The most mainstream games in the genre outside of Disgaea (FFT, XCOM, FE) all had permadeath, so I think it’s fair to go in to a new game in the genre with the assumption it’s on the table.

It’s been a staple of the genre for a long time. Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Warsong(Langrisser), Xcom, Tactics Ogre...

It’s not just a fire emblem thing.

It’s fair to assume that, yes. FE saturated the casual market and people’s impressions and like to assume other games are like FE.

They made it very clear that it was a first half of 2022 announcement. BOTW 2 was never coming out in first half.

For being “Everything announced during the Nintendo Direct” you sure missed a number of titles announced in the direct... SD Gundam Battle Alliance being one of the ones I was hyped about and only found out was announced from friends after reading this article.

And to round out what was only featured on the JP direct:
Loop 8 - An RPG/visual novel dealie

I’m more excited by the fact we’re getting an official translation of Radical Dreamers. Considering it never even got a physical release in Japan back in the day, I was sure it’d never happen

Then you clearly didn’t read the only sentence on the screen at the start which clearly stated that the focus was on releases through spring.

Nintendo usually says what the Direct will cover, and rarely diverge from that. This time they said they were showing off games in the first half of 2022. (It’s quite unusual that they showed Xenoblade 3 when it’s not coming out until September.)

Nintendo outright stated that this Direct only focused on games released in the first half of the year. Outside of Xenoblade 3, all of the games shown are being released between now and July.

I thought the animations in the character profiles were really well done, and I trust WayForward to do right by the game.

No rules beyond Nintendo’s announcement saying “This will be focused on first half games” yesterday. Not that you were the only one to pay no attention to that.

??? That’s what the E3/Summer Direct is for.

Did you really think Breath of the Wild 2 was coming out in the next few months?

But...this isn’t everything at the Nintendo Direct.

The argument the author makes is literally that they should replace at least part of the cast with people with a SWANA background in order to do a fantasy culture more justice. What do you mean slippery slope, we have literally reached the point where some people are getting ‘woke’ over a fucking DnD campaign.

I think the part I’m struggling with is that D&D has, to me, always been about play it how you want. And this article is flipping it into play it how we want. The internet is no longer satisfied with being spectators, they want to be directors as well.

Right. I think it’s kind of weird that they didn’t take advantage of their huge talent pool (cultural consultants notwithstanding) of friends who are voice actors that also happen to be POC. Many of the people in Legend of Vox Machina are POC, so it’s not like they don’t have connections.

So what is your solution, or is this just a criticism with no answer?

Yeah but there is no better that they can do. According to the author, the original cast is fundamentally incapable of doing right by any setting that isn’t traditional ‘European’ fantasy.