Hah, I didn't look that deep into the art, just saw a few images on Steam that caught my eye, like these:



Google image search is turning up...slightly more questionable results.

You're not serious are you?

EDIT: I deeply regret the Google search I just made.

hey mentioned it earlier but get Lisa. It's a western game but done in the style of old JRPGs like Earthbound, except instead of quirky and magical it's quirky and violent. Early on you get captured by a Mad Max style gang and get the choice between them permanently killing one of your party members or permanently chopping off one of your arms, which cripples you for the rest of the game.

Not even close. The Tales, Trails, and Dragon Quest series are all exponentially weebier. "Kill demons to get powerful enough to make Lucifer your personal servant and battle bitch" is what Shin Megami Tensei is all about.

What is your usual party composition? I started with Alfyn, and then I usually have H'aanit, Ophilia, and Therion. Therion is almost always the one I swap out when needed. Prim, Tressa, and Cyrus are lagging way behind the other four because I only use them when following their individual storylines. I haven't picked up Olberic yet either.

It's all about that H'aanit/Cyrus/Ophilia/Olberic life for me. Maybe swap in Therion when I wanna steal everything that isn't nailed down.

I rotate them regularly to prevent them from lagging behind too much (I was also told this was a good idea for avoid frustrations later, so phew). H'aanit was my main, and I used her as primary damage dealer, but I swapped her out since I finished her chapter 4 (only time you can replace your protag) and she's way overlevelled compared to the rest.

Typically, I want a party that has at least 1 major phys. damage dealer (usually H'aanit or Olberic/warrior class, sometimes both), 1 healer (I like Tressa with cleric subclass personally), 1 mage (Cyrus, or Primrose w/ scholar subclass was nice), and at least 1 buffer/debuffer somewhere in there. I kept Therion often because he's just so useful, he can open those locked chests, and I'm a compulsive looter in RPGs and missing out on chests just sucks...

But now I unlocked 2 divine subclasses, Sorcerer and Starseer, and that changes things a bit lol. My party right now would be:

- Olberic or H'aanit w/ starseer subclass (Main damage dealer + the badass support abilities)
- Primrose w/ sorcerer subclass (Lion's Dance + all elements)
- Tressa w/ cleric subclass (donate BP + healing spells)
- Therion w/ hunter subclass (Leghold trap, Arrow spam for breaking, etc.) or apocathery if I have H'aanit

Basically I try to have, at all times:
- Lion's Dance (if I only have Olberic as damage dealer I can make do with just Abide, though)
- Corrosive Armor
- a strong phys. damage dealer (Olberic or H'aanit, Therion's divine skill fully buffed is nice too)
- Cleric spells for healing
- Scholar/sorcerer spells to cover most of the elements

Of course this is not possible without the subclasses, so before I unlocked those in ch. 1-2, I typically went with H'aanit, Therion, Cyrus, and Alfyn or Ophilia (ugh) for healing. With subclassing, the actual characters don't matter that much.

My next goal is to reach 30k damage on a boss. Closest I got to was around 29k.

Edit: oh, for town exploration, always have Therion, Olberic/H'aanit (duel > provoke if I have the choice, obviously), and Alfyn/Cyrus, of course. Only bring Tressa if I really want an item and the % is too low for stealing.

Not an Ophilia fan I take it? Her healing and damage output are through the roof for me so I kinda need her. I guess I could get the same effect with the cleric subclass but like I said, I've leveled my main party way past everyone on my bench so it'd take a while for any part-time clerics to get on her level at this point.

Ophilia is pretty useful gameplay-wise but she's the worst character story-wise so yeah I kinda hate her. xD

There are several characters with "social links", so you talk to them and build trust throughout the game and get stat/combat bonuses in return, when the link is full you can ask a handful of them to date you for like one extra line of dialog and an extra scene near the end = picking your favorite waifu apparently. And if there are vocals in the battle themes they are so buried and inconsequential that I didn't even notice/remember until this post, and identity is a huge theme of these games and so trying to juggle being a regular joe schmo in the modern real world while also being a literal demon-tamer hero is a big part of why the series works so well.

But hey, you can either take the word of somebody who steadfastly refuses to play the games and constantly says wrong stuff about them or you can listen to people who have played them tell you why they like em.

How the HELL did I just notice this was a thing?
https://www.tjebackinthegroove.com/
New ToeJam and Earl just like the original, talk about nostalgia overload. Gonna play this with my best friend who I played the original with for countless hours back when we were kids!

Pretty deep into Dark Souls: Remastered. It was pretty smooth sailing until about Sen's Fortress, where the difficulty starts to ramp up. I just beat Ornstein and Smough so I can finally warp between bonfires. That was a really great boss fight, definitely best in the game so far. Now I'm in Darkroot Garden/Basin which apparently I'm way overleveled for since I'm one-hitting everything. Literally killed that big butterfly boss in like 5 hits

Gotta say though, I'm not digging it as much as DS3 or Bloodborne. I reckon I'm only about halfway through the game, but a lot of the areas just haven't really done it for me. They're either just more linear and bland than I'd like or are actively frustrating, like Blighttown which I legitimately hated. Anor Londo was really cool so hopefully there's more memorable stuff to come. Likewise most of the bosses have paled in comparison to ones in DS3 or Bloodborne. Until getting to Ornstein and Smough I was on like a 5 boss streak without dying, and I honestly don't consider myself a particularly good Dark Souls player.

But I'm still enjoying it and looking forward to pressing on. I've heard the DLC is really cool.

Sorry, yeah. Persona and SMT waifus are not a thing at all. I made this all up. My bad.


"This track plays in every random encounter throughout the game (Persona 4).": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu1LCUJMnF0

Once again: I ain't making anything up. Rexxz asked about Persona (not even SMT, but specifically Persona) and his concerns mirror what I find off-putting about it, so I told him what I know about it through exposure. I didn't conjure this out of thin air. I get that you're a fan, but your defensiveness is kinda silly here.

All fanbases have waifus. Literally all of them.

Doesn't mean any of them /should/ have waifus.

To reiterate an earlier point, if it's not too weeby for Yahtzee, it's not too weeby for any reasonable person.

lol come on, that's like when I was 13 and my buddy proclaimed that everybody in Finland was hot and googled "hot finnish chicks" to prove it.

And the screenshot FSM posted looks completely ridiculous, no way around it. But for context, the dungeons in the game take place inside antagonists' psyche, taking on their own warped perceptions of reality. That guy is a teacher at the school who is a former Olympian that is physically abusive to the boys and sexually abusive to the girls (which isn't played for laughs like the Japanese tend to do with perviness, one of his victims tries to kill herself, for example), so thanks to his clout in the school he sees himself as an untouchable sex god with complete control over everybody (the girl on his arm is one of his victims as well), hence the ornate palace and sleazy royalty getup. Yeah, it looks goofy as hell out of context, but it's absolutely not played that way.

I get it, Persona isn't going to please everybody for the same reasons no game pleases everybody, and the series as a whole definitely has its quirks and one or two problematic tendencies (Hanako from P4 is an obvious example), but if I get annoyed it's because the criticisms here tend to be silly and come from people who willfully don't know anything about the games beyond a surface level.

Sure, the internet will sexualize just about everything, but you are absolutely kidding yourself if you deny that the waifu bullshit is not endemic to the Persona franchise.

Honestly, the frantic and defensive denials are getting absolutely comical at this point.

Hollow Knight pre-order is 11.99 on PS4. WAY cheaper than I expected and it includes lots (all?) of the extra content. For some reason it only comes up if I search "Voidheart" not Hollow Knight. Head's up!

Lisa doesn't have waifus

I haven't played P5 and I don't have anything against it, but I work with three different guys who are all into it and we have another mutual friend who is also into it and when the game came out, ALL PERMUTATIONS OF THOSE FOUR GUYS were constantly arguing about which waifu was best. Like literally using the word "waifu" and everything. They were self-aware about it, they have girlfriends and social lives and whatnot, but the whole Persona series is super super duper weeby. That's not a value judgment, it's just a fact.

(shudders)
Sounds about right.

Hey man, if you guys are just that insecure, then suit yourselves.

...are you talking to failsafeman's coworkers through his internet posts?

lol for real he wasn't even talking about himself. Don't know where that comment came from.

FWIW I like SMT a fair bit.

Non-interesting that you guys read his last comment as not about you guys.

are you a real person?

lol?
This post honestly couldn't be more ironic if it tried.


This one, however, is just confusing.

For real.

Just admit that a thing you like is weeby, it's ok. I like some weeby stuff too.

Most JRPG's are inherently weeby in art design, concept or the waifu stuff. I see no problem in that. It is what it is. Either like it or not.

Right? I mean I played Ys and Kiseki games. Cold Steel is the weebiest borderline-waifu shit I've ever played in my life and I have no problem admitting that (I like the games in spite of those things). Persona fanboys are so weird.

Reminds me of:

Any of you play Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun? God it's a bad name, but it looks really fun. A methodical, strategic stealth-based ninja assassin game. I'm looking at the PS4 version but I think it's been out on PC for awhile. Just curious to hear some feedback if anyone has played it. I'm always looking for high quality ninja games. This one is necessarily quite slow but the little gameplay I saw looked satisfying to say the least.

Hoping to find a cheap used copy locally, as it's still 50 on PSN.

.

I've never heard of Shadow Blade, but the game play looks like XCom from the little I watched.

I've heard that comparison made in several reviews. Never had any interest in Xcom (read: no ninjas) but I think it's fairly highly regarded.

I bought it for 14 bucks on the way home from work. We'll see what happens!

Shadow blade is not like X-Com, more like Commandos or Desperados (but never super unfair like those games can be at times). The combat is in real time and I'm telling you, it's pretty awesome with the stuff you can pull off and feel like a genius for orchestrating a well-timed tactical killing spree. Tell me what you think about it on PS4, I can't imagine it working properly without a mouse (but I don't know that, maybe they pulled it off).

I'll be honest, it's WAY harder than I expected. I figured the first mission or three would be gimmes, but it didn't take me long to hit a wall. I need to practice the shadow strike or whatever the coordinated moves are called.

17 hours until my copy of Hollow Knight becomes playable holy shiiiiiit I'm so pumped. If I wasn't so new to my job I'd call in sick tomorrow honestly.

Yeah I bought it too in direct reaction to your heads up. Dirt cheap for an amazing game. I already beat it with my buddy on his PC (I'm only a filthy console gamer) but I've never played the DLC and playing it alone in the dark with headphones is an experience I'm too excited for words about.