If Level-5 puts town-building in its next major game, whether it be Dark Cloud 3 or something else, I’d like to see them have more incremental goals than Ni No Kuni 2. In the Dark Cloud games, you always had to hit certain milestones in your town development in order to be able to move forward in the dungeon.

Choose whichever characters are the most fun to control. The different weapons and skills all have a distinct feel to them.

The battles in Ni No Kuni 2 are a lot easier and faster than the battles in Ys VIII or Final Fantasy XV, if that’s helpful.

I’m always disappointed when I go to a restaurant that has French’s ketchup instead of Heinz. I think, “This restaurant has taken the wrong side in the Condiment Wars.”

I seem to recall Spielberg saying that the most shmaltzy and Spielbergian aspects of the film were already there in Kubrick’s notes or Watson’s treatment. And Spielberg went on to say that he consciously tried to reference Kubrick in some of his shots. Some people criticized the movie as an awkward amalgam of…

At the time, a lot of people were harshly critical of Final Fantasy X for all sorts of reasons: voice acting, linearity, annoying side tasks to unlock ultimate weapons, even as they praised it for a thoughtful story with a unique setting and strategic battle system.

I know some of the show’s writers and producers have expressed regret that they explicitly tied the show’s early flashback episodes to the 70s and 80s. In the short term (say by season nine) those flashback episodes felt much more “dated” than the other episodes that aired around them.

Dennis grades the episodes on a curve, basically.

I hated the docu-series’ style as well, but I put up with it for the He-Man episode. I’m sure I’ll eventually watch the others, but, yeah, incredibly annoying.

Yeah. I found lots of the side quests to be trivial like that as well.

Over the weekend, I made it this far as well. Goldpaw signed on, and I’m finishing up some sidequests before I move on to the next country.

I think that summer is my favorite season to get lost in a long JRPG. Part of that is childhood, I’m sure; summer was when I had all the free time to play these 50-100 hour games. But it’s also a good reason to stay indoors, preferably a cool basement. I don’t do well in the heat; it really saps my energy.

Roland and Evan are pretty much inseparable, so it’s a moot point in this case. The POV shifts back and forth between them as the story necessitates. Having Roland as the initial POV character makes exposition a lot less awkward, as he can ask questions about the world that the players need answered. Plus, Roland…

I’m told that you’ll need to recruit at least 100 citizens for the kingdom in order to beat the game. Some of those citizens will be automatically recruited as part of the main story, but you’ll still need to do some side-quests in order to recruit more. Thankfully, the quest list in the menu clearly indicates which…

Yeah. And it’s not as if the game suddenly stops being an action-JRPG after six hours. The city-building is fairly straightforward. You’re not managing a whole lot of different crafting materials or deciding how to optimally place certain buildings. The only things limiting a city’s growth are money (which accrues…

Your last point gets to my least favourite thing about the game: trying to recruit a specific familiar could take hours of fighting the same battles over and over.

City sim games have been locking development behind real-time since the 80s, long before micro-transactions were a big thing. It’s all about delayed gratification, and making players decide how to prioritize their research and construction with the limited resources they have available.

I assume it’s meant to indicate that Uber is constantly losing money?

I think Jian-Yang’s story this season has some promise. I enjoyed his casual description of his ongoing attempts to fake Erlich’s death. I hope they do a good job of integrating Jian-Yang with the rest of cast.

Yeah, I think the main issue with TMNT series isn’t that they grow weirder over time; it’s more that they seem to grow sillier (and usually more juvenile) over time. The Ghostbusters franchise went through a similar trajectory in the 80s; by the time The Real Ghostbusters ended, it was more of a straight cartoon.