The game was in a pretty rough state when they relaunched it, but they have been slowly improving it a bit at a time (it often feels like 2 steps forward, 1 step back). I feel like the game is in a pretty good spot though. I enjoy it and am looking forward to season 4.

I’m more surprised that this game is still running. I haven’t heard of anyone playing it in years.

Honest question here. I’m not familiar with the game, but you seem to be upset that it offers cosmetic items for sale. One of your proposed solutions is to bundle all of the cosmetic items together and sell it as a DLC. What is the actual difference in those two options? Why does one of them seem acceptable to you while the other does not? They sound like the exact same thing to me.

I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.

Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.

For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.

Having not played either one of them yet, what do you think makes the first one so much better?

Jesus Christ, the ending of that 3rd Strike match was incredible!

I’m willing to keep an open mind until it releases, but that tells me that the gameplay will be nothing like the original.

For me it’s the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don’t hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.

I enjoyed it a lot during the open beta. Really looking forward to playing again soon.

Well I mean, they also ADDED Super Mario Bros 35 to the eShop, for free. You can’t just mention the removal as if it had always been there. I agree it was shitty for them to remove it though, it was one of my all time favorite games. But I’m at least happy that I got to play it.

For the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, Nintendo released Super Mario All Stars for the Wii. It was just an emulation of the SNES game from years before. It was released for $30 even though you could buy all of the original games on the Wii shop for like $21 total. It just reeked of “We know you’ve already bought these games like 4 times, but please buy them again”. They did do a better job on the 35th anniversary though.