WhyEssEff [she/her] @ WhyEssEff @hexbear.net

I do the emotes [![lea-caramelldansen](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/5cf

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Oh yeah, Xenoblade, let me piggyback off that.

1 is very very good, best story, but there's a bit of a plot lull in the midpoints of each of the Titans that can feel like I'm going through the motions. Due to how extensive the areas are, it exacerbates the needed downtime a bit far for my liking. As well, too many placeholder quests that just serve as padding/easy XP. Also, if I have to look for Black Liver Beans again, I'm reaching through the screen and killing Juju myself.

2 has my favorite combat (I miss step-cancelling ;–;). However, even though I do genuinely like the story and characters–I'd die for Nia–it's hard not to cringe recommending it to other people, especially people who aren't desensitized to animeisms. A lot of moments that feel like they're there to hit quota, a lot of things I think just feel awkward. Some of the character designs are just straight-up egregious (my go-to on this is Dahlia) and it sometimes has the aura of "we were making a gacha game specifically for that demographic but then Nintendo told us to remove the monetization so we just nixed that specifically." I love this game but with a large asterisk on it.

3 is rather polished gameplay-wise and probably my favorite in sum but it's a bit all-over-the-place due to having to accommodate both returning and new players from the outset in the story. It's the most disjointed feeling one for me, feels like it kinda scrambled to tie up a lot of ends. It's still a good story, It just doesn't have the unfettered cohesiveness of, say, 1. Best main party overall in the series though, IMO. Named my cat Mio.

they should have given pokemon to david lynch, including game direction, just to see what he'd do with it. woulda been a good bit, if nothing else

am using SoH, but I chose Vanilla Plus preset since it's my first playthrough. Not helping that I'm using an 8bitdo Pro 2, which mimics DualShock, which does not mesh well with the N64 design.

Autojump in 3D is just baffling to me, to be honest. 3D platforming is already hard to eyeball, I at least want to control when I'm doing it. My own personal barrier to entry for the Zelds

i'm first-timing it now and it's really good. my only major critique is that in retrospect with what we have now for design principles I'm really feeling that funky camera control mechanism in a similar way to how I felt it in SM64. Lock-on can be a little wonky sometimes. First-person is unintuitive without a crosshair/focus point. Those quirks are just early 3D, I guess, so it's not exactly bad design, just dated.

Also, give dedicated jump button, please god, there's platforming and it's 3D, please, I beg you, I can't keep autojumping, please

Had to recreate this one because I refreshed instead of posting

For Undertale, I disagree with the final Chara scene at the end of No Mercy. It muddies the waters on an otherwise very-deliberate thematic overtone of the whole route (you are engaging in a gameplay strategy that is designed to be extremely tedious and grindy in a continuous slog of deliberate cruelty so banal that it’s probably for no other reason than wanting to experience everything). I’d honestly prefer that the game continued to specifically lambaste me and reinforce my culpability rather than give room for anything else.

Like, okay, let’s spitball. Chara is the only entity in the game that has enough natural determination to step in and override you. Instead of being just ‘evil child’, let’s have them be an entity that is generally non-interfering but wants to enforce 'responsibility for deliberate acts' to counteract the godlike nature of SAVE/LOAD. Maybe Chara is the intermediary who allows us to interface with SAVE/LOAD and/or Frisk, or maybe they’re just an observer of beings with high determination, or something else entirely. Instead of the consequence in Tainted Pacifist being 'evil kill bad now spooky haunted' at the very end, have Chara make a show of them seizing control in the middle of the ending sequence (at the most unresolved moment possible) and leverage the metanarrative elements of the world to inflict a depth of dissatisfaction that can only come from a game—back to title screen, save wipe. Instead of 'you experience true pacifist but game haunted oh nooo' it would be 'you can never experience true pacifist in full again. live with your choices.'

Alternatively, let’s take another option. Don't involve Chara. Don't give a true 'conclusion' in that sense. Just end with a black screen after killing Flowey that persists until you manually go into the files and unfuck the save—i.e. 'What are you still doing here? The monsters are all gone. There’s nothing left. Isn’t that what you wanted?'

Instead, it really just kinda serves to make talking about the route annoying (no Patrick, you were not possessed to do evil, you chose what buttons to press) and feels a little hackish in retrospect. 'wow evil child monster haunts the game kill everyone and you too ooh wow' is a bit of an eye-roller when tailing one of the most otherwise ludonarratively-consonant gameplay routes in an RPG, IMO.

Moving on, encounter and non-encounter area differentiation is a bit unintuitive. Pokémon solves this by having special encounter tiles, and Deltarune solves this with roaming encounters. Properly adds to the tedium of No Mercy, annoying elsewhere.

Speaking of Deltarune, you can feel the lack of a run button on replay. Rather annoying now that I’ve been spoiled with having it.

Lastly, I don’t really like Muffet’s heart mechanic. Idea is cute, but it feels like it'd give me RSI if played for a good bit.

ok, disclaimer, these criticisms are only refreshed as far as my last playthrough, which was late 2023, so they may be half-remembered

CrossCode's level graph very much assumes you're champing at the bit to do a good chunk of the quests in each area before you move on (or an annoying amount of grinding), which–especially in the early game–can be a bit of a slog due to the amount of backtracking and/or fetching you have to do. The justifications I've heard for this is that it's supposed to be a part of the general satire of MMOs–however, if you make something that drags on purpose and I have to play it, I may or may not feel the purpose but I definitely feel the drag.

The bit after Red Area^TM and before Japan^TM honestly drags a little. I see the vision but it feels like it ballooned in scope relative to its importance to the story. Don't get me wrong, after Red Area^TM you absolutely need to have downtime, but I remember a bit before you get to the temples feeling like we should either be getting back into the plot action or at least be in another area by now, and then there's two temples. Cool idea, a bit much, especially on replay.

I think the puzzles are a design strength of the game, especially the final puzzle, but it very much constitutes a barrier to entry, especially the very long puzzles (including the final puzzle) where sometimes I just want to get back into the combat (the most fun part for me). It's more in retrospect that I like some of those longer puzzles.

I don't like the stealth sections at all. They're insta-room resets (annoying), and Lea feels too floaty to work with it. Her fluidity is great for combat but it just doesn't do precision. I'm glad that there's like, two in total, but I think they should have nixed it. CrossCode is a very active game, and IMO it thrives most when it allows you Metal Gear Rising/Sekiro levels of pure activity in gameplay. It's like if you were mid-Titanfall and they hit you with turn-based menu combat (shoot at options)–funny bit, kills the momentum, frustrating to control.

Lastly, platforming is generally fine but there are some bits where the isometric layering is poorly communicated, and it's rather frustrating when that happens. Also, I'm generally not the biggest fan of auto-jump platforming (currently first-timing Ocarina of Time so this is rather fresh) but it's implemented well-enough to not be annoying in a way that I remember.

your turn

hold [...] China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration

wazzup shanghai

disengage

a thing some of don't like

which we're not allowing on this forum. we're not free-speech radicals, this is a site that embodies a politic. we have real political stances which we enforce as a general standard of conduct here based on broader consensus among ourselves. we're also taking an iron fist to, say, suggestions that forceful imposition of "western values" is the solution to reactionary tendencies in peripheral countries–an idea that a notable amount of self-identified 'progressives' support, but we don't tolerate on this forum. you're talking about it as if LLMs are in an apolitical vacuum and don't exacerbate real labor problems and real environmental problems and real exploitation around the world.

this isn't a

your arguments seem to be coming from the fact that you cannot comprehend the disconnect between your position and the site's position here, but we are not changing the site's position merely because you refuse to engage with the multitude of points people are bringing up and just want it that way. tough shit, I guess.

springboards with a real example i should be able to do this rule-breaking thing because i'm honest about it and it's for good reasons
okay, here's what you could do in this real example to not do that and still fulfill those good reasons
here's how you can ignore how i'm doing that
no, you shouldn't be doing that, we're not going to allow it and we'll keep enforcing it
if you don't allow it, everyone else is going to do it, secretly, so allow it if we're open about it
here is a real example of something we don't allow and how we enforce it and that strategy seems to work better
why are you comparing my thing to that really bad thing
hey, you still haven't engaged with my first point, here's how not to do that, can you do that
actually this is a broader point for hypothetical situations on principle (validating llm usage [cool, good, fine])

hey even though I've emphasized it again, you still haven't responded to my last point. i have to ask:

1. why can't you write the summaries yourself, it's a minute at most if you're reading the article before you post it
2. why can't you copy the byline if you refuse to put in the minute of work to summarize the article you've read
3. even assuming both are impossible, not happening, why do you assume that the demographic of "people who want AI summaries of articles in their social media posts" do not know where and how to access the chatbots that can summarize them themselves. does it have to be in the post itself?

this is just the argument libertarians use for why you can't ever regulate anything? this is not a free-speech radical forum. we're not making market solutions for content here. in the same vein in which we both have an automatic slur filter, remove blatant racism, and attempt to weed out subtle racism, the solution isn't normalizing the open racism–the solution is stamping it out with an iron fist whenever it's caught. yes–things slip through the cracks, it's imperfect–but it's infinitely better than Twitter despite its imperfections, and it wards away the people who are incentivized by its normalization. I would personally like this site to strive to be a space free from this slop. There are numerous ethical, labor, environmental and health issues with its normalization and usage, and I'd like to be in a space carved away from indulgence in it in an open and unabashed manner. I feel uncomfortable with the encouragement of usage or reliance on it in any capacity or degree of separation, especially systematically. Again:

just write the summary yourself. I assume you've read the article. It can be a paragraph. let's say you don't want to. we can access the text. we can access these chatbots. if we're so inclined, we can toss the article at the chatbots on our own time.

I […] oppose the normalization of it [on this forum]

honesty is only a virtue unalloyed. the goal is to eradicate AI slop in this space. why would we allow it under the pretense of 'at least they admit it?' that's not the goal. the goal is to remove it entirely. when it's detected, it should be gone.

it is also not at all an accessibility aid. as the exact demographic of person (rather severe presentation of ADHD) who would be supposedly most aided by this, as well as being a data science major, I wholeheartedly reject the idea that it in any way meets an acceptable standard for constituting that. the average person genuinely doesn't know the sheer amount of subtle fuckups and misinformation these diceroll plagiarism boxes output even when provided the exact text they are supposed to paraphrase. rather, its main effect–due to them 'seeming right'–is a disinformative capacity, encouraging people to skip the article and defer to the generated 'summary.' I simply do not think this is a sound argument.

just write the summary yourself. I assume you've read the article. It can be a paragraph. let's say you don't want to. we can access the text. we can access these chatbots. we can toss the article at the chatbots on our own time. I don't want AI slop on this forum at all and oppose the normalization of it, especially under flimsy pretenses such as this.

Hyped myself into telling my mom about wanting to experiment looks-wise/gender-wise down the road. She’s hesitant but open to helping me try which is honestly on the better end of what I can hope for w/rt it