Recent content by balladbird

I'm pretty hype, I can't deny. The art style looks like it's falling back to the more traditional designs, which would be pretty awesome for me. While a handful of the demon designs in SMT IV were superior to the original designs, many just felt out of place, and while the whole game *played*...

In a perfect world, I'd argue that pretending to be something you're not is the defining trait of an actor, and thus an actors race/gender/orientation shouldn't have any bearing on the roles they fill... but I concede we don't live in a perfect world. There probably is a case to be made for...

I'm having the same issue. It may no longer be possible to access profiles on the old escapist. Either way, if possible, I'd like the status. Been lurking around these parts since 2012. https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/view/balladbird

Well, more than any catastrophic collapse, it was more that the preferences of the japanese public changed. JRPGs were always, largely, a budget genre of game. There were titans like Square-Enix who would crank out top-of-the-line graphics and cutscenes for maximum specatcle, but for every one...

I work as a hotel night auditor, so I remained employed througout the lockdown... albeit largely in the capacity of being paid to spend all night listening to youtube on my phone, since for a solid 2 months there we didn't get a significant amount of business. Employment aside, the pandemic...

Tim's alright. My girlfriend is a big fan of his work. His style is a bit scattershot, I admit, even by the generous standards afforded to youtube personalities. That said, he tends to have a lot of things to say that are worth the trouble of listening to him... even if it takes him a while...

Oof, that sucks. I'm the kind of person who buys one sports game of each sport I'm interested in every 5-6 years, so I'm not the most negatively effected by this, but I feel for the fans... EA has stripped and dumped most of the modes players actually want in favor of their 'freemium in all...

You're right, but when has that ever stopped a buzzword? Take "virtue signaling", for instance. By definition, it's a person who pretends to care about some important cause because they want to be seen as caring about it, despite not actually giving a crap... but unless the person using that...

The term has been watered down so absolutely that I never use it myself... since no one would understand what I meant by it unless I spent extra time explaining it... and at that point I may as well just drop the buzzword and keep the explanation. I will say that for me it's the "self insert"...

Not sure how well known it is... but the example that has always stuck out in my mind is the niche Xbox360/PS3 JRPG "Eternal Sonata" According to the game: On the night of his death, legendary Polish composer and piano player Frederic Chopin had a dying fever dream that saw him transported to...

My own thoughts on the issues brought up: 1.) regarding length: You won't hear me defend the idea to make FF7 an episodic game. I hated it when it was announced and I hate it now. That said, length wasn't a downside here for me. I'm a slow player and a completionist, but it took me 55...

That's amazing. Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. If sports are declared an essential business, then Gamestop should have gotten the title as well. No surprise it was Florida though, figured it'd be them or Texas.

Animal crossing is a game that shines brightest as a side-project you play for a few minutes a day, only occasionally getting super invested in. It was basically a mobile game, sans microtransactions, before mobile games were a thing. That said, it has always been easy to cheese the date by...

Man. Saint Louis was so hype to finally have a pro football team again, too. :( Sucks that the XFL did everything right and still failed because of circumstances it couldn't control. Sadly, a lot of businesses will be destroyed by this disease before all is said and done.

Honestly, same. Part of it is that I came to RPGs super, *duper* late in life. I had an NES when I was a small child... like 3-5, but mom saw how much I seemed to grow addicted to it and got rid of it, not letting us have another one until I was in middle school. By the time I realized there...