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This Week in Games - Living the Tomodachi Life

Rather than being harder, what I want is for the game to have some friction.
Difficulty is a kind of friction, but so is something like a limit to your inventory or the inability to just teleport willy-nilly.

Tsukuyomi: Everyone disliked that. Seriously, if you're using AI in 2026 you're just dumb. If Nintendo isn't on it, that's a warning sign

Anyone complaining about "modern games" being too easy has never tried maxing out all of the skill hats in Kirby and the Forgotten World.

It worries me that Rise/Sunbreak and Wilds are definitely in the lean towards undercutting that aspect of needing to learn/teach someone else the game. Because Capcom wants paid & doesn't want to turn away players? Because modern life is busier now and free time is less? As an older Hunter, it's a monkey's paw situation where on the one hand, it's cool the series is more popular now and tons of people have easier access to it, but modern Monster Hunter players are also very much not-getting that original experience either. They're playing an almost-fundamentally different game now.

To wrap this up, I recently got to play Pseudoregalia front to back, and it really opened my eyes to a lot of game design wants/likes. The game doesn't tell you where to go, it doesn't tell you what to do. It gives you a set of instructions and skills, it tells you what they do, and then it's 100% up to you to go out and find things in the world and figure out how to grab them on your own terms. By the end of the experience, not only did I get insanely proficient in solving the puzzles and learning how to move efficiently, but unlike a lot of other self-proclaimed platforming games, I was actually enjoying moving simply just for the sake of moving the character. It's something that was very definitely absent from Mario Galaxy and a lot of New Super Mario titles during the Wii era. Being free to move and express my individuality through that movement was insane, in a way that I have not felt since Mario 64 first launched.

Same Nintendo that when they chose to go their own way for the N64 decided that cartridges were still viable even when most consoles had long started the move to using CD Roms. And figured by guess that DVD and Blu Rays would never catch on when they choose to use their own disc format for the GameCube, Wii, & WiiU.

I recently picked up I am Setsuna from a steam sale, and while that game does have a lot of issues, one thing I felt was refreshing was the fact there are no quest markers whatsoever, no mini map, no journal. I just had to get around and talk to the npcs to figure out where to go next, and check each area and nook to find chests. It *is* a different gameplay loop, despite people arguing quest markers and mini maps are just QoL, because instead of looking for the quest marker/staring at the minimap wherever I go, I need to actually look where I am going, and while I always talk to every npc nevertheless of the story ones being marked or not, it feels different going through each and every npc parsing for the info I need.

My only experience with Monster Hunter was World/Iceborne and while I didn’t master all of the games systems and mechanics or bothered tackling the more challenging Hunts (Fatalis and Alatreon were enough). I enjoyed my time with it though it hasn’t left me at all interested in trying the games that preceded them bar Stories I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything.

Not trying to sound rude, but while Nintendo sticking with a cartridge-based media for the Nintendo 64 hurt them a lot in regards to losing tons of third-parties (especially Japanese ones) they still performed better than the Sega Saturn, a CD-based console

Pokemon lean.That: "I don't feel I'm missing out on anything" - is it contentment? Is it that you finished the game and accomplished stuff, so you're good and don't need to spend money on more?

Fatalis in particular is supposed to actually be the big penultimate finale for the game.

My worry in either game's case, is that someone new to either series is going to give either title a try, only be made to engage with them at just a surface-level of interest, and then walk off never to be seen again because they just didn't see that spark of inspiration that the rest of us did years ago.

I'm playing DQ7 Reimagined with everything on the hardest setting and the challenge seems good to me. Just completed the dungeon right before you get your 4th party member and I actually died on a random encounter & I ended up having to use a lot of my MP restoration items (which can't be purchased at this point) to get to the boss. The special optional monster heart battles have all been difficult and I usually save them until the end of the island when I'm more powerful.

Maybe the game gets drastically easier later when you get some crazy overpowered job combinations, but I'm just wondering why people are finding the game so easy? Are they grinding? Did they leave some difficulty options on easy? For example, the combination of reduced rewards + monsters that chase you means that you're unlikely to naturally get so powerful that you start insta-winning enemies in your current dungeon unless you grind to become overleveled, but it still makes it more convenient when you're backtracking in earlier areas. And that combination also means that each dungeon has a set number of battles that you can't really avoid having to do since some areas are too narrow to really dodge battles.

Anyway, I just think it's odd that I've heard so many complaints about DQ7 Reimagined being too easy when my personal experience has been that on max difficulty, it's much more difficult than DQ3 HD remake was. And I don't remember hearing a lot of complaints about DQ3 HD. And to be fair, the original DQ7 wasn't a particularly hard game - the hardest thing about it was not getting bored at the languid pacing.

I feel we're missing out on that a lot lately, as there's this really fuzzy, concerning space where too much compromising of the design means you never have to learn and adapt - you just pay your admission fee and then move on to the next shiny thing after looking around for a few hours. Stopping to learn something new about your hobby or pick up a new skill slows you up from buying the next "experience" you could participate in.

If games like Dragon Quest and Resident Evil were the way they were in the 90s due to "limitations", what does that say for their remakes that somehow have even less content?

If Nintendo isn't on it, that's a warning sign

Whereas Assignment Ada wasn’t canon unlike Separate Ways.