I'm wondering if this game can still be saved in current day. The new og map has returned but still is limited by additions from later seasons that remain. For example, sprinting and mantling. They feel out of place and awkward for the nostalgia binge everybody is smoking on. But you cannot remove these things because otherwise no build would be impossible to play. And you cannot remove no build because that's what encourages loads of players to re-download in the first place. Build mode has too high of a skill ceiling for many to compete, and don't bring up the argument of skill-based matchmaking because I'm convinced it isn't even real at this point. So the solution, hear me out...

LOW build mode. I don't know about today but back in 2017 or so there were many different presets under settings to choose from. One of these settings was called Combat Pro. Now this was basically the same as regular, but when building, each structure is assigned to the same button, and you had to scroll between each structure to place what you wanted. It operated practically the same way as shooting, but with builds. Turbo building was impossible, and there was building but it was extremely limited and bare boned. This could be the perfect mix. A way to encourage creativity without restricting it to the meta. A way to bring back players unhappy and cynical with the return of the og map.

EPIC. Remove all your bullshit. All your grapples gloves, mantling sprinting whatever. And slap that in there. Watch the player base, hypothetically, rise. That is just my theory. Not on some matpat type shit but it could work.

At this point just hire me. I can fix this game. I am incredible and wise and can make quick spur-of-the-moment decisions that will always secure a profit.

Okay, Ghoul Trooper, you go left. Skull Trooper, you go right. And Nog Ops, well... just be Nog Ops! Okay let's go WE ARE FORTNITE!

Baten Kaitos is a great game that has beautiful and very creative pre-rendered backgrounds. The card-based battle system is very interesting, and I fairly liked it. Overall, this is a fantastic RPG from Monolithsoft.
The characters were quite nice, I especially loved Xelha and Kalas. Regarding the other party members, I think they were fairly good, but nothing too special. Not bad, but also not outstanding.
The story was also wonderful, I at least had a great time with it. Foreshadowing is definitely a strength of this game.
The pre-rendered backgrounds are totally beautiful, though I think the navigation on these can become a bit confusing. With that, I mean that sometimes it can be quite hard to see where you can walk and where you have to go.
Personally, I prefer whole 3D games because I think the experience isn't that immersive with pre-rendered backgrounds, but I think with the power of a Gamecube it worked pretty well in this game.
I'm glad to have experienced and played this game, and I'm really looking forward to playing Baten Kaitos Origins. As far as I can tell from this game, Baten Kaitos is another great Monolithsoft game series.

CNs for Tales of Innocence R: child abuse, mind control, maiming, sui*, human experimentation, starvation, kidnapping.

Tales of Innocence R is a game with a smallness claimed by its title that often gets betrayed by remake-itis bringing uncreative adaptations and bloating in all the wrong places. The promise of a Tales that's primarily about how its cast relates to or copes with social expectations put upon them without a super burdensome fantasy pretense is exciting to me. Like many, I come to these games primarily for how much of the run time is spent emulating petty conversations while in transit to different set pieces. World and political table dressing which normally takes up so much of this franchise's interest falls to the side for simple emotional revelations made by the cast. There isn't anything impressive in terms of content or theme, but the amount of space between events is often really affecting in the way that grindy games can transform a single sentence or image multiple times. This carefulness is unfortunately not the norm and the game is frequently ruining its characters with bad remixes of the usual stock gags done without much thought and completely random grinding demands that negatively affect your sense of time passing.

I'd really love a middle ground between what the DS script size probably is and what we have here because I really do like the idea of a JRPG that only claims very brief character sketches rather completely fleshed out character arcs. I would just like a version of that where I liked the main cast anywhere near as much as the two random remake tie-in characters that I didn't even realize weren't in the original until credits!!! Thanks to life bottle for the fan translation and for the help actually applying the patch!

Some thoughts that I had stuck in my head:
Explore the world looking for a solution, a connection. Together. Maybe not physically, not by the same routes, maybe not delivering the same

It is difficult for Death Stranding to reach you playing it alone. Its nature emerges more easily online, and it's a great gesture and a statement of intent that you don't need a subscription to ps plus.

Kojima presents a digital world that is difficult to interpret and unite in words, a fiction that shoots directly into our reality.
Cursed, heartfelt, but also emotional. embrace the connections between things, but question them. a celebration of human duality
More prophetic than MGS2 and with better observation, generalizing and at the same time specifying the difficulties of our day to day, articulating them in the total art of videogames.
From the most abstract to the most literal, collective fears, traumas and very recognizable memories materialized. Visible, audible, and even palpable in an alien America full of dualities, of people who only intuit and show themselves through holograms and numbers.
But we are here. Maybe not next door, but in the same world. And the proof is the ladder that I have used to create an improvised bridge, I have left it here, for you, for me, for everyone. And that rope on the cliff, that capsule, that package on the ground. We are here.

Where the rejection of what forces us to leave this world is manifested in a kind of allergy for those who are more akin to these fears or have experienced them to the limit.
Where people are baptized for their present, for their office and condemned for their past. Where the heroes deliver packages and letters. They come to our futuristic shacks and install an esoteric Internet.
Everything is Sam Porter Bridges, whose name makes it STRONGLY EVIDENT what Death Stranding is about, and at the same time no, you cannot perfectly encompass anything as complex as earthly and afterlife connections, the natural and the mechanical, the Software and the Hardware, the "Ka" and "ha". reality and dreams. Much of Death Stranding's recontextualized iconography seems to suggest that.

It is a work that calls for thinking in an unprecedented way about it, because it offers an unprecedented reinterpretation of the transition and relationship with our environment, especially for gaming standards, obsessed with the mechanical-narrative relationship or the challenge, the suggestion and the satisfaction as a criterion to generate interpretations that are autopsies or descriptions. That in the best case.
At worst you have Far Cry 3.
Every species has the game in different facets and areas as a form of intellectual and emotional connection.
Children play and learn/relate, animals play to understand each other. We play to replace war.

Even before having sex we played.

Homo ludens. And Kojima welcomes a lot of this.

We need to be playful without losing focus.
There is no need for subtlety, just answer honestly to human questions. Use the forms of play as a response to the bitter obstacles of reality.
The example is the "Social Strand System", a mechanical reinterpretation of social networks where the game of deliveries and recovery of packages, manufactures and constructions has an impact on likes and statistics, but also on turning the environment into something more livable and peaceful, at the same time, shows that a more altruistic and ethical form of social interaction is possible.
It sounds naive to say that the reconstruction of the collective environment in an online video game is a lesson in altruism and community, even more so when there are likes involved, but the exercise of life begins somewhere, and now that we are waking up from this techno delirium -competitive utopian in which social networks had us flooded, now that we know how important they are to connect with each other more than to raise our ego, this "Social Strand System" shines more than in 2019.
Through the textures of slow gaming, an experiment of self-knowledge and updating is proposed, there is the unprecedented, in how the game confronts us with situations without necessarily connecting their thoughts or ideas and still achieving a certain cohesion. As in life, no one knows "what it is about" and yet we walk through it with what we own and what others leave for us.
And for a game that wants to embrace these themes without giving up the nature of its medium, its foundation, it's something really admirable.
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Not a single day goes by that I don't think about Death Stranding. Perhaps because of what has been happening in the world since 2020.
On arrival at Port Knot City.
How the corpses of people who have left explode, leaving an emotional and physical void in the form of a crater. Cities with people locked up, invisible. In the networks. In their inverted rainbows. How work becomes playing with its dozens of tools to transport, how enemies are my reflection, silence, likes, photos, stories... In life, how life can be everywhere.
And I can't even put into words practically anything that this game is for me. I plan to return to it in 2023 now that a sequel has been announced that begs the question: Should we have Connected?

I was really excited about this game like I am anytime Cosmo D releases something new, but I walked away a little bit disappointed this time.

Here, Cosmo D pushes into new territory with a short RPG built around dice-based skill checks. It’s as strange a take on that as you’d expect, with customizable pizza dice and a physique skill that’s frequently used to contort your body in weird ways to get people’s attention. It’s fun and unique, with some enjoyable writing that adds new layers to the Off-Peak universe, but the balance of the default difficulty is off - while the game is built to be replayed several times, I had a hard time progressing whether I built my character as a jack-of-all trades or focused on one or two skills, and I had to save scum once I hit the late game. I think I’d probably enjoy it a lot more on the lower difficulties, so I may give that a try when I inevitably come back to this.

Also, Cosmo D’s Off-Peak universe is one of the strangest and most creatively bizarre in video games, and that’s very much on display here. But the move away from a first-person perspective and the focus on RPG mechanics takes some of the focus off the game world, which means there’s not as much room for the details of that strangeness as before, and I found the game less engrossing as a result.

Regardless, I’m excited to see Cosmo D push into new territory, and I’m excited for what he does next!