Heya! I'm Behemoth, and I'm a big ol' nerd. Professionally, I recently became a web developer, but I used to work at the Pike Place Market. FFXIV, JoJo, One Piece, Gundam, etc.


[ 🧾 ] wordpress
beigemoth.blog/
[ 👹 ] twitter
twitter.com/Beigemoth
[ 👁 ] personal site (hasn't been updated in ages)
rtvgilder.com/

Man, that fog is STILL hanging around. It was really thick last night, I went for a walk around the block and tried to get some pictures of it, it was so surreal. Could hardly see two blocks away. None of them really captured how it looked except this one, kinda. Hard thing to photograph, fog.

Back at the office today. I'm considering bringing my space heater in, one of the other guys in the office has one. It just gets freezing in here, honestly reminds me of working at the market in the winter. Where like... if I were up and walking around, this would be fine, but since I'm just sitting in one place all day, I end up getting chilled.

Someone I follow on tumblr is going through an Armored Core 6 phase, reblogging all kinds of art and whatnot. That game... I kinda regret dropping it so quickly, but I really felt like it was just not for me. The aesthetics of the mechs didn't appeal to me, and that was clearly one of the major pillars of the game, as with any From game.

And it's not like it was too hard or anything, but it was clear that I would have to put in a lot of time to get accustomed to how it plays. I'm not a person who can bounce from game to game and grasp the controls quickly, I gotta put in the hours. When I first played Nioh, I spent a couple hours just killing the first few enemies over and over, getting used to the controls. Same with Dark Souls, come to think of it. And then it took me like 10 more hours to actually beat that first mission! It was a whole thing.

I put like 200 hours into Nioh before beating it, and just on the regular difficulty. Lots of starting over and trying again, coming back weeks or months later. Then I had an easier time with Nioh 2, because I was already accustomed to its core gameplay. But it took all that time invested to get there in the first place.

It was the same with AC6 as with Sekiro: I saw a path forward, but I just didn't want to take it. In this case, it certainly didn't help that I was like 50 hours into Baldur's Gate 3 at the time, and didn't want to switch gears.

Anyway, I feel like I am the only person even aware there's a new Dragon Quest Monsters game coming out on friday, much less the only one excited about it. I love that series! I haven't really played one since the first Joker game on the DS, which I didn't really like, but from the demo of this one it seems like a return to form.

Probably because they remade the originals on 3DS and just... never released them in the US... the DQ dark ages....



Back at the office today, after a whole week off. It's kinda nice, gettin' back into things, but also I wish I could take like a whole month off. Maybe I'll save up my PTO next year.

It's cold and foggy today. We get a lot of fog around here, being so close to water in every direction, but this is weird because like... it didn't burn off? Like, it's more foggy now than it was an hour ago, and it's almost 4pm. Very unusual.

Sure hope I'm not trapped in some sorta allegorical hell dimension of my own making, that would suck.



gee-man
@gee-man

"devs AND fans of the genre have ceded that JRPG combat isn't really interesting"

Seriously, what is it about Japanese media that just brings out a specific kind of self assured dipshittery from (mostly) white voices in the industry? I see this shit all the time, both from the press side of things as well as within the industry itself. I won't name names, but I've met animators who hate anime, game designers who hate Japanese games, hell I once met a graphic designer who had a weird fixation on the "structural failings" of Japanese graphic design (whatever the hell that means).

Where does it come from? It happens too often to just be the occasional bad take.

To be clear, this isn't to imply Japanese media is exempt from criticism, but it's weird how much is in bizarrely racialized bad faith. I wouldn't go as far as call it racist, but definitely bordering on xenophobic.

Also god imagine criticizing JRPG combat (which is an insanely broad genre with so many different interpretations and styles) and then presenting deckbuilding as your solution.

Fuck it, tell me about some cool and interesting JRPG battle systems that you've enjoyed.

I'll start. Resonance of Fate is one of the messiest games I've ever played, but goddamn if I wish they had made like 2 more of them and refined the "Tri-Attack Battle system." It's a mix of real time and turn based where you decide your character's movement and shooting targets independently of each other. The key is to optimize your movement paths to synergize with your other party members to build up resources that you then cash in to do sick Equilibrium style gun-fu maneuvers. The tl;dr is the more sick jumps you do, the more resources and healing you get back in the process. Quite frankly it's an easy system to break after a certain point but it never gets boring watching your JRPG heroes decked out in primo mid 00s Japanese fashion do jumping 360 spins in the air while blasting hot lead in every direction.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

What the fuck nonsense is this anyway. This brain genious clearly has Something In Mind for "JRPG combat" and I'm pretty sure it's just Dragon Warrior. Lightning Returns is my favorite RPG combat system of all time, it's unbelievably technical and like... you don't get much more middle of the road JRPG than "full-budget mainline Final Fantasy". I would defy this person to justify literally anything in those tweets.


Behemoth
@Behemoth

Literally everything he's suggesting in the second tweet has been done, decades ago.

It really just sounds like someone imagining the most boring possible Dragon Quest game and then getting mad at it. The genre of JRPGs is rich with variety! If you want something with a ton of super crunchy and detailed systems that makes every single turn a high-stakes decision, you can find it. If you want something nice and light and story-focused, that is also available.

Honestly, it sounds like he just wanted to muse about ideas for interesting turn-based combat, which is fine. But framing it as "I'm going to be the one to come in and fix this inherently broken genre" is incredibly shitty lmao