Christian

Surrounding the joke with a comic actually makes it less funny here.

I clicked your link not expecting to watch more than thirty seconds but watched the full thing, that was a great lecture.

Being clichés was exactly it, I would find all of the other things perfectly tolerable if the characters had depth. I think three of the four introductions I saw just felt like “this character has actual values that you, the player, will totally align with” but completely hamfisted. If the protagonists are going to be the good guys then a story making that clear should be enough, rather than having “being the good guy” be an entire personality at the very start. (The exception to that came across as a generic oonga boonga beast woman, so having her dialogue be the least taxing for me to read was not exactly reason for optimism.)

I expected they’re all going to be given more depth as the story advances but I didn’t feel excited to wait around to see if that makes them less annoying, especially with four more intro stories remaining.

If you’ve played the second game I would like an opinion on if that one has a better cast.

I had a fluffy black cat who was also a metal kitty! His name was Buddy, but he would get into a lot of mischief so we would often refer to him as “the monster”. Once you’ve started calling your cat Buddy Monster you’re now a very short distance from “monster of buddies I’m pulling your strings”.

I tried the first one a few years back and it seemed right up my alley as far as art style and gameplay but I gave up after finding my fourth character because all four of them had personalities and dialogue that were grating on me. I like jrpgs and I can’t remember another one I bailed on explicitly because I found the dialogue annoying.

When I looked through reviews they seemed mostly positive, and even for the critical reviews that did share my complaint it was mostly an afterthought to other concerns that were not a big deal to me personally. If anyone felt similarly and also tried out the sequel I’d really like to know if it’s any better in that regard because I really wanted to like the first one.

I have never played Mario 64 outside of a couple five-minute sessions on a Toys-R-Us demo when I was maybe 10, but the Watch for Rolling Rocks half-A-press video - a speedrun with the added condition that a longer time will trump a shorter time if the player presses ‘A’ (jump) less than in the faster run - is almost unquestionably my favorite youtube video ever. It’s a hilariously silly niche thing, but beyond that it’s like watching someone try to explain their doctoral dissertation, making their best attempt while knowing full-well both that they won’t be able to get their audience to follow every piece and also that no one else is as engaged in the topic as they are. As long as I don’t feel like a captive audience, I can find a real joy in exposure to that sort of enthusiasm. Laying that on top of something that’s just a little funny hits the spot for me so much.

Now, you’re probably wondering what I’m gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for twelve hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes, and if you thought my other tangents were complicated, just you wait. Okay, so Mario’s position is a floating point number, but it’s converted to a short when the game uses it to test for collision with floor triangles…