Ashtear

With Atlus announcing that they are going to add voice lines to all the S-Link level up scenes, I'm guessing that's why FeMC didn't get included. They said this will already have the most voice lines of any Persona game. Adding FeMC's S-Links to that would have been a lot more lines on top of that.

Whether or not expanding the voicing was a better move than not including FeMC is another question entirely.

Something I've noticed as I've shifted more of my conversations from Reddit to Discord (even before the garbage fire over at the site) is that I'm not looking up stuff as much during instant, short-form communication. Just casual conversation really is okay sometimes. I'll be trying to keep that in mind as I spend more time on Reddit alternatives.

I also have a theory that message board conversations spend as much time on opinion as they do because all the little shit has been solved now that we have esoteric information at our fingertips. Some people don't even know what it was like to be sitting around with friends all trying to figure out what 80's film you saw Robert Loggia in because you couldn't just look it up on-demand.

It still makes sense if Reddit's negotiation with the subscription-based third-party apps was never in good faith and this was always about killing them.

Mostly that exactly. The instance is probably the most restrictive general NSFW content platform I've ever seen, and that's ruffling feathers. There's also a lot of the same power struggle dynamic, too. It's exhausting. One of the threads publicly descended into name-calling (on both sides) so I doubt it'll get better in the long run.

Bickering between admins and mods. Only a matter of time, though. It's already happening again over at lemmynsfw.

Freelancer and Freespace 2 were also peak space sim for me.

Getting about 10 hours in before dropping it, I had two big issues with Everspace 2: experience level progression and immersion.

Once I got to a new system, everything was high level, and in ES2, the level scaling means it's more of a wall than a slaughter. There's also no experience point rubber banding to make it worth your while.

I really enjoyed the story so far, more than Freelancer (not exactly a high bar), but I'm at a point now where I have to grind levels to continue. The above already makes me not want to, and then there are immersion problems on top of that.

In Freelancer, the whole system was loading screen free as long as I wasn't docking. I don't think I realized how big a deal that was until now. The transitions in and out of "jump drive space" in ES2 are a stark reminder that you're flying from node to node, and not cruising through a star system. Other little things when off the main questline like lack of radio chatter, no consequences for looting stations, and low traffic add to the immersion problem.

I'll probably come back to it eventually as it's good enough, but that's only because virtually no one is making this kind of game anymore. It feels like it wouldn't much to surpass this game.

Would be nice, but antitrust has been feckless in the US for so long that I'll take it where I can get it.

FF4 was also from an era where keeping scripts concise was part of saving on costs.

Playing third or fourth gen RPGs is certainly going to make virtually any RPG made today seem slow.

I've been using Grouvee for a while and I'm still happy with it.

Taking a quick look at Questlog, the term "backlog" doesn't seem to appear anywhere, which I appreciate. It's a work term and isn't great for mental health when used with a hobby that should be relaxing.

Looks like their "similar games" algorithm needs work, though.

They had better be. The mods at the larger subreddits clearly aren't safe as long as Reddit is this profit-driven. If it helps their bottom line, they will step in and reorganize mod teams one at a time.