Some games I replay a lot, but always on a fresh save. I think I’ve finished Dark Souls about 10 times without ever touching NG+.

Notable exceptions are:

• Nier Automata, although you kind of have to if you want the whole game and it still brought down the experience for me.
• Chrono Trigger, for the quick kill on Lavos. I did not play much of the NG+.

Performance problems aside (menus take ages to load in), I like the game quite a bit. There is just so much stuff: 120 characters, two additional fighting systems for special events, a card game, a bayblade minigame, a castle/town upgrade system and probably much more - I’m not even halfway done. The combat is quite auto-attack heavy and therefore simple, but keep in mind I’m olaying with double MP cost for all abilities (one of the additional challanges to tweak your own difficulty, like the ones in Dragon Quest XI).

As for the EXP thing, there are a few things that happened to align for me. EXP works like this:

• Each level requires 1000 EXP.
• You get EXP based on level difference between you and your enemies. There is a maximum value of EXP a single enemy can give to usually prevent what happened to me - I think it’s about 1000 for most enemies.
• If you get say 3000 EXP, that’s 3 level ups. Remaining EXP does not get adjusted upon each level up. That’s great since you can recruit 120 characters and if you miss someone at first, it does not take long to catch up if you want to use them.
• You fight with 6 charaters. EXP is split between them, meaning you get more EXP per character if only e.g. 2 of them survive.

Now, what actually happened to me is: I fought a unique mini-boss encounter with 5 enemies. I was overall underleveled and got wiped twice. The third time however, I won with only my weakest character still standing - he was 8 level below my team average. He got about 1200 EXP for the level difference * 5 enemies * 6, since only he survived, resulting in about 35 level ups.

Eiyuden Chronicles

Despite playing on the highest difficulty with all extra challanges, it’s quite chill right now. Due to some quirks in how EXP works, one of my characters shot up 35 levels in a single fight. While he is lvl 55, everyone else - including my enemies - are around lvl 28.

Think of them as MCU movies. They all work independently, but they reference each other and share a universe. Each game is fun on its own, but I think they get better if you play them all in order.

There are a few exceptions:

• The Xenoblade 3 DLC is a 20-30h game on its own that only works with the context of all three games. It’s your Avengers movie to keep the metaphor.
• Xenoblade X has no connections to any other game as of yet. This might change with the new story content.
• Xenogears and Xenosaga are not connected to any Xenoblade games. You might miss about 10 minutes of references across hundreds of hours across the series.

I’m excited - X is a great game and the bonus content may finally give closure its story. I’ve waited years for this.

I’m also just happy to replay it. It’s the only WiiU game I have ever bought and I don’t even own the console - I just borrowed one from a friend.

Become a bad programmer and be thankful you won’t have to further maintain your code instead!

I’m guessing the hackers are releasing both actual and fake leaks, just to get attention. Do some damage until GF gives in to their demands, wich I presume they made.

Just don’t believe anything that could easily be made up.

I don’t play actual shooter myself, however, both Pokemon Snap games fit your description - might be worth a shot.

It’s a pet peeve of mine, I hate stealth sections. Waiting around just isn’t fun and most stealth sections are just that.

However, that was years ago. I haven’t encountered one in a long time since I mostly stopped playing AAA games - by now these games are an amalgamation of so many worse design decisions, I almost miss the time stealth sections were my biggest issue.

Back on reddit, I mostly interacted with communities relating to JRPGs. There are some communities over here, but at most they post some trailers every now and then. There are also some more focussd communities about Dragon Quest, Xenoblade or SMT - all of them practically dead. I don’t think there is an instance.

I could go over to a programming related one, the german instance or even one of the vegan instances for secondary ‘interests’, but those aren’t things I often find myself posting about online to be honest. They seem to be mostly about memes anyways.

Yep, there’s both a normal and a hard mode - normal is quite easy. On top of that, you can get most digimon without much trouble, I just happen to like the ones that are difficult to get.

There’s also a farm feature where you can level digimon passively. Due to a bug on the switch version, the ingame clock and therefore the farm continue running on standby if you don’t close the game properly.

My partner and I are playing through “Digimon Stories Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memories” in some kind of challange run similar to a Soullink in Pokemon games.

The Digimon Story games are basically just grinding, but sometimes I’m in the mood for that. Although, I prefered the older ones on DS.

Digimon have 7 different stages and many different paths to evolve from their first stage to their last one. Bacially everything can become everything. Each stage starts at level 1 and is stronger than the one before, with certain stat and level requirements to evolve. They can devolve too and that’s where the grinding comes in: There is a special stat called ‘ABI’ that’s raised by d-/evolving. If you need a certain amount of ABI, you will train your digimon, evolve it, devolve it right away and start from level 1 again. Repeat until you have enough.

During older games, you would accumulate power by doing so - you kept a certain percentage of your current stats when devolving. In the Cyber Sleuth games you don’t. Each Greymon e.g. has the same base stats at the same level. ABI only slightly increases a hard cap for permanent stats you can get from a different mechanic. It’s kinda tedious.

It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.

Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.

Unfortunately, there is no instance matching my interests. There are a number of communities across different instances, but it seems like several people tried to make their own, didn’t interact with each other and all of them are long dead.

Once I find such an instance, I’ll switch over. I’ve been meaning to leave .world anyways.

While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.

On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.

For the sake of adding something new, X is pareto optimal in terms of having both the best and the fewest games.

• Xenogears
• Xenosaga (maybe, haven’t played it yet)
• Xenoblade anything
• X-COM anything

I’d probably be content with only playing games from the Xeno- meta-series alone.

Anything Dragon Quest needs to be on the list!

Despite loving the genre overall, I bounced off KoA multiple times. Maybe it’s time to give it yet another go. I just wasn’t in the mood for MMORPGs - which the IP should have become iirc -, I guess.

I’m glad people are finally coming around to this. There is still fun to be had in Skyrim, but it released around the same time as Dark Souls, Witcher 2, Risen 2 and Fable 3 among others. Not all of them are better games, however Skyrim most certainly isn’t the best one.

I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.

Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.

Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.

If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.