Yeah I get it and am not blaming anyone in particular. But in my case it’s hard not to compare this to the other Japanese VN I played in 2025, the Hundred Line, which had a ~10x? bigger script and no such localization issues
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“Huh? Filler dialogue?”
“Dialogue that fills in gaps of the story. Used to pad and lengthen games, sometime unnecessarily.”
“Ah. I see…”
sometimes the correct translation/localisation is to cut the lines
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I actually think the occult/dark tourism distinction is correct. I’ve heard the term “dark tourism” used before to refer to people traveling to, e.g. locations where famous murders occurred. To me that’s different from someone who’s traveling to see a historical site with a legend behind it. Those other two examples are definitely awkward though.
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I have gotten to the diablo 4 endgame and I am losing interest. Same thing happens with Destiny 2. I have no interest in grinding out Mythics and doing higher and higher difficulties. I might just do a bunch of the sidequests and then leave it be. I will be holding off on getting/preordering the next expansion.
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I used to find this sort of thing silly but now I think it’s admirable for people to make deep life commitments more or less arbitrarily (like a dog or ghost). Get her Jim
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It’s only really stupid in the second game. You can explain his characterization in Brood War as a cope because his gf is going evil mode and he doesn’t want to believe it.
also tbf Raynor falls in love with her over the course of a month and they’re in combat/close proximity with each other the entire time!! also she’s an esper, which you imagine has to save some time.
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Starcraft 2’s story and presentation is so abysmally Disneyfied. Really you can demonstrate everything about Blizzard’s decline by pointing to SC 1 > 2 (or, analogously, Diablo 1 > 3)
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To be clear I don’t think it’s weird or bad; I genuinely like it. The comedy part for me is that because of this via domino effect he ends up just casually like, befriending all the notable Protoss leaders? Tassadar, Zeratul, Fenix, and Artanis are all good friends of Jim Raynor!
Also I remember not being bothered that much by his feeling towards Kerrigan in 2. After like 5+ years in hiding doing hit-and-run on the Dominion, his limerence towards Kerrigan-that-was is probably the only thing holding him together lol.
But we’ll see how I feel about it once I hit Starcraft 2 in my series replay.
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It’s not his longing for her that’s stupid, it’s his entire goal with finding her in the campaign, and then how even if you’re okay with that the next expansion completely backtracks on it making jimmy’s whole emotional arc in wings of liberty come across as a waste of time. the writers having a very narrow idea of what they want to do with kerrigan doesn’t help
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just one mission is all you need to fall in love
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wait, can love blossom on the battlefield?
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yeah it’s honestly kind of wild how the storyline is resolved considering that kerrigan kind of becomes this incredibly powerful supreme leader of an entire race in the middle of it? and the way it’s resolved is “we gotta CURE her”, like how is that the most interesting route they found out of everything that could’ve happened when the person you love becomes the leader of the zerg, it’s just such an unimaginative resolution
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right exactly like kerrigan actually has some agency as a character as queen of blades which makes this arc even more inexplicable because the writers knew that and heart of the swarm starts with her immediately reinfesting herself. like it comes across like raynor loves that old photograph of her more than kerrigan the person lol which like could be interesting if this was a book and not a hacky videogame plot uninterested in its characters interiority. one of blizzards great misogynist moments is like everything around her
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Been playing Astro Bot the past few days, I wish its actual mechanics had a bit more friction to them (hitting enemies is just never satisfying) as I think the levels themselves are fairly charming. Still a good time, the Ico bot having a gatcha thing where it is eating a watermelon is a real “for the sickos” touch.
Also a friend of mine has decided that 2026 is the year where he’s gonna try and tackle some classic crpgs he bounced off of in his youth and has just started up Fallout 1, so I may try to give that a shot as well. If I do I am terrified at the things I will overlook and the terrible consequences that will result.
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its really hard to actually fuck up in fallout 1 to the point you cant win
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Clearly you are not familiar with the legend of username, Breaker of Games
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i’m replaying Chrono Trigger for the first time since I was a teenager. with New Game+, I replayed that game an uncountable amount of times, but at age 42, I felt like i’d forgotten enough of the play experience to warrant a revisit. of course, I basically remember all the beats and story points of the game as they’re happening or about to happen, but this is as close as i’ll get to “seeing it with fresh eyes,” I think (in reality, I remember a lot more than I figured I would). i’m playing with a fresh New Game to get an actual sense of how stuff feels, though. i’ve died a few times! the pace of battles can really make you think, and the fact that so many enemies have particular ways of beating them or timings to beat them makes it more action-y than other RPGs.
the game moves at breakneck speed and really seems to respect the player’s time. you also don’t really need to grind, unless you want to. I don’t feel like I can say anything new here about the game, but basically i’m having a good time with it and it’s living up to my memory of it. of course, it isn’t like “wow, this is the best thing ever” that I felt at the age of 12, but I feel like many games are not as fun as what i’m playing right now. it helps that the music and art is beautiful and, say whatever one might, but I like Woolsey translations.
I also like how all the areas in this game are relatively small - you spend time traversing through them repeatedly, but it’s easy to remember their layouts and how to move through them quickly, which makes everything feel interconnected in a way, like the world is alive and a real place, and not just disposable setpieces you forget about once you finish whatever quest.
just made it to the the Ocean Palace and getting mentally ready for the skillcheck fight that initially cost me weeks of my life as a kid - The Golem Twins.
my hope is to beat the game before this holiday break is over, and then I plan to replay FF6
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Getting close to the end of DLC1 for Witcher 3, and I think I understand now why people have enduring positive memories of this game. I knew DLC2 was about Geralt retiring, but turns out DLC1 is too, and it’s a good hook in this one too. I suspect they realized during production of Witcher 3 that this is what that game should have been about, but it was too late to rewrite the questlines to actually be about something. Instead Witcher 3 is mostly about resolving plot threads from Witcher 2, or just wandering around the ubisoft wilderness. There’s a quest line about setting up Dandelion’s cabaret club, and instead of being a send off of his character or about settling down it’s just a excuse for his fiance to get attacked by a serial killer who Geralt has to hunt down.
With the DLCs they finally have a target to shoot for, leading to significantly more focused writing and much better quests. It’s frustrating that they made the same mistake again in Cyberpunk because it seems like they have the ability to make a good 30 hour game as opposed to a meandering 120 hour checklist.
The inventory clutter makes a little more sense in Witcher as opposed to CP2077 too. Half of Geralt’s powerset involves a variety of alcohols, so it kind of makes sense to rummage through a bandit camp incase they have some vodka. It feels like a little joke when you kill a man and find a chicken sandwich on his body, and then you eat that chicken sandwich because the game doesn’t have automatic passive healing. I do wish that it didn’t have looting swords/armor as part of the economy though; that kind of Oblivion behavior seems out of character for Geralt, and I preferred back in Witcher 1 where it wasn’t even possible to carry a sword in your inventory.
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Heart of Stone (DLC1) was a highpoint in my hundred something hours of playing Witcher 3 across like five years, too. I think it is one of the game’s best adventures and the best stories in all of the Witcher games. It made my heart soften a little to W3 when I was thinking of it much like you were in your first post. Blood and Wine hardened me to the game once more when I got a couple hours into it.
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