ExHaseo

A toxic environment is different for each individual person. When it comes to specifically gaming, a toxic environment is one that ultimately makes the game unfun and stressful. For some, this may be when someone starts yelling at you about how bad they are, using every curse in the book. For another it's that one person who intentionally kills themselves to troll. For another, it's just playing with people who are bad at the game. Ultimately, it just boils down to some kind of selfish action. Using the examples above, the person who is yelling about how bad you are is only thinking about themselves. If they instead took the time to explain things and help teach you how to better play the game, the game would go far more smoothly and be way more fun for everyone. The troll should be obvious. They're killing the enjoyment of the game because they find it funny, putting themselves above everyone else on the team. When they could really just go do something else. The third one is much like the first one. They're just getting mad because people are bad, without doing much of anything about it. Only focusing on the enjoyment they're getting out of the game, and not doing anything to help improve the community overall. If you're playing with bad people, by taking the time to help them learn, you're improving the current game you're playing as well as improving the playerbase as a whole. Unfortunately, people are assholes. They always have been, and always will be. Even if people were helping each other, the ones being helped would need to be receptive. And they usually aren't. They either don't care that they're playing badly because it's fun for them (oh look, more selfishness), or they already think they're good and don't want to be told they're bad. There are really only two options to deal with a toxic community. Try to improve it by being a good and unselfish player or leave. I tend to just leave, because I know people aren't going to change. Once things have gotten bad enough to be labeled as toxic, things will only improve once the assholes decide to leave on their own.

Finished up adventure mode in Smash Ultimate. Words cannot describe how much fun this game is. The inclusion of spirits has finally made Smash stand strong as a single player game, instead of just a multiplayer game. And that's all I'll say about that. Since Smash has such an obscenely large amount of content, I'm going to be doing points a little differently than normal. I'm doing the 1 point for beating the adventure mode, like normal. But since there so much other content, doing 1/3 point to do everything else just didn't feel right. So I'm going to break it down and give points for a few different things. In doing 1/3 point for doing all of the challenges, 1/3 point for beating each mode with every character, 1/3 point for collecting all of the mii items and music, and then 1 point for getting all of the spirits. This should all take hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. I really wanted to give myself full license to keep playing this game, without having to worry as much. So this is what I came up with.

I miss costume side quests and unlockable bonus modes so much. That's one of the biggest reasons I've been so against the Tales of series from Xillia onwards. They took out all the fun little post game costumes and side quests, and instead you just pay for all the costumes and have none of those fun extra character interactions. It also makes the games significantly shorter and light on content. That's just one example too. There are so many more. I find myself playing more and more older games lately, because they're complete, dont have issues, and have a ton of stuff to do.

If the RE2 remake is as good as it looks, I really hope this is true.

He's a bit of a dick, but I agree with him on a lot of things. I'm glad there's someone out there spouting my nonsense at people for me.

Yeah, but then you have to wait an extra month. A WHOLE MONTH!! Seriously though, I'm in the same boat as you. It's much better to just wait for a sale. I can understand buying the occasional game at launch, like I am absolutely getting Smash Ultimate tomorrow, but there's no real reason to buy more than one game at a time. I feel like if more people did that, and stopped buying games at launch and stockpiling them, at least some of these anti-consumer policies that companies have developed will slowly go away. Because if more people are waiting for sales on the complete versions of the game and just buying one game at a time, that means they'll be making less money. And since they'll be making less money, they will be all but forced to do things like release complete games in order to get people to pay full price again.

For me it was Monster Hunter World. Don't get me wrong, MHW is a good game, but it's a really disappointing MH game. I played it for a couple of weeks, and I was already done. For a MH game, that is just really disappointing. I played MHFU for YEARS and still never did everything. I kept trying to come back to MHW with the updates, but each update was only enough to keep me busy for maybe a day or two. And after a couple of updates, I just stopped caring. I really just wish they had put more content in the game at launch. Also, I find that people complaining more about the state of games than anything in this thread is absolutely hilarious. I've been saying that the gaming industry was headed this way for years, and that supporting games with microtransactions and "DLC" would only make things worse and worse. And yet here we are with things like "games as a service", where games get released before they're done and you have to deal with all kinds of bugs/glitches and you have to wait months/years for the whole game to get slowly released. All while having to pay double or more than the base price of the game. Giving developers license to be anti-consumer by buying unfinished and broken products, then continuing to pay more and more for them, leads them to do whatever they want. Because they know people are just going to complain, and then continue to buy their products anyway. Like Sony is doing with their new censorship policies. They know everyone is going to complain, but then ultimately keep buying their games. The only way to fix the industry, is to stop supporting these anti-consumer practices. Don't like the new censorship policies? Sell your PS4 and get an X1 or Switch instead. Don't give Sony any more of your money. Don't like "games as a service"? Stop supporting any game that announces a season pass, DLC, or any kind of microtransaction. Developers will be forced to start putting out complete games at launch again, because otherwise they won't be making any money. And at the end of the day, that's all these companies care about. They will always do the absolute minimum to guarantee them the most amount of money.

Finally finished up the Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess adventure maps in Hyrule Warriors. With that done, I'm finally completely finished with Hyrule Warriors. Which brings my Wii U backlog down to just one game, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. It's going to be pretty weird not having Hyrule Warriors to fall back to whenever I need some Warriors action. I've been playing it for the past couple of years working through the adventure maps, which were just ridiculous. Maybe eventually I'll try out Fire Emblem Warriors, or just pick up the Switch version of Hyrule Warriors the next time I've got the itch, haha. That brought me up to 9 points, but while I wanted to save as many points as possible for Christmas, stupid PSN had to have a good sale. I've been waiting for Agents of Mayhem to get a nice discount, and that time is now. It's on sale for just $6 for the base game and all the DLC. Even though I don't have a PS4 right now, I'm getting a new one next month. So I had to pick it up while it was cheap, which dropped me down to 6 points. And luckily I'll be able to get Smash after all, which will bring me down to just 3 points once it comes out in a couple of days. I'm just going to hope I don't get too many games for Christmas, haha. For now, I'm just going to take a break for the next couple of days and not play anything. I know once Smash hits that's basically all I'll be doing, so no reason to start anything new, haha.

Finished up Saints Row 2. I absolutely hate GTA. I think they're all steaming piles of aggressively unfun garbage. So imagine my surprise when I decided to try Saints Row 3, after getting it with PS+, and absolutely loving it. It's one of my favorite games. I've got it at 100% and even got it on Steam to replay. Being a big fan of 3, I was told to try 2. I've been told by a lot of people that it's better. So I had to see for myself. The simple answer is that it's not. Controls are worse, the activities are less fun and less integrated into the game, there's insane difficulty spikes, and it's just overall not as good as 3. The complicated answer, is that I get why some people do like if more than 3. Especially fans of GTA. The story takes itself a lot more seriously than 3 and it feels more like running a gang. There's a few, "Oh shit," moments that I really wasnt expecting too. A few of the characters are also vastly different. Okay, mostly Shaundi. So I can understand how 3 would be a letdown to a long time fan, and be "better", in their eyes. As someone who doesnt usually like this style of game, it definitely wasnt, but it was still enjoyable enough for me to play it all the way through. It really made me want to play 3, but I'm controlling myself so I can keep going on the backlog. I'm hoping to be able to get Smash once it comes out, and dont want to be too involved in anything else. It's looking like I may have to sell my Switch to be able to make rent this month though. And I wont be able to get another one until next summer if I do. Either way, I'm up to 7 points now, but I want to keep saving as much as possible in case I get some games for Christmas. I really dont want to go negative again.

Finished up Oracle of Ages after playing it off and on for the past 3 years. This game was terrible. It doesnt deserve a picture. Easily the worst Zelda game I've played. There was little to no direction so I never had any idea where I was going. Traveling back and forth through time was just frustrating. Especially when you tried travelling and it was a spot you could travel to, so you have to wait for it to transport you back, slightly move, the do it again. The dungeons were just frustrating. And it was overall just a bad time. The only reason I pushed myself through it was so that I could get the true ending in Oracle of Seasons. When I was a kid, I only had Seasons, and I loved it. So when the two games got put up on the 3DS shop, I snagged them both so I could finally get the true ending hinted at the end of the game. Now is finally the time. I just really hope Seasons is as good as I remember. I dont think I'll make it through another game like Ages.

Finished up Ark of Napishtim. I'm on a roll lately! This game apparently gets a bad rap, but I really enjoyed it. It never explicitly told you what to do, but it was always easy to figure out by watching the cutscene or talking to people in the towns. I really liked playing a game that doesnt hold my hand for a change. It uses the same combat system as The Oath in Felghana and Origin, which is my personal favorite. Lots of fast paced hacking and slashing. It was great. The bosses were all pretty fun, except for the last one. Which is where my only real issue with the game comes from. They tell you it's the point of no return and that you wont be able to go back. Pretty standard for RPGs. So I just thought, okay cool whatever, and moved on. Immediately after this point was a save point. I was expecting there to be another section of dungeon before the final boss, so I went ahead and saved. But there wasnt. It immediately throws you into the final boss with no way of leveling up of you're not strong enough. Which I definitely wasnt. I was doing decent damage because i had fully upgraded one of the three swords, but the boss was doing about 1/4 of my health per hit. And that was just the first of 3 forms. After that, there's another form that requires the use of all three swords. I had only fully upgraded one sword, and the other two only a couple of times. So when I had to use the other two swords, I was doing almost no damage, so it took forever to kill the boss. It was an absolute nightmare. It took me about 2 hours of repeatedly dying before i was finally able to beat it. It was really frustrating, and I wish it would have mentioned at least that there was no way to level up after that point. Otherwise, I enjoyed it though. Now I'm off to play something else. On thinking either Saints Row 2 or FFIX. Going to boot them both up and see which one grabs my attention.

That's not on my backlog, but thanks. I'll keep it mind for if I ever have too many points and some money to blow. I ended up starting Ys Ark of Napishtim, now that I've had a bit of a break between RPGs.

With all the different kinds of mechanics in games these days, JRPG just makes me think of anime style graphics, and made in Japan. Stuff like Kingdom Hearts, Persona, and Star Ocean all fall under the JRPG category, but are all vastly different games. I'm also weird and I don't like to generalize or make assumptions about games. Just because something is labeled as a JRPG, that doesn't mean it will inherently include any specific mechanics or tropes. So I don't try to assume anything, because it's just going to lead to either disappointment when the game doesn't have the mechanics or tropes I'm expecting, or it's just going to be a very neutral experience, because it has exactly what I expected. That's something I learned after playing Persona 5. It was exactly what I expected, and because of that, it ended up being really forgettable and felt mostly plain. So I try not to expect anything anymore, and take things as they come.

Finished up Super Mario Odyssey. I'm just on a roll with these short games lately. This only only took about 6 hours. I was going to collect all of the moons to do the secret world, but I didn't have time. I just borrowed it, and I had to give it back. Great game though. Maybe eventually I'll pick it up and do the extra stuff, but not until it drops in price. Knowing Nintendo, that will probably be never though, haha. Not really sure what to play next now. Maybe I'll finally finish up Oracle of Ages so I can start Oracle of Seasons and get the true ending of both. That Ages is nightmare though.

I played on PC, so I didn't get any trophies. I didn't do anything too special though. I played it pretty casually. All I did was play the story, do all the public events that I happened to run into that had started, and did some of the adventures that gave gear. Once I was high enough, I did a few strikes, and suddenly I was level 20. I did get lucky and joined a couple of strikes when they were at the very end. I know the plat would take a lot longer though, because you have to get all of the classes, and I only unlocked the 2 extra hunter classes. And you have to get 15 exotic items, and I only got 1. There's also a trophy for doing 30 challenges, which I only did about 10. The plat would probably require another 20-30+ hours of grinding out strikes, public events, and challenges. Seems like it would be highly dependent on luck of exotic drops and if you can find a group to do the raid on prestige. I did almost everything once, but the plat would require doing everything dozens of times.