missingno

Particles are used together with words to mark their grammatical role in the sentence.

私(は) - I (subject)
ホテル(の)向かい(に) - hotel (possessive) across the street (to)
(お)店(で) - (just makes the sentence more formal) shop (in)
スーツ(を) - suit (object)

Fun thing about particles is that word order is a lot more flexible compared to English. As long as the right particles are attached to the right words, you can sometimes* swap around the order of these words and still be grammatically correct.

That's several more steps than it ought to take. Including the step of having to look this up, because you'd never intuitively figure this out on your own.

Game & Watch Gallery 2 was the first game I ever owned, and Ball was easily my favorite. Getting into a good rhythm as it speeds up feels so satisfying.

I don't own any original units, but I do have the 2010 Club Nintendo reproduction.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. They took the best competitive puzzle game ever made and added a ton of goodies to make it the best package deal. 20 variant game modes, 24 character stories, a comprehensive set of tutorials, a devilish set of chain challenges, and a final challenge where you play against max level CPU while it's allowed to cheat.

It's a tragedy this game was never released in the west, and I can rant for hours about Sega has criminally neglected the series with the half-assed slop they put out now because they know that crossovers will sell better than the main series ever will.

The character that leaves and rejoins the party is not permanently missable. It might be tricky to figure out how to get them back, but there's no fail state.

You can and should do the first playthrough blind. Save the guide for NG+.

Anime. There are plenty of great shows I like, and seemingly no way to discuss them with people who are actually normal about it.

Still waiting for more info on it, not to mention games, but I'll almost certainly be buying a Switch 2.

There is an optional party member that you can either recruit or fight based on which dialogue option you pick. You'll know it when you see it though, so it's easy to make the right choice.

There are 12 endings (13 in DS and subsequent rereleases). You can easily see all of them in just two playthroughs. Theoretically you could even do them all on the first playthrough, but it's much easier to do in NG+.

The only caveat is that you have to see them in order, you can't backtrack if you miss one, which is why I recommend starting with the final and true ending on your first playthrough, then do all the others on NG+. NG+ makes it pretty easy to speed through things as well, your second playthrough will be much shorter.

I respect the hell out of him for doing the best he could with very limited resources, difficult technical limitations, and an insane deadline. I just can't recommend playing that version today over a better alternative.

There are a lot of JRPGs from this era that I love dearly but would have a hard time recommending to anyone who didn't grow up on these kinds of games. Games that are slow, grindy, and mostly consist of clicking Attack every turn.

Chrono Trigger is the one exception I can recommend to anyone, and then say that if you liked this entry point then you can try some other JRPG classics.

Just note that the original SNES translation should be avoided, play a modern rerelease or a retranslation patch.

Fighting games: I'm a solid upper-intermediate player in most of the games I play. I've got a few tournament wins under my belt for smaller local brackets. At majors, I usually go 2-2 or 3-2, consistently finishing in the top half. Best I've ever done in a large bracket was 9th in Them's Fightin' Herds at Combo Breaker 2022.

Riichi Mahjong: Master 1 on MajSoul, 7th Dan on Riichi City. Our local club runs a seasonal league where I took 2nd last season and am currently ranked 4th this season, though with IRL games the sample size is a bit small. I know I have a lot to improve on still, my deal-in rate is akin to repeatedly putting my hand on a hot stove.

Versus puzzle games: Retired out of spite for the sad state of the competitive scene today, but I used to be the top Puyo Puyo player in my state, peaked at a 2700 rating back then. That is a big fish in a small pond though, top Japanese players are so far ahead of us because barely anyone in the west ever took this game seriously. Which leads into the long rant about why I called it quits... I've dabbled in a lot of other games as well, but when it comes to competitive scenes everything else is even more nonexistent than Puyo. There are a lot of games I can call myself good at just by default.

Maybe they should grow thick enough skin to not get offended at this sign.