Almost done with Star Ocean Second Story R, I’m literally right before the dungeon called ‘Phynal’.

My initial love for the game didn’t fully carry over into the second half. There’s been a big change in scenery and ever since that, the writing got worse by quite abit. It’s just one guy with little to no personality sending you from one fetch quest to the next. There are still good things in there, but it started off way better.

Next up, I think I’ll go back to something turn based, which means either Octopath 2, SMTV:V or Baten Kaitos.

Realistically speaking, how many of them could even follow the game? Seeing every piece, I mean.

Nopons are missing from the line-up!

(As for Moogles, I think FF:CC has by far the best ones!)

I’m still on Star Ocean Second Story R.

I’m about half way through the game, but I now have it broken to the point that ‘Universe’ difficulty is a joke. Now it’s time to focus on the story, I think.

On that note, if any of you want to play the game: Be warned. You can recruit up to 6 additional characters in a single playthrough, which means you cannot get everyone. Some choices even lock you out of other characters.

In addition, you get to choose between two protagonists: A fantasy one and a sci-fi one. They are together for most of the story, but if you want everything out of your companions, it does make sense to recruit the sci-fi ones with the sci-fi protagonist, as they will talk about stuff the fantasy protagonist wouldn’t understand. I missmatched these and would have to do three playthroughs now to get most of the interesting stuff - which I won’t. Learning this even killed my motivation for a second playthrough…

Other than that, I still highly recommend the game!

The main benefit of keys for each dialogue only comes into play for localization. You could send your ridiculously long map to a translator and nothing else. When loading the dialogue, simply read a global language variable and change the file you read from.

There are a few other benefits of having every line of text in the same place. For starters, you could drop the entire thing into a spell checker. You can quickly change a few lines while having the entire exchange in view to make sure it flows right.

Lastly, you can add keys for common names. Assume you have a very important collectable, let’s say ‘bread’. You could write your dialogue with placeholders like ‘You have to find the %s to save the world!’. Then in you dialogue object, you use an array like ‘[dialogue-key, word1-key, word2-key, …]’ and apply them, which is done with a ‘%’ in Godot. That’s more initial work, but now you could change the name by only editing a single value. Also useful for stuff the player can name.

But of course, game dev has no rules. If it works for you, that’s all your system needs to do!

Fair enough. For future projects, I’d advice using keys - or even better enums - for this. Something like:

{
  "character": "duck",
  "emotion": "angry",
   "lang-key": "dialogue12-box15"
}

And then using lookup tables for the matching sprites and translations of the text.

I don’t think it’s even set in stone that we are expanding at all. There is another theory that the universe as we know it could be the inside of a black hole. In this scenario we could actually be shrinking instead - or rather being compressed, if that makes sense.

Why would you need to change the dialogues? I assume you have some kind of string or enum already in place to display the proper image, couldn’t you map these to a name, too?

I wasn’t thinking of literally writing ‘Prometheus: Blabla’ into the box, but a name tag below the image for example.

What I don’t get is, you don’t own them anyway. They are lost once the server is shut down, which happens quite often for less popular games. You often don’t even play with them, the gameplay is so obnoxious and snowball-y, you just click the auto button and leave the game to itself.

For all intents and purposes, watching videos, or collecting images, has equal value and it’s free.

If you wan’t more interaction, go watch some VTuber.

Yes, there’s a main story event in the DLC with the single best piece of equipment - the Professor’s spectacles. Buy them, it’s your only chance!

Also there is some missable witcher gear in the very same quest, I think. Just get everything in the Borsodi Brothers’ venue.

Looking great! But I think you should add the name of each character into the text box, just like you’ve added it to your transcription.

What font are you using? I’ve run into the time sink of creating my own, which probably was not worth it all things considered.

At this pace I might as well wait for a ‘Pixel Remaster Collection’, just like I wanted to wait for the full trilogy.

That being said, I love VII and hope they don’t change anything. I think the 3DS port made the game shorter.

While they have added a rainbow flag, which does improve the situation, the biggest thing still is a German flag at its core. They even started one of these obnoxious long flags, too.

I support the pride flags. Their message is important. For the sake of the event, the canvas is still dominated by flags.

I’m fine with either. I never liked ATB, but X had a great system. However, I equally liked XV. Give me a finished game with XV’s system and I’d love it.

I just never bothered with XVI because they stripped out most of the RPG from my JRPG.

I support this for multiple reasons, of course, but flags also simply destroyed these canvas events. The only fun one was the first one with it’s wild tribalism and weaved in artworks. Blue corner vs Void vs Green Lattice was just more fun.

There are still artworks there, but of course, the most pronounced thing is a German flag - same as every year.

I can highly recommend Risen! I’m still sad the studio closed down.

Glad you enjoyed Xenoblade X! As you said yourself in the other thread, I’m probably just salty thanks to years of theories - all of which existed outside any other Xeno canon, I didn’t knew better when I first palyed the game.

Anyway, I went deeper into Star Ocean Second Story R. Thus far, I can only recommend it. The games throws so many options at you, it’s just a delight to try and break the game. As per usual, I started by stacking tons of EXP multipliers. This weekend, I’ll dive ibto item creation.

The game has a lot of interesting things you don’t see often within games. Some whacky, some dark. I’ll list one of each below, they are story spoilers, but I don’t mention names or anything.

Arch.

I’m vegan, german and into fitness. There really was no other choice. /s?

Also, it’s lightweight, you always get the most recent software, pacman is superb and it’s super stable. In about 10 years on multiple systems, I never had anything break. The worst of it are simple problems during updates, which are always explained on their website.

Lastly, there is the wiki. The single best source of Linux information out there. Might as well be using the distro that’s directly explained there, albeit a lot of information can be used on other ones as well.

With arch-install, you don’t even need to learn much, but learning is never a bad idea and will be great if something does break. Every system can break. Arch prepares you for that.

Thank you! Keeping up with other stuff in my life, I’d be looking at about 5 to 10 years. By then, the list is probably wildly different. Maybe it would be a fun plan for retirement, if I ever get there.

I’ve seen like four of those, partially. One Piece, all of Fringe except for the last season, a good chunk of Community and the first season of Breaking Bad.

So, assuming I’ve seen nothing - for easier math - and would watch all of these, how many hours are we looking at?