Zeik

@senorsucks2suck: Or, you know, people can actually just have different opinions. I really really can't stand it when people try to force ridiculous ideologies onto other people to try and dismiss any opposing viewpoints, with absolutely no evidence other than your own warped worldview that anyone who might not agree is some insane toxic hivemind with no thoughts of their own. It's absolutely absurd.

Even though I disagree with OPs viewpoint on this matter he's certainly allowed to have his opinion. But man, fuck off with trying to dismiss any discourse as invalid just because people aren't on your side of the argument.

This is a pretty ridiculous thing to get worked up over. This was always advertised as something that was going to be PS5 exclusive. It's also not like they hiked up the price of PS+ for PS4 owners to justify this addition.

Let's say you bought a year of PS+ before this was announced. You're getting exactly what you payed for if you only own a PS4. If you own a PS5 the you're getting more than what you payed for.

There is nothing wrong here. This would only be worth getting upset about if they removed features that were previously available and locked them behind owning a PS5.

@justin258: I don't think those are really comparable situations. Trump became president because people underestimated how many stupid people live in America that are easily brainwashed by rhetoric. It wasn't because he was some master tactician that accomplished the impossible and then pulled the rug out from us after the election.

My biggest worry was that he still had enough fanatical supporters to vote him into the Whitehouse. But now we're past the point where he can leverage them to succeed (hopefully) so now all he has left is his own buffoonery.

The rest of the republican party that is now going to be vying for power are definitely going to be a problem, as always, but I don't think many are going to go to bat for Trump's limp shenanigans at this point.

I'm not too worried about Trump. He'll spend the next few months whining and moaning and probably try every pathetic trick he can come up with to magically make it so he won, but I'm not too concerned that he'll find any way to actually stay in office.

I am worried about his radical supporters though. They have the potential to do some real harm if they're not willing to accept that he lost, and I won't be surprised if Trump tries to stoke those fires to boost his own ego. I'm really not looking forward to the coming months.

I recently built a new PC, so I may end up playing on PC more than I ever have, but it's not any active attempt to move away from consoles. I'll play whatever has the games I want to play.

@bigsocrates: My issue is that you're conflating "not explicitly targeting adults with explicitly adult themes and graphics" with "targeting children". A lot about the game has a potentially broad appeal, yes, and there are going to be children who will play it, but that's not the same as actively targeting a child audience. For better or worse, characters like Paimon are often not designed to appeal to children, they're designed to appeal to otakus who like cute moe characters. Paimon isn't the "breakout character" because kids are talking about her. It's adults.

I don't intend to sit here and argue in circles with you, but I flat out disagree with the assertion that this game is inherently scummier purely for its choice in artstyle and its broad anime themes. There's plenty of valid criticisms you can have about this game and the gacha game model in general, but I strongly disagree with that one.

The game is already rated T, so if you're following the ESRB's guidlines then that already cuts out young children. And when it comes to teens there's really nothing about this game that has an inherent "teen" appeal, more than any other age. In fact, for most teens something with more mature graphics or themes is a far easier sell. Games like CoD are incredibly successful at appealing to teens. Personally speaking, if a game came out with graphics like this but Ys level or greater themes I would have been 100% my jam as a teenager. Being more broadly "kid friendly" has no inherent appeal for the average teenager.

@bigsocrates: Building a lot of varied units is definitely a large part of the appeal for me. While I don't chase the gacha, just naturally playing them will amass a sizable roster of units, and the game's tend to incentivize building a lot of different units to tackle a variety of content, and I enjoy that. Most RPGs tend to limit you to a small selection of units that are often pretty interchangeable. The gacha games I have stuck with for an extended period of time have also had a decent amount of depth to their mechanics and a satisfying challenge to overcome. That's usually what keeps me playing, the gradual progress toward overcoming a challenge, and what usually causes me to quit them is running out of those challenges and the games turning into a treadmill with no goals beyond the gacha.

But I still have to disagree with what you're saying about the game targeting kids. The idea that just because it has an anime aesthetic and more active combat it is intentionally aimed at children and inherently scummier and warrants harsher treatment is a very misguided mindset. It reminds me of too many of other misguided arguments about other media that people mistakenly believe is intended for children specifically (anime, video games, comics, etc) and any content deemed unsuitable for children is unacceptable. While I definitely think parents need to be more aware and more cautious about young children playing these kinds of games, and the ESRB should probably start factoring in the gambling element of gacha's, that should apply to all gacha games. Nothing about this game warrants it to be singled out and treated harsher, beyond perhaps a greater awareness that it is in fact a gacha game and parents should be aware if their child starts playing it.

So I've played a lot of gacha games over the last several years. They scratch a particular RPG itch for me that is kind of few and far between with more traditional games. But I don't really play them for the gacha mechanics. They're just a means to an end and I almost never put money into them. I've learned how to find fun as F2P and making due with whatever I happen to get.

Genshin Impact is an odd duck though, as it doesn't scratch quite that same itch for the most part, but I have enjoyed just exploring the world, and the combat mechanics are fun enough. You don't really see RPGs like this even in the full priced game space. While it shares some notable similarities to Breath of the Wild, they are still quite different games, even disregarding the gacha. But I still don't really know about the game's longevity. A good gacha game in my book has a strong F2P friendly gameplay loop. Some people may choose to spend money to speed things up, or just chase some unit or goal, but there should always be a decent amount of stuff to do to make steady progress without spending a penny. But a large appeal of the game is the finite exploration that's eventually going to run out, and what I've seen of the actual loot grinding loop isn't anything special. In fact if the resin issues aren't addressed it's kinda bad. So I feel like a lot of people will drop it once they reach the end game and go find a gacha game with a more satisfying gameplay loop. Depending on how they decide to expand the world it might be a game worth checking back in on every few months though. We'll see.

That being said, I don't think anything about this game stands out as targeting kids directly. No more than literally every other gacha game out there. Bright colors and cartoony anime graphics is the standard for mobile gacha RPGs. I think it's unfair to try to call them out simply for their choice in artstyle. If you want an example of a gacha game clearly targeting a younger audience look at something like Pokemon Masters. Given the source material that's far more iffy.

@topcyclist: Are you sure you read it? Because your thoughts on Advent Children are more or less what he said. Maybe he's more down on it overall than you seem to be, but you can't expect everyone to feel the exact same way about everything as you. Some people liked Advent Children well enough for being mindless entertainment and entertaining fights. Plenty of people expected more, because the source material was more than that, and were left disappointed.

ZombiePie's opinions don't always line up with my own, but he always makes an effort in these blogs to explain why he feels that way (sometimes in excruciating detail) and I can respect that. Contrary opinions aren't inherently a bad thing.

You really should learn to read more than one or two words of the title of a thread before you make comments like this. Then you might have realized this whole thing was not in fact about FF7 itself, but all the subpar supplemental material that came out that most fans don't even like.