Raziel

The only benches that are itemized are the Chocobo Stops, which only unlock after you catch the region's wild Chocobo. There are still regular benches that are unlimited use. So, thoughts 5 hours in: I think the intro is just telling us how fucked the timelines are right now after whatever occured during the ending of Remake. I loved Remake so I'll just finish this before I say anything about the story. So I wasted about a hour looking around at stuff before progressing through the first 3 stops post Calm and unlocking the Chocobo and Chadley's stuff, and now the game is wide open and there's a fuckton to do. I do know that all Chadley's shit is region specific so I'm going to clear it out a region at a time, so it's going to take me a while to get out of teh Grasslands and move onto the Mythril Cave and Junon. I can see this game taking forever. I'm ok with the crafting as it seems a cheaper alternative to get stuff (possibly better than store stuff?) given the abundance of materials and how quickly they and other fiends respawn. I do like how regular stuff are in yellow chests and equipment are purple. It also looks like the Folio is doubling as Remake's Weapon upgrade stuff, as it looks and acts like the Sphere Grid from 10, which given some other theories and how the Fiends "die", makes a lot of sense depending on how you feel about the "7 and 10 are in the same universe" theory. I do like the Weapons' unique abilties go quickly. Also, that non-active party members also get XP and Materia levels as you go, although I'm guessing there's some issue with Synergy if you don't swap around when needed.

Well, when you get to it, only one character in this show actually speaks English. The crew of the Erasmus would all be speaking Dutch. So, yeah, you'd have to find at least one actor that spoke all 3, then enough Japanese actors that spoke Portuguese, then enough Dutch actors that spoke Portuguese. Oh, then there's the Franciscan, who would be speaking Latin, which Blackthorn and Mariko also speak... Or it's just easier to use 2 languages and whatever.

Went a couple hours into Rebirth, and this game is great so far. I have to respect that the path they went for explaining why all materia, items, gear, levels were reset is... well, fuck you, we're just doing it and hand waving it, that's how.

I'm guessing it's just easier to have everyone not Japanese speaking english for viewing than everyone try and act in Portuguese (and to be honest, at that time they really all *would* have been speaking either Japanese or Portuguese). It does look like we're getting more of the intrigue around Toranaga's rise than everything directly from Blackthorne's POV like the book/miniseries. I'm good with the first episode, even if it did breeze through getting Blackthorne to Osaka

It's funny that 45 years later, we're gonna get another crash, fueled by mostly the same reasons the first one happened (Inept, aloof, and delusional Executives squeezing every drop of blood from the stone, unrealistic dev cycles causing programmer burnout and poor games, and a market oversaturation and multiple variants of the same theme that hit once and everyone wants to recreate but missed what sold the first one). Only thing that this one won't have is the overabundance of physical media causing massive losses, but I guess that's being replaced with Dev costs increasing by orders of magnitude while MSRP's only barely shifted.

Well, it's end of Quarter, need the P&L reduction to bump that price up for the results. Continued growth is unsustainable but Executives don't give a shit because they want another couple hundred thousand a quarter.

The money I'm saving from cutting NJWorld because NJPW is fucking unwatchable will offset this nicely.

Of COURSE Tales of Arise hits PS+ and GamePass a week before Rebirth comes out...

Its the whole run of classic Iron Chef, but the episodes are all out of order. Or possibly just the seasons are out of order, but still. Sadly, they ran the dubbed Kaga instead of subbing him while everyone else is dubbed.

Lack of Big gray lizard saying "I'm too old for this shit". They are doing a good job of keeping Destroyah under wraps if it is the actual final monster and not Skar King.

I've read this book.

These commercials are rather... bad.

You mean they intended me to beat someone to death with a fish after feeding them spoiled canned pasta sauce?

Excuse me, this is Demo part 1. They're doing a second demo with the actual field area sometime before the game proper.

"I totally got fired because of the woke ideology and not because I pissed off the Franchise's biggest star by trashing his sister"

Well the 7 Rebirth demo looks to be the entire Nieblheim flashback. I'm an hour in and haven't hit the reactor yet, it's huge. But I'm liking the walking around the map changes and extra traversal stuff, and it looks like the NIbelheim area is the tutorial area this time. The neat thing is it says that if you play the demo, you can use the save to skip the area in the game proper when it comes out. So it's almost like playing this area ahead of time to be able to jump right into the game proper come launch day. I still don't know how they're squaring rolling everything back if you played Remake, but I have my completion saves from Remake ported over to the PS5 just in case they're doing something for the 70 hours I put into Remake.

What's gonna suck is trying to avoid that shit for 20 days and realizing there's no way around it.

There's a funny irony in there of Carton's former enabler partner accidentally booking a fucking Horse racing announcer by accident.

Gamecube was that weird mix of the hardware was probably the only time Nintendo had hardware comparable to the rest of the generation, but its architecture was fucking spaghetti and it's amazing as much stuff ran on it as it did. The ridiculous controller didn't help, ridiculous controllers is Nintendo's bag since Gen 5. But Nintendo found it's groove if hoarding it's IP, gimmick controls, and creating artificial scarcity that it ends up sitting on money.

The one thing The Show has going for it, at least with RttS mode, is that you can carry it over every year, although I haven't seen if the equipment packs carry yet. But I might skip The Show this year or wait til it goes on sale. I'm more than content to just run different save types on Football Manager now anyway.

MetLife is bigger. But Jerryworld is getting some games too. I don't think I'm springing for the Finals, but depending on prices I'll probably try to get to one of thr other MetLife games, or one of the games at the Linc.

Ok, looking at thr sudden swell of WeWantCody and talent and celebs getting in on it... It's a work and they're manufacturing another moment playing on every 10th Mania having a contender controversy. I just don't know if we're getting a 3 way or 2 Roman matches.

I call bullshit on Rusev and Lana being not their call because they then went and ran a variant of the same angle in AEW. That seems more Miro's kink.

And Solo wins that. You thought nepotism was bad before, fuck Rock is gonna give us all his family all the time.

I didn't have "Rock takes over, immediately puts himself into Mania Main event" on my bingo card though.