Grungie

I’ve been able to read Japanese for quite awhile. Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy, but I’m not fluent on kanji.

Magnets are all over most LCD displays now. The sleep/wake mechanism on laptops and tablets work via magnets, and half the side of an iPad (for their folio case) is a magnet, same with the ones that have their styluses.

I find that the irony of Latinx is that while a term created to be inclusive, is exclusive against the people it targets. People who don’t speak Spanish created a term that is difficult to pronounce in Spanish.

Magnets don’t mess with LCD’s like they did with CRT’s. Your speakers usually have magnets, and they don’t mess with your display.

I think it’s one of those things where you look at the percentage of who it affects. Let’s be honest, how much of the average user actually cares about the SIM tray? The handful of people who complain make it sound like everyone swaps SIM cards everyday.

Their laptops tend to be standard MSRP outside of sales. Their desktops on the gaming side tend to be hit or miss. You have to research the components to see if it’s actually worth it. Sometimes the PC gamers can over exaggerate the money you save on building it yourself, and it’s easy to fudge the numbers. I’ve seen it very common for people to say they can build an equivalent machine for half the price, but they purposefully threw in cheap stuff that they wouldn’t be caught dead using to shave off the price.

There’s multiple facets to that. Some people want to lord over you like you’re poor for buying the used game, but on the other hand, if you buy a used game, the developer doesn’t get the money. If it’s a disc game, you might have to worry about scratches, or maybe if you’re into complete games, stuff missing. I just buy whatever.

I’d disagree about it being more of a WRPG problem than a JRPG problem. A large chunk of JRPG’s tend to have one ending and that’s it. You could have been super lucky with only playing ones with multiple endings, but most of the big ones have just a singular ending. Franchises like Final Fantasy, Dragon Wuest, Tails, Ys, Legend of Heroes, etc, have one ending.

Tbh, I feel like people tend to misuse terminology with the Water Temple. It’s tedious, and not hard. You are just restricted access to rooms because of either the water level, lack of keys, or the lack of the long shot. It’s not like it takes skill to raise/lower the water level, or just come back with a key or long shot. I always see people calling anything that takes longer than usual as hard, despite it not really taking effort. I can beat the Water Temple without a guide as I use the same tactic you do, but some of the backtracking is a pain, but that doesn’t make it difficult. The part that throws people off is the chest with the key in the basement of the central tower people easily forget about.

Sometimes I’m just being super lazy. Other times I try and just say “fuck it”. I use them for old JRPG’s, because it wasn’t unusual for them to not give you direction after a certain point. It was common with when you got a ship or flight. There are a few that tell you where to go, but there’s no fucking map. So I also never had this “spiritual connection” with video games to where I get some weird feeling for using a walkthrough,

Depends, I own a lot of them, so I can’t really be in a position to actually complain.

I’m not sure what’s really exhausting about acquiring a physical copy of a game. If it’s a popular title, I can easily get it from a store, and if it’s not popular, I just order it on Amazon. It doesn’t take much of my time to get a game physically. If the game was brand new, it was a very rare issue to see the disc scratched. I also own hundreds of used disc based games, and none of them were too scratched to not work. I could be super lucky. I get the convenience of not having to wait for a game to be delivered, but the exhausting nature of physically acquiring a game is completely foreign for me.

Honestly, the Nickelback hate is mostly from the press/critics. The press that dictates “good taste” hates them with a passion, so the rock community that likes to act like they have “good taste” have to act like they hate them too. They have a ton of commercially successful albums, and regularly fill stadiums, so despite what the press wants to dictate, clearly someone listens to them.

You run around collecting stuff to build things. It's a great time waster.

I wasn’t really referring to the current inflation, just more of general inflation since the early 90’s. $70 in 1992 is different from $70 in 2022.

As someone who works as a server admin, this stuff isn’t cheap to run. I know you mentioned the price of games being $60, and the new consoles have jumped up to $70. It does suck if you want to play them day one, but like people mentioned earlier, you can wait for them to be on sale. With older game consoles, the price of the games are more expensive if you consider inflation, and others were more expensive without inflation (and worse if you include inflation). The cartridge based home consoles didn’t really have a standardized price, and was dictated by what extra chips they had. $80 games were not that unusual back then.

They’re the most hated by critics, but since they make billions on the box office it means that clearly someone likes them. That shows more of there being a disconnect between the audience and the critics. You’d be surprised at how many things in the entertainment industry (especially with film and music) where popularity has little comparison to critical acclaim. Back to my actual topic: These “one hit wonder” entries, those are usually associated with being the most famous entry, as that obviously means that’s the one most people know/played. A lot of the time, those tend to get the most recognition/praise from outside the fandom. You can see this easily in metrics from countless websites of people making lists and such. Thats why I question why some of these franchise entries have a disparity between sales/popularity between the rest of their franchise. Did it change anything up? Was it a reboot, back to its roots? More often than not, the praise/popularity/sales have less to do with the actual game, and more to do with how it was released. It either moved to a different console, or the publisher actually felt like putting money into its advertising. It’s more obvious with franchises with their “one hit” being in the middle of the franchise. If I handed you 3 subsequent games from a franchise, and told you to play them with zero research, then told you the middle one has triple the sales, you’d be confused. That’s my entire point. I also strictly said these “one hit wonder” entries in JRPG’s are overrated in the context of their own franchise. I gave it a limiting factor from the get go for an actual realistic comparison. Trying to toss “have you played every game” at that is a straw man to try and act like you made a “gatcha” moment.

I didn’t call Persona 5 overhyped, I called it overrated in comparison to its other entries. Did it do anything to warrant double the sales figures besides being released on a relevant console at a relevant time? Thats why I brought up in the original post is that it’s similar in a lot of JRPG franchises where, from a series perspective, does nothing special, but has disparaging sales figures compared to the rest of the franchise. Those entries tend to have an outside factor in play. With these same franchises, you also see disparaging differences between the most famous/popular game in the West vs Japan. Outside of JRPG’s, you tend to see where an entry does something different, and that resonates with a lot of fans, so you can see why there’s a large rise in sales. With JRPG’s it feels like you either just throw a ton of money at its marketing, or release it on a different console, and that’s how you get people to notice.

It's a home media server where you host movies/shows/music/etc yourself and can stream it to any of your devices. Recently they added the ability to watch live TV on it too.

You can look at sales figures for the games (they're not hard to find). You can clearly see the large jump between P4 and 5, but the changes in the game weren't significant enough to warrant a gigantic increase in sales. You're even acknowledging that it being on the PS4 was a boost to its sales figures, which was part of my point. You can see analogues in other JRPG franchises, that one "random" entry that has a significant amount of sales and award nominations, but doesn't do anything significantly different from other entries. There wasn't anything drastic that made it more appealing to people outside the fandom. A lot of it is marketing, and being on the right console at the right time. You'd be surprised at how much of a difference being on a different console actually boosts sales. Tales of Symphonia is a great example of this, it's no secret to Tales fans that it being on the Gamecube was the reason why it stands out. Let's just say hypothetically Pokemon was a niche franchise, but out of nowhere, X/Y blows up in popularity, then simmers afterwards. We're not even going to change the gameplay or anything. So as a fan who got into Pokemon later being confused at why X/Y was so massive, but the franchise popularity/sales figures drop.

Persona 4’s been out on Steam for like 2 years. It didn’t “tank”, but you can see that Persona 5 eclipses it by a significant amount. Also a massive amount of people only care about P5, and have no interest in P3 or 4. Even telling the P5 fans to play P4, they have zero interest. Persona 4 was a borderline cult classic. It got some initial traction on the PC port, but simmered out pretty quickly. Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised when P6 comes out, and also doesn’t really do much different from P5, and doesn’t do nearly as well, as non-Persona fans will expect some kind of drastic upgrades, and be disappointed. It’s happened a ton in other JRPG franchises.

Well how do you explain other franchises that have that one hit wonder game to fall back into general obscurity? It only feels weird for you when you’re already a fan. As a fan, some of these “one hit wonder” entries definitely feel super random. That’s why you have to look outside of the fandom, because what was so special about that entry that got other people only interested in that one entry and not another one?

I’m talking about the general public, not the fans. As a fan of a franchise, you already know what to expect, but when that one entry magically gets popular, it definitely feels completely random. It’s not like that entry usually does anything different, it’s just the one that got popular. Usually based on release timing, or for it being on a different console. So when I find that franchise entry that’s “randomly” popular, I tend to see a reoccurring theme, and it rarely has anything to do with the actual game.

I don’t think it got bigger because of its mature themes, it really just looks like the timing of its release was what really did it. You have the previous games being released late on a console, and that tends to do a toll on the popularity of a game. The reason why I look at the gameplay evolution (or lack thereof) is because most JRPG’s don’t go super crazy between iterations, so at face value, it looks random as hell why that one entry eclipses the popularity of the rest of the franchise, and it falls back to “obscurity”. Especially when you go back to play older games in a franchise, and you feel excited to play “the big one”, and realize there’s nothing really noteworthy about “the big one”.

There’s a handful of those on the PS1 and Saturn when they were called FMV’s. I forgot about it a bit until I played the 3DS port of Devil Summoner Soul Hackers, and random FMV’s all over the place. I was like “yup, it’s a Saturn game”