Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

Honestly, they really should let yoship design Prime 5.

It'd have the same volume of cutscenes, the character writing would be superb, and set piece mechanics would have had a little more time to cook.

Duke: *stands in a very clearly marked AoE ground target, dealing Black Mage DPS uptime, in clear range of a Rescue cast that I know I would be able to get off. And at half health, with me not able to heal them unless they fall to critical*

Me: *eyetwitch*

There are so many, many nitpicks I have with 4, but I love it anyway, despite the former Halo devs on Retro betraying my empathy for their characters and the pervasive male gaze throughout. Hoo boy.

But to be thrown into an FFXIV-style raid encounter unexpectedly, with none of my tools, and none of the AI respecting mechanics, dealt to me a very specific form of psychic (ha!) damage.

It is really, specifically hilarious to me that two phases of Sylux's boss fight are, "we heard raids in FFXIV were cool" without committing to understanding the mechanics.

I spent the first phase screaming, "dammit Mackenzie, stop standing in the mechanics!!" And phase 3 mentally hearing, "A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES!!"

@KayOhtie Yeah, I do this too now, except with Calibre as the destination instead of (presumably) an intermediary step of this. It's niiiiice.

The one Amazon feature that I wish had an analog is Whispernet. I know you can just use wifi, but being able to send books, magazines, and serialized RSS to myself over cellular was... very very handy.

@Dragonhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character

It makes a little ding in the console when sent over IRC!

@Dragonhead The bell symbol too, which y'all should test early!

Honestly, the most stand-out thing for me in Z-A is whoever they put on the storyboard and camerawork throughout the game.

It's subtle and hard to notice (because it's working). Until you get this hilarious, long fisheye dolley leading to an extreme closeup of the main rival's face before they pop off about a rank-up, or the off-angle, low shots for ghost trainers and a Litwick. With bonus scare reel because they wanted to.

Once you know it's there, you can really tell that person or set of folks had _so much fun_ setting these up. Sort of like when you know a sidequest writer in an MMO had way too much fun and got fully into the bit.

I think if you look at how birds speak, particularly crows, you find a very similar pattern to their language. More grackle, less purr I suppose. Same principles behind it though.

Were they to get to speaking a formal language, I would not be surprised if they arrived at something very similar.

Anyway humans are absolutely embarrassingly not the only speaking animals, and it's neat to contrast with a language that had nothing to do with them.

So if you wanted to think about how that worked: the language itself is bound vaguely kinda sorts like English, but in run-on. With a developed throat rumble or purr as part of the words. And a set of sounds for things likely originally derived from how they felt to the original speaker.

And that's how my name is dirt.