was pretty short (I want to say 7 or 8 episodes), and it barely made a dent in the manga; in fact, several episodes were basically zany slice-of-life filler. Then the show just kinda... ended, with everyone suddenly hunky-dory and living together in harmony thereafter. As a result of the pacing, tone and the length of the show, none of the characters developed in any meaningful way, nor did the show have any time to go into anyone's arcs. The net result was every character literally was a giant predictable trope. It was not a good show on its own, but it was especially bad because it literally captured nothing of what made the manga good. The manga was, if anything, good because it fleshed out and grew its characters over time. Very ill-suited to a silly short, half-season anime with gobs of stupid filler.
This has at least 19 episodes currently and seems much less irreverent and silly, so I'm confident it will probably do better justice... At the very least, Shigure is still the sh*t.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 4, 2019 13:54:30 GMT -5
Also, another point in the reboot's favor is that the art style looks very generic. I'm no fan of generic style-of-the-decade, but in Fruits Basket's case, this is a huge improvement. The original manga was pretty ugly, with cosmically sized eyes, but it looked even worse in the anime. From the original--this shot horrifies me: Side-by-side: Just... n-o-p-e. The eyes suck. Also, I don't like their small, pointy faces. It's just ugly.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 4, 2019 15:31:45 GMT -5
Large eyes and pointed faces are the shoujo look, so I guess it's a good thing you don't care for shoujo.
Why is it that I hadn't heard about a shooting in what feels like months, yet suddenly we're assaulted with three of them practically back-to-back? There's a retro gaming convention that my friend wants to drag me to, and it's weird when the thought, 'boy I sure hope nobody shoots the place up' crosses my mind as a genuine concern.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 5, 2019 4:50:26 GMT -5
I am losing respect for myself. After watching a poorly written show with very real 'forced drama', many poorly defined characters, and multiple concepts it barely capitalises on before moving on to the next -- in other words, some good ol' anime garbage -- I find myself genuinely feeling, "yeah, but best girl won, so 6/10 I guess". For starters, let me amend what I said earlier: I described 'forced drama' as characters acting out of character to craft fake drama. This is true. However I forgot that sometimes writers are so inept that they take it a step further, and just start whipping out random reveals and situations that are unbelievable, poorly foreshadowed, or just straight-up too convenient. This show has all of that and more. Also, most of the characters end up being really poorly defined by the end. I understand it's adapted from a Light Novel series with many more volumes, but the drawback is that, of the core group of five, only two characters come across as really defined. One is so superfluous that he might as well have been written out entirely, another is only really relevant during the moments specific to her arc, and the last one undergoes such a radical character change in the last four episodes (remember what I said about 'forced drama'?) that it deflates everything that came before. I won't bore anyone by continuing, but suffice to say I could spend a few more paragraphs on the crap this show pulls. And yet, in the love triangle (which, if I'd known about from the start I never would've begun watching), it was not the obvious pairing of 'basic-b*tch protag gets together with basic-b*tch happy-go-lucky girl', but it actually circumvented that to have basic-b*tch protag end up with basic b*tch level-headed girl who more-or-less keeps everyone together. I've noticed in anime a tendency for one character to end up being the "mom" of the group, and that character ends up getting shafted the hardest when the ships start sailing. Considering how much sh*t these two tards went through to keep this dumbass group together, it's nice to see mommy and daddy finally realise that they belong together, rather than letting daddy run off with whatever the basic-b*tch FeMC of the week is.
Does that alone redeem Kokoro Connect? Jesus f*cking thunder-Christ no. It was awful trash that should never be viewed by anyone...
...but best girl won, so 6/10 I guess.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on Aug 5, 2019 15:04:20 GMT -5
You guys have been watching anime?
I need to catch up...
I'm still playing FE:Three Houses. Decided to restart the whole game because I wanted to go a different route, and I've also been rushing most of the non-story cutscenes because I don't really care about them. Some of the support conversations are really amusing though, and aside from the handful of female characters, the characters are pretty decent. I was going to write a rant about the UI in the game, and how ambiguous some of the mechanics are, (you lose a fight in arena if it goes beyond 4 rounds or something? ok could've told me beforehand, or explained why I suddenly lost), but in the end I have so many problems with it that I'll just conclude that it's pretty s**t. Stuff are found in weird places, useful information is hidden behind multiple transitions while useless information is everywhere. I'm not an UI designer, but I can tell when an UI gets in the way of my enjoyment.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 7, 2019 22:02:28 GMT -5
Hmm, I haven't really run into UI issues yet. I do find it's harder to tell where units are on the map, though. I constantly select the wrong unit because I think I'm hovering over another one. Last night, I had a mission where I was trying to keep allies alive. I handily took care of the minions and then surrounded the boss on all sides with my characters so they could pummel him, with the express intent that the allied NPCs could not access him and die. Yeah, well, I didn't realize my characters weren't actually blocking one spot, so of course the ally NPC raced in, attacked the boss, and promptly died. Thanks, man.
Could be worse, though. I'd rather the difficulty be harder. I feel like Hard is much easier than Normal on older games. I haven't been playing a whole lot, but friends who are ahead of me say the difficulty level does not improve. I feel like permadeath doesn't really matter because no one is in danger of dying anyway?
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on Aug 8, 2019 14:38:20 GMT -5
My problems with the UI is that the information is all over the place. The best way to see a characters motivation is to go to the Goals-menu, and while you can bring up the stats inside that menu, you can't cycle through the characters when you have the detailed stats open. So if you are planning what to do with the characters and trying to decide where to dump your gifts, you have to go to the goals-menu, then press x to bring up detailed stats, press b to go back to the previous view, select the next character and so on. You also can't preview the class requirements directly from the menu where all the learned classes are, but you'll have to go to a different menu (which only shows the classes from the same level) which doesn't show the skill levels of that character. So in the end you are going back and forth between multiple different menus (which are located in different places, like certifications vs. goals/roster), and not all of them are accessible at all times.
The inventory management is a bit of a pain in the ass as well. While the game shows all of your items in the convoy-section, they are not sorted by type but by the owner, which doesn't make much sense since the items are split in different tabs by type to begin with. When selling all those Bullions, you have to cycle through the whole consumables tab to find all of them, instead of them being together in the same place. Then also the shop assigns items to a specific character by default, so you have to scroll to the convoy every time you open the shop unless you want to bloat the protagonists inventory with all the stuff (which will overflow into the convoy, so it doesn't matter that much).
Mostly I just dislike how the stuff is assigned into different submenus, as they don't always make sense. Some of the menu transitions are a bit too long, so navigating the menus trying to remember what information I can find from where becomes a bit frustrating. Also some information isn't shown anywhere. It's become a habit with my brother where we nag about even the smallest things in the UI.
Hard is definitely a lot easier than Normal in previous games. Other than some difficulty spikes with bosses (in the later chapters they will one-shot any of your characters without exception, so the only way to win is to cheese with gambits or high evasion) it's been a relaxing min-maxing experience. I've had one character die because I didn't pay enough attention where I decided I didn't like him much anyway so I let him stay dead. I'm a bit disappointed that he still hangs around the monastery like nothing happened, the only difference is that you can't have him in battles and can't improve his skills/support level.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 9, 2019 4:06:56 GMT -5
Super Mario 3D Land is not a great game. Half the time it's so easy that it's just a joke. The other half I'm getting f*cked over because the perspective isn't aligned in a way that makes it obvious where exactly I will land. I thought it would be something to do while I waited for something tedious to finish, but after breezing through three worlds (with a handful of frustrating deaths on a few choice levels) I think I'm more annoyed than anything else.
-edit- Okay, I just went back through all the posts in 2019, and not once did I mention finishing a JRPG. I did this because I literally cannot remember the last one I played to completion. Even the things I've started have been half-hearted attempts abandoned within a few hours, because every time I try I just get overwhelmed by how many other things I'd rather do with my time. Seriously, I don't think I've played a single JRPG for more than 5 hours in this entire year. I keep calling it a "phase", but the fact that I can't even remember the last time I saw RPG credits is pretty troublesome...
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 10, 2019 8:22:54 GMT -5
Derman - you're totally right now, now that you spell it out. You do have to go to a lot of different places to find out the information you care about, and, frankly, 90% of what info the game makes you surf through, I don't actually care about. They should have centralized it more. I'm not sure what the last JRPG I beat was. I distinctly remember playing Berseria 3 years ago, but that went nowhere, obviously. In looking at my backloggery, I've beaten 3 games of any genre in the past 3 years. Super Mario Odyssey (2018), Pokemon Picross (2016), and Pokemon Sun (2016). I'm a little sad Odyssey is on there, as I didn't care for it.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 11, 2019 4:12:10 GMT -5
I think that has more to do with the types of games you play though. You can't really "beat" The Sims or Civ. Which, generally "unbeatable" games are what I've been gravitating towards on the rare occasions I do play anything (strategy games, Miku, Risk or Rain, etc.). According to Steam I've played 14.2 hours worth of games in the last two weeks, of which 12.9 were played with a friend. Which makes the fact that my friend dragged me to a gaming convention today all the more... mistimed? (I'll do a post on my thoughts about my first ever convention later).
Judgement proved that I still have the capacity to completely lose all sense of priorities, but it's definitely the outlier. RIP Game Convention: you never stood a chance (but I got Super Mario World on the cheap, so whatever).
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 11, 2019 10:46:13 GMT -5
I'm going to assume video game conventions are like anime conventions, where it's a legitimate question for many people when, if ever, they last showered.
I attended a few anime conventions in high school. I've always been more interested in games than anime, and I've never really been a "fandom" sort, but it was OK because it was one of the few times I got to see my friend after I transferred schools (we lived in different states), and you could buy hard-to-find games there. But then I moved to New York--retro game shops abound--and we became roommates. The appeal of conventions became... umm... well, nothing?
Side note, but I always think of this story when I think of cons...
My friend, who is equally nice as she is ridiculously weird, is a literal magnet for cringey strange people. Her ability to attract these people is ... unworldly. Like she sends out subconscious radio waves, and they come out of the woodwork. The Pied Piper of Hamlin, except with CringeLord NeckBeards. One year, some girl zeroed in on her literally an hour of us arriving, and followed us around the entire day. This... would have been... idk, fine... if she wasn't... well, let's put it this way. My friend and I decided we were going to drive to the store to get food. Girl invites herself to go along. In the car ride, she tells us 1) that she was born a hermaphrodite with ambiguous genitals, and 2) she has a really unstable relationship with her mom and all of the (genuinely) abusive things her mother has said to her. WTF. I would like to note that this information was volunteered with zero context and/or relevance to anything being discussed. She then followed us to our hotel room post-store uninvited (!!). My friend's friend finally lost it on her and asked her to leave. She began crying in our hotel room that nobody liked her. Awkward...
The subsequent days of the con were spent racing to the opposite side of the con whenever one of us spotted her in the crowds. Felt kinda bad for ditching her the one time she caught sight of us and came over, but N-O-P-E...
I'm a naturally direct person, but I'm decidedly not "ok this is going to hurt someone's feelings but they need to hear it and I don't care" sort of direct. If I know something will hurt somebody's feelings, I won't (can't) say it. My friend, on the other hand, is incapable of saying anything mean, period. Not a good combo at cons. (I'm pleased to say, by myself, I do not suffer from attracting CringeLord NeckBeards. That is my friend's unfortunate lifelong burden to bear.)
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