Strange that they don't count comments IMO. My first reaction was that I like the self-promotion rules because the ones I'm familiar with just require posters to interact with the community. i.e. For every post to their Youtube channel/whatever there need to be ~9 comments.
I always liked that because it prevented the subreddits I browsed from becoming giant ad spaces where content creators just dump a link to their video on all related subreddits and move on. If someone is never answering questions asked of them in their own threads and not participating in discussions in any other thread then they're more of a leech on that community than a contributor IMO. I like the idea that in order to have access to the views of the community, you need to also view other people's work within the community and interact.
But to count only posts is weird for sure. I don't feel like the rule really helps anything. For example if I had a channel that was relevant to r/pcgaming to meet the rule criteria I feel like I'd just post my content, then post 9 other inane threads that I didn't really care about/intend to participate in. "What's your opinion on Final Fantasy XIV?" "Someone explain to me why Epic Game Store is so much worse than Steam" "What games are you getting from the Steam Summer Sale?!" etc. etc.
My reply was a lot wordier, so I just wanted to say I 100% agree with pelotron here. They have the right of it IMO.
I focused pretty hard on the negatives because many other posters here have already hit a lot of the highlights and I felt they left out the negatives. It's certainly not all bad. Absolutely try it out.
Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it's the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I'm still here checking it daily. I don't find it's a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.
I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit's overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I've gotten lucky.
I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don't use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.
There's a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it's possible for one person to grow communities on here and that's pretty cool. I don't have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you've got the mind for it, there's opportunity to be the change you want to see. It's just not going to be easy and it's going to be slow.
It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.
Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.
Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.
A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.
Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.
There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.
And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.
So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.
There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.
I would think most of those applications should be able to use an alumino-silicate based refractory ceramic fiber. Kaowool is one brand, but there are many like it.
It has its own problems in regard to silicosis but that's only after it's been exposed to higher temperatures and are easily mitigated with most particulate respirators. Also, if I remember correctly, the silicosis threat requires very long term exposure. I do know of at least one company developing a silca-free version too, which would eliminate the silicosis threat.
I use it in glass manufacturing with temperatures 2000°F+ so I'm quite confident it'll hold up to any application where asbestos is being used.
EDIT: It will hold up in any application unless there's a problem with certain chemical reactivity I should say*. I don't expect that would be a common problem, but I'm sure it could happen. I'm admittedly not well versed on asbestos since I've never tried speccing it out for anything, haha.
Man the name of the dish is so not the point of this community. I stand by Lemmy in present state is far worse than reddit for pedantic or toxic behavior.
It looks really good OP, nice job! I'd eat it regardless of what you called it.
Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema's incompetence.
It's actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it's that you can't criticize them because "Hey, we're human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings". And when I say you can't, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.
They take an "us vs them" attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU'RE WRONG WE'RE RIGHT.
It's a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it's long since entered its death spiral.
Bb7 looks good after Qc3. Still feels like there's something here to me but it's not simple imo.
This is very close to how my weekend went actually : ) Just with BG3 instead of Wrestlemania, and the wife was out of town instead of no school. Haha.
I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.
I got a laugh at seeing this was a "book move".
Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven't got around playing it yet.
Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you'll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you'd never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.
For me personally, the game I'll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren't generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn't enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren't new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.
The other game that stands out to me is Assassin's Creed 1. I couldn't make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn't actually seem to matter...I just hated the game lol. I do think it's another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.
Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.
Politicians can put "you're against education!" in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn't worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.
Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of "you're against education!"
It's a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.
It's truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn't have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.
Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.
Beef is absolutely more expensive than chicken and pork in the states. By a wide margin. Not sure if OP misspoke or meant cheapest option to raise not purchase or what, but beef is not the cheap option in stores.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9446966
> I’ve spent a lot of time on this game in the last week and I really want to write my thoughts down. Looking around the internet I’ve seen a lot of reviews for this game but few that really captured it in the way that I see it. So, I’m putting this together both to start a discussion and hear what others think, and hopefully to provide additional context for those of you considering this as a purchase. > I have no real credentials other than being an old gamer who loved the original Dragon Warrior Monsters on the Game Boy Color and has played many monster battler/collector games throughout the years. But, hopefully what I have to say resonates with someone :). As you'll see, I have plenty to say. > > I’m going to split things up into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, rating various aspects of the game on a 5 point scale. There will be no story spoilers but I will be touching on how certain mechanics in the game work and will be referencing various monsters. So if you want to go in completely blind not knowing the answer to questions like can you change the seasons and weather at will, or if it’s possible to control a monster’s size, or if the Slime King monster made it into the game, then don’t read this. > > This will be a bit long, so we'll start with a quick TL;DR here. Let’s get into it. > _______________________________ > > # Overall (TL;DR): 4/5 > > Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (which I will refer to as DQM3 from here on out) is simply a lot of fun. Any criticisms aside, I plugged 75+ hours into the game in a week mostly because I was having so much damn fun the entire time. > > DQM3 delivers in a huge way where it counts: the monsters. The designs, the names, the trivia, the synth system, collecting, all are top notch and that’s the main reason this game gets a good score from me. There are a few other positives such as the voice acting, some of the game mechanics, and the environmental design that contribute to the positive score but everything surrounding the monsters makes up the bulk of it. > > It’s a good thing too because I have some heavy criticisms of the game otherwise. The performance issues are first and foremost, followed closely by scummy DLC decisions, and then other aspects such as some post-game mechanics and online features really hurt the game. > > On the whole though, I really loved the game. It’s clear a lot of care went into it from the developers and there’s a lot of character and heart in the story and writing, even if the story is really campy and goofy and not at all why I recommend the game haha. If you’re a fan of the monster collector/monster battler genre there’s many hours of fun and enjoyment in this game for you and I’d recommend it highly. > _____________________ > > # The Good: > > ## Monster Design: 5/5 > > I really can’t say enough about the monster design being so good. Nearly every new monster I came across put a smile on my face for some reason or another. Whether their name was fabulous such as the Abracadabrador, the design was adorable like the Crème Caraslime, it was just badass like Lieutenant Goresby-Purrvis, or a combination of these factors like in Giruffian it was just a pleasure the entire time through. I know that all of these examples exist in prior games and aren’t necessarily new to DQM3, but it doesn’t matter. The designs are great, they look good in the game, and it’s a huge strength of the game. > > ## Monster Synthesis: 4/5 > > Despite 4/5 being a good score I expect many players will tell me not giving the Monster Synthesis system a perfect score is a crime. And they have justification to say that. On the whole, the system is excellent. I have a single gripe that is important enough to me that I knock a point off. > > The Reverse Synthesis option, especially with allowing the player to see “Not Possible Combinations”, is such a QOL improvement over the original that it’s hard to overstate. It works so well! Every time you go to the Synth station you want to open up the Reverse menu and see if there’s anything new you can fuse your monsters into. Looking through that list, hunting for Synth partners to get the next cool monster, experimenting and learning how different skills can “fuse” together to make stronger versions of those skills, all of that was fun for nearly the entire game. It makes everything feel very safe as you can see all the potential options for your monsters and it makes deciding when and what to synth very easy. > > Until the post-game, that is. The “4 body synthesis” system spits in the face of everything I said in the above paragraph. Without specifically looking up a long path you’re highly unlikely to ever accidentally stumble into the 4 body synthesis. Most of them involve you uselessly combining two sets of two monsters into literally anything just so they act as the grandparents, then the hidden 4 body synthesis will show up for you. > > This is the first example of something that will appear more than once in this review: SE having very contrasting mechanics in the game. For 95% of the game you’re conditioned into using the reverse synthesis and incentivized towards creating the “gold portrait” synthesis options. Then, to get the rarest and most secret monsters in the game, you suddenly have to decide to mash two of your strongest monsters together and not get anything new out of it, twice, with no indication for why you would do that. > > That last bit there is the crux of it for me. No indication. I don’t mind the 4 body mechanic at all on its own. It’s a clever way to add another discovery for the player as these rare monsters won’t easily appear in your reverse synthesis. However, there needs to be a hint in the game somewhere. I find it very poor game design for players to be forced to rely on external sources for big unlocks. This wouldn’t be hard, I would be satisfied with various NPCs in the game giving hints along the lines of “I’ve heard if these four monsters are grandparents the offspring will be very powerful”. But without any hint or indication at all inside the game, I’m knocking a point off. > > If you happen to know that this does exist in the game and I just missed it, please tell me! That’s absolutely possible. > > ## Environment Design: 4/5 > > I’m extremely pleased with the environment design. There is the human land, 6 circles of hell, and 3 “echelons” for each of the 6 circles. It easily could have been very boring and repetitive to keep revisiting circles at a new level but it really never was. Every circle felt very unique, and each level also felt like a fresh experience running through them. Plus, exploring a circle you’ve spent a lot of time in could even be a fresh experience thanks to the Seasons and Weather mechanics. Combining small areas of the map only unlocking in certain seasons with monsters change depending on the season and weather makes it so you can spend many hours on a single map always finding something new. > > The world mini-bosses were a really nice touch too. > > EDIT: Oh, and the dungeons! The dungeons were a surprise. There are some puzzles I would say approach the level of Zelda puzzles near the end of the game. It was a pleasant surprise to me at least. > > The only reason I’m knocking it down to a 4/5 is because at times, traversing the maps is frustrating. There are very small ledges that your character will suddenly not be able to go up without jumping so you end up feeling like you slam into an invisible wall. It’s very jarring when it happens the first few times, and downright frustrating in the post-game when you’re trying to farm, get stuck on some invisible ledge/wall, and get forced into a battle you were trying to avoid. > > Additionally there are a few platformer-esque areas in the game, where you need to be jumping from platform to platform in order to reach a chest or something. But the controls and jumping mechanics are too clunky to work well for these areas. Oftentimes I found myself seemingly stuck in an area because my character didn’t seem to be able to jump over a ledge, and then suddenly I’d find a very small bump or rock on the ground and that’d give me just the boost I needed to get over the ledge. If this were a platformer game with more intuitive ledge and jump distances, I’d be just fine with that. But none of those 3 things are true here. > > > ## Voice Acting: 5/5 > > > I don’t have a ton to say here other than that I was pleasantly surprised at both the amount and the quality of the voice acting throughout the game. It’s absolutely over the top and campy, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously and in my opinion it just works. The puns absolutely littered throughout the dialogue did it for me too. For example, I was very impressed by the Slime voice actors putting emphasis on things like categooey instead of category. Just very well done all around. > >## Story: 3/5 > Yeah the story’s good enough for me. The pace is very fast and, to me, it’s clearly not the main focus of the game. I’d say my general opinion of the story is that Square Enix wrote it with the motto of “We know why you’re here, it’s to collect monsters, here’s a decent story to serve as the vehicle for you to collect more monsters”. It’s got a couple nice surprises and twists in it, it’s charming enough…sure it won’t be winning any awards and it wasn’t super gripping or anything but I also wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m not even sure I wanted it to be. I just wanted to collect more monsters. It is kinda funny that they seemed to want to set an Any% Speedrun for giving a character PTSD in the intro though. > > > ## Music: 3/5 > The music is not anything to write home about, honestly. The themes are too repetitive most of the time and don’t stand out to me in any way. I’m pretty sure if I listened to any given theme I might have a difficult time telling you which map it belonged to. > The nostalgia factor in themes such as the Arena battles and Mole Hole were an A+ from me but I’m not going to give a good score just for nostalgia. Music wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. I’ll call it good enough. > ________________ > > > # The Bad: > > ## The UI: 2/5 > > This one is maybe just me, but I’m still calling it out. Man did I find the UI clunky. The number of times I tried changing my party only to open the monster information screen or vice versa was high. The number of times I changed my party, or changed my filters in a Synthesis search, then lost all my changes because I didn’t press + to confirm was maddeningly high. If I spent all that time changing my party around, why do I have to “confirm” it? Backing out of the menu after selecting what I wanted was intuitive to me, having to confirm everything after selecting it was not. > > Z and R will scroll left and right on your monster information tabs but not when you’re giving orders and want to go to your 2nd skill page. And how often did I try to see my monster’s 2nd talent layout but accidentally changed to the next monster instead or vice versa. The + button hides on screen info rather than opening your menu. Z and R suddenly spin my camera when my cat gets in my way and I’m holding my Switch funny and accidentally bump one of those buttons. Why would I ever have wanted those to control the camera? > > Also, there was some serious menu lag for me. Sometimes at the end of a fight I wanted to open the Talents menu, but I pressed Y too early I guess? Then I’d press A one too many times and leave the end-of-fight screen entirely and have to open up my menu and go to Talent Points that way. And, you know, of course I’d press + to open the menu lol. > I dunno. It was all just clunky and frequently frustrating to me. > > ## Post-Game Mechanics: 2/5 > > This is a real shame because it’s almost so good…but just not quite. I alluded to this in the Monster Synth section, but this is where I find the game to be full of contrasting mechanics that are in conflict and end up falling flat on their face because of it. This area got long so Imma split it up a bit more. > > > Post-Game Content > > Aside from the mechanics, the post-game content itself is just rather lacking. What is there is fun and cool and I love the boss designs….but then there’s just not much. You get S class in the arenas which are neat battles but…no high level dungeons to be taking on, no real replayable content. A shame. > > Discovery vs QOL > > Before I get into the mechanics there’s an important concept I want to convey. I feel that giving players a sense of wonder and discovery vs giving players agency to do what they want via QOL features in the game is a very delicate balance. A friend of mine put it well, he said he was really enjoying DQM3 compared to Pokémon as he was playing through the story because “without knowing how everything works, the fun-goggles get to stay on”. Damage scaling, monster size, monster abilities, evolution of abilities, fusing of abilities, all of that remaining a mystery as you play through the game is fun. I mentioned earlier that the seasons and weather changing are a huge positive to zone exploration remaining fresh throughout the game. These are perfect examples of allowing the player to have that sense of wonder and discovery, and I think all of that is done really well in DQM3. > > However, in the post-game there's little left to discover. So now it makes sense to give the player information, agency, and other QOL features to start optimizing. In many ways, DQM3 does this very well. But it falls flat in enough places that in my opinion it completely cancels out all the parts that go well. > > Seasons and Weather > > A really good example is the Flute of Seasons. Square Enix clearly realized that, in the post-game, the changing of the seasons that was such a positive during your story playthrough will become a huge negative. If you really want a monster that appears in the summer and it’s currently fall you don’t want to have to wait 30-40 minutes just to get the monster you wanted. So they give you the Flute of Seasons so you can change the season at will! Great idea! > > …except that they forgot about weather? So…if you need a monster in clear weather and there’s currently a weather event going on…you still have to wait until that’s over. And there’s no timer for when that might happen…so…the benefits of the Flute of Seasons are entirely negated in any case where a monster spawn is also related to weather. So close, but this one detail was a huge one to miss so ends up being that, in the post-game, weather is just a huge source of frustration and nothing else. > > Eggsclusive Monsters > > There’s no way I can not mention Eggs in this section so let’s talk about egg-exclusive Monsters. The idea behind the eggs is really fun, especially before post-game. It’s great getting a random monster every now and then, especially rare ones! I don’t even mind some monsters being exclusive to eggs, but if that is the case, there either has to be a more straightforward way to get those monsters out of eggs, or the RNG for eggs has to be a lot more forgiving, or maybe both. If, say, there were 1 egg-exclusive monster that appeared in each of the 19 zones and there was a reasonable pity timer of how many eggs it would take you to get your egg-exclusive monster, and you could reason out which map held which egg-exclusive monster from information in the game, that might not be so bad. But players are reporting 9-10 hours spent farming eggs looking for certain monsters. The playerbase has already developed a mildly convoluted way of regenerating the random egg seed in order to try taking some of the pain away from farming these things. And it still sucks. > > This just wasn’t well executed, even if the idea is not inherently bad. It directly contrasts the ease in getting most monsters you need in post-game, especially with the Mole Hole DLC. It just ends up being a very frustrating and tedious grind for all players, and a soul-crushing one for players with bad luck. > > Specific Information > > The lack of specific information is another one. How much does Ultra Crafty Banger/Frizzer/Cracker/etc reduce resistance by? How much does it raise potency by? Is Big Banger or Kaboomle better to run on monster X? What about monster Y, where I don’t want to run Wisdom on it? The experimenting that was fun during your story playthrough is no longer fun if you’re trying to optimize for competitive play. Now I no longer want that information abstracted away from me. There should be a way to get it at some point in the game. > > Positives and summary > > There are some positives here though! Metal King Slime grinding is dramatically improved once you finish the final boss in the base game, making leveling a breeze. I love that. Also, the Talent scrolls you can get are a huge time saver; allowing you to almost completely revamp your monsters without having to resynth and relevel them. Getting them is the slightest bit tedious and I really wish they’d have alluded to it a little more, but, it’s there and not too bad to grind. Mole Hole is…well, we’ll talk about that later. So it’s not all bad by any means. But to me it’s like…say there were 10 things that were cool during your playthrough that would become tedious in post game; maybe they solved 5-6 of them, but since there are still 4-5 remaining it doesn’t really matter. The post game still ends up being needlessly tedious. > > > ## Online Features – 2/5 > > I won’t spend a lot of time on this because frankly I haven’t spent a lot of time on online play, so my opinion here isn’t as informed. But from my brief foray it’s not been fun. > > The “Quickfire Battles” are an entirely useless feature until you’re done with the game and have a level 100 team of your own. I tried them when I first unlocked online play and my level 15 team got wrecked, as expected. They should scale matchmaking on this to where you are in story progress. > > Then online ranked battles…let’s just say I haven’t been a fan yet, but, it’s still early and competitive metas take time to develop and settle. Maybe it’ll settle into something I find fun. But for now, I typically love competitive turn based games like monster battlers and card games…but I found DQM3’s PvP to be quite underwhelming. There’s a clearly dominant strategy and you’ll see it on 100% of teams. That’s just not real fun. > > No ability to Synth with friends, no way to do dungeons together or anything…just underwhelming online capabilities IMO. I give it a 2/5, but it’s not contributing to my overall score of the game much. I play this mostly for the single player stuff anyway. > _________________________ > > # The Ugly: > > ## Performance: 1/5 > Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat this at all. This game performs like hot ass on the Switch. It did not keep me from having fun with the game, but it still needs to be called out. > > You might see players claim they see no problems. I dunno, maybe someone at Nintendo stuffed better hardware in their Switch. Or maybe they’re emulating the game, or maybe they just haven't gotten far enough to experience it yet. But even if they do truly not experience it, it doesn't take away from the fact that most people do. > > I’m really not that picky when it comes to this stuff. I’m not someone who’s going to be like “Omg I dropped from 30FPS to 24FPS this is unplayable” or “I see screen tearing!”. But the game runs like crap. Forget frame drops, there are plenty of times I get complete stuttering. There are of course frame drops though. Candy land while it's raining is oof. > > Monsters in the distance rendering in as low texture/low frames is particularly jarring to me. The Lumbering Lizard in the Circle of Conquest lower echelon in particular stands out as an example. Maybe someone can convince me I’m ignorant and wrong to say that after falling from a Sky Island to the Underground in Tears of the Kingdom without a load screen, with minimal frame drops, and with everything looking gorgeous I expect better than highly pixelated monsters drawn in the distance but that is my expectation. > > Speaking of load screens. Holy fucking hell the load screens. I’ve got about 80 hours in my file, I have to assume somewhere on the order of 20 hours of that is just staring at a little slime in the corner of a black screen stutter-jumping up and down. I’m pretty sure there are 30 second cutscenes that have 5 load screens, each taking 5-10 seconds, doubling the cutscene time. Heaven forbid you try one of the grinding techniques for post-game where you have to cut back to the title screen. > > And lastly, most importantly, I want to say this: I would’ve given this game a 2/5 in performance except for the fact that the further I got into it, the more it started crashing. I’ve crashed all the way back to the switch home screen maybe….10 times? Maybe 15? Sometimes mid battle, sometimes right after a synth…then I have to figure out where my last auto-save was so I know what I have to redo…The longer I’ve played the more this issue has cropped up. Just this morning I crashed twice while trying to climb Zoma’s synth tree. Once or twice I could forgive, but it’s become too common to rate the game any higher than 1/5 on performance. > > > ## Regional Exclusives: 1/5 > > Yeah Imma knock Square Enix for this one. It’s some crap that Japan gets exclusive monsters. It’s pretty much par for the course sure but in a monster collection game locking some players out of collecting everything because they don’t live in a region is crap. > > Also, seriously, Japan exclusive McDonald's monsters? What's more American than McDonald's? I wouldn't want it to be a US-exclusive monster either but c'mon. > > ## Day 1 DLC – 1/5 > > In general, I find Day 1 DLC indefensible for one simple fact. It means that the game developer/publisher/some rich ass with a C in his job title made 100% of the game, then took out some percentage of that 100% and said “Sell this as extra.” To me, DLC should be adding extra to the game. Day 1 DLC can only ever be taking away from the game. > > That said, some are worse than others. Costumes/Cosmetics…I still pine for the days when costumes and such were unlockables instead of DLC you have to buy, but, that kind of stuff bothers me the least. > > The DLC for this game is straight up egregious IMO. The Treasure One is just “Have some extra useful items every day forever”. Like. DLC stands for downloadable content. Is that really content? That’s just the online store that you offer for free except better. But, whatever. The items are nice but not necessarily game-breaking. Just…pretty damn nice and you’re at a minor disadvantage without it. > > The dungeon DLC? Man, remember that whole bit I said about post-game lacking replayability/challenges? Well, here it is! Just you have to pay extra for it instead of it being in the game. I find that to be infuriating. The content itself is cool, I like the challenges, it’d be great to do them with friends…and since it was clearly finished by the time of the game’s launch it should just be in the damn game. > > And then there’s Mole Hole. Mole Hole is the most unforgivable. The Mole Hole puts you into a little dungeon with each floor being a rank, starting with G, then F, E, etc. On a given floor you can find monsters of that rank that you’ve scouted before. > If you happen to unlock it during your playthrough it can be abused to make your playthrough extremely easy. If you’re looking to complete the Monsterpedia in the post-game….With how many duplicate monsters you’ll need to Synth the entire Monsterpedia, this is insanely useful. I’d say it could save you dozens of hours easily if you’re trying to 100% the Monsterpedia. > > Since so much effort, quality, and care was put into the monster designs/collection systems/synth systems, clearly Square Enix recognizes the value of the Mole Hole. Which is why they took it out of the game and sold it as Day 1 DLC instead of just adding it to the game as a post-game unlock. Seriously, that’s some egregious predatory bullshit to me. > > For the record, it’s an awesome area and absolutely worth the money. Like, as content, I rate the Mole Hole 5/5 easily. But to make it day 1 DLC is bullshit. Just leave it in the game for everyone to enjoy, don’t make the most enticing area pay2play. >
I’ve spent a lot of time on this game in the last week and I really want to write my thoughts down. Looking around the internet I’ve seen a lot of reviews for this game but few that really captured it in the way that I see it. So, I’m putting this together both to start a discussion and hear what others think, and hopefully to provide additional context for those of you considering this as a purchase. I have no real credentials other than being an old gamer who loved the original Dragon Warrior Monsters on the Game Boy Color and has played many monster battler/collector games throughout the years. But, hopefully what I have to say resonates with someone :). As you'll see, I have plenty to say.
I’m going to split things up into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, rating various aspects of the game on a 5 point scale. There will be no story spoilers but I will be touching on how certain mechanics in the game work and will be referencing various monsters. So if you want to go in completely blind not knowing the answer to questions like can you change the seasons and weather at will, or if it’s possible to control a monster’s size, or if the Slime King monster made it into the game, then don’t read this.
This will be a bit long, so we'll start with a quick TL;DR here. Let’s get into it. _______________________________
Overall (TL;DR): 4/5
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (which I will refer to as DQM3 from here on out) is simply a lot of fun. Any criticisms aside, I plugged 75+ hours into the game in a week mostly because I was having so much damn fun the entire time.
DQM3 delivers in a huge way where it counts: the monsters. The designs, the names, the trivia, the synth system, collecting, all are top notch and that’s the main reason this game gets a good score from me. There are a few other positives such as the voice acting, some of the game mechanics, and the environmental design that contribute to the positive score but everything surrounding the monsters makes up the bulk of it.
It’s a good thing too because I have some heavy criticisms of the game otherwise. The performance issues are first and foremost, followed closely by scummy DLC decisions, and then other aspects such as some post-game mechanics and online features really hurt the game.
On the whole though, I really loved the game. It’s clear a lot of care went into it from the developers and there’s a lot of character and heart in the story and writing, even if the story is really campy and goofy and not at all why I recommend the game haha. If you’re a fan of the monster collector/monster battler genre there’s many hours of fun and enjoyment in this game for you and I’d recommend it highly. _____________________
The Good:
Monster Design: 5/5
I really can’t say enough about the monster design being so good. Nearly every new monster I came across put a smile on my face for some reason or another. Whether their name was fabulous such as the Abracadabrador, the design was adorable like the Crème Caraslime, it was just badass like Lieutenant Goresby-Purrvis, or a combination of these factors like in Giruffian it was just a pleasure the entire time through. I know that all of these examples exist in prior games and aren’t necessarily new to DQM3, but it doesn’t matter. The designs are great, they look good in the game, and it’s a huge strength of the game.
Monster Synthesis: 4/5
Despite 4/5 being a good score I expect many players will tell me not giving the Monster Synthesis system a perfect score is a crime. And they have justification to say that. On the whole, the system is excellent. I have a single gripe that is important enough to me that I knock a point off.
The Reverse Synthesis option, especially with allowing the player to see “Not Possible Combinations”, is such a QOL improvement over the original that it’s hard to overstate. It works so well! Every time you go to the Synth station you want to open up the Reverse menu and see if there’s anything new you can fuse your monsters into. Looking through that list, hunting for Synth partners to get the next cool monster, experimenting and learning how different skills can “fuse” together to make stronger versions of those skills, all of that was fun for nearly the entire game. It makes everything feel very safe as you can see all the potential options for your monsters and it makes deciding when and what to synth very easy.
Until the post-game, that is. The “4 body synthesis” system spits in the face of everything I said in the above paragraph. Without specifically looking up a long path you’re highly unlikely to ever accidentally stumble into the 4 body synthesis. Most of them involve you uselessly combining two sets of two monsters into literally anything just so they act as the grandparents, then the hidden 4 body synthesis will show up for you.
This is the first example of something that will appear more than once in this review: SE having very contrasting mechanics in the game. For 95% of the game you’re conditioned into using the reverse synthesis and incentivized towards creating the “gold portrait” synthesis options. Then, to get the rarest and most secret monsters in the game, you suddenly have to decide to mash two of your strongest monsters together and not get anything new out of it, twice, with no indication for why you would do that.
That last bit there is the crux of it for me. No indication. I don’t mind the 4 body mechanic at all on its own. It’s a clever way to add another discovery for the player as these rare monsters won’t easily appear in your reverse synthesis. However, there needs to be a hint in the game somewhere. I find it very poor game design for players to be forced to rely on external sources for big unlocks. This wouldn’t be hard, I would be satisfied with various NPCs in the game giving hints along the lines of “I’ve heard if these four monsters are grandparents the offspring will be very powerful”. But without any hint or indication at all inside the game, I’m knocking a point off.
If you happen to know that this does exist in the game and I just missed it, please tell me! That’s absolutely possible.
Environment Design: 4/5
I’m extremely pleased with the environment design. There is the human land, 6 circles of hell, and 3 “echelons” for each of the 6 circles. It easily could have been very boring and repetitive to keep revisiting circles at a new level but it really never was. Every circle felt very unique, and each level also felt like a fresh experience running through them. Plus, exploring a circle you’ve spent a lot of time in could even be a fresh experience thanks to the Seasons and Weather mechanics. Combining small areas of the map only unlocking in certain seasons with monsters change depending on the season and weather makes it so you can spend many hours on a single map always finding something new.
The world mini-bosses were a really nice touch too.
EDIT: Oh, and the dungeons! The dungeons were a surprise. There are some puzzles I would say approach the level of Zelda puzzles near the end of the game. It was a pleasant surprise to me at least.
The only reason I’m knocking it down to a 4/5 is because at times, traversing the maps is frustrating. There are very small ledges that your character will suddenly not be able to go up without jumping so you end up feeling like you slam into an invisible wall. It’s very jarring when it happens the first few times, and downright frustrating in the post-game when you’re trying to farm, get stuck on some invisible ledge/wall, and get forced into a battle you were trying to avoid.
Additionally there are a few platformer-esque areas in the game, where you need to be jumping from platform to platform in order to reach a chest or something. But the controls and jumping mechanics are too clunky to work well for these areas. Oftentimes I found myself seemingly stuck in an area because my character didn’t seem to be able to jump over a ledge, and then suddenly I’d find a very small bump or rock on the ground and that’d give me just the boost I needed to get over the ledge. If this were a platformer game with more intuitive ledge and jump distances, I’d be just fine with that. But none of those 3 things are true here.
Voice Acting: 5/5
I don’t have a ton to say here other than that I was pleasantly surprised at both the amount and the quality of the voice acting throughout the game. It’s absolutely over the top and campy, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously and in my opinion it just works. The puns absolutely littered throughout the dialogue did it for me too. For example, I was very impressed by the Slime voice actors putting emphasis on things like categooey instead of category. Just very well done all around.
Story: 3/5
Yeah the story’s good enough for me. The pace is very fast and, to me, it’s clearly not the main focus of the game. I’d say my general opinion of the story is that Square Enix wrote it with the motto of “We know why you’re here, it’s to collect monsters, here’s a decent story to serve as the vehicle for you to collect more monsters”. It’s got a couple nice surprises and twists in it, it’s charming enough…sure it won’t be winning any awards and it wasn’t super gripping or anything but I also wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m not even sure I wanted it to be. I just wanted to collect more monsters. It is kinda funny that they seemed to want to set an Any% Speedrun for giving a character PTSD in the intro though.
Music: 3/5
The music is not anything to write home about, honestly. The themes are too repetitive most of the time and don’t stand out to me in any way. I’m pretty sure if I listened to any given theme I might have a difficult time telling you which map it belonged to. The nostalgia factor in themes such as the Arena battles and Mole Hole were an A+ from me but I’m not going to give a good score just for nostalgia. Music wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. I’ll call it good enough. ________________
The Bad:
The UI: 2/5
This one is maybe just me, but I’m still calling it out. Man did I find the UI clunky. The number of times I tried changing my party only to open the monster information screen or vice versa was high. The number of times I changed my party, or changed my filters in a Synthesis search, then lost all my changes because I didn’t press + to confirm was maddeningly high. If I spent all that time changing my party around, why do I have to “confirm” it? Backing out of the menu after selecting what I wanted was intuitive to me, having to confirm everything after selecting it was not.
Z and R will scroll left and right on your monster information tabs but not when you’re giving orders and want to go to your 2nd skill page. And how often did I try to see my monster’s 2nd talent layout but accidentally changed to the next monster instead or vice versa. The + button hides on screen info rather than opening your menu. Z and R suddenly spin my camera when my cat gets in my way and I’m holding my Switch funny and accidentally bump one of those buttons. Why would I ever have wanted those to control the camera?
Also, there was some serious menu lag for me. Sometimes at the end of a fight I wanted to open the Talents menu, but I pressed Y too early I guess? Then I’d press A one too many times and leave the end-of-fight screen entirely and have to open up my menu and go to Talent Points that way. And, you know, of course I’d press + to open the menu lol. I dunno. It was all just clunky and frequently frustrating to me.
Post-Game Mechanics: 2/5
This is a real shame because it’s almost so good…but just not quite. I alluded to this in the Monster Synth section, but this is where I find the game to be full of contrasting mechanics that are in conflict and end up falling flat on their face because of it. This area got long so Imma split it up a bit more.
Post-Game Content
Aside from the mechanics, the post-game content itself is just rather lacking. What is there is fun and cool and I love the boss designs….but then there’s just not much. You get S class in the arenas which are neat battles but…no high level dungeons to be taking on, no real replayable content. A shame.
Discovery vs QOL
Before I get into the mechanics there’s an important concept I want to convey. I feel that giving players a sense of wonder and discovery vs giving players agency to do what they want via QOL features in the game is a very delicate balance. A friend of mine put it well, he said he was really enjoying DQM3 compared to Pokémon as he was playing through the story because “without knowing how everything works, the fun-goggles get to stay on”. Damage scaling, monster size, monster abilities, evolution of abilities, fusing of abilities, all of that remaining a mystery as you play through the game is fun. I mentioned earlier that the seasons and weather changing are a huge positive to zone exploration remaining fresh throughout the game. These are perfect examples of allowing the player to have that sense of wonder and discovery, and I think all of that is done really well in DQM3.
However, in the post-game there's little left to discover. So now it makes sense to give the player information, agency, and other QOL features to start optimizing. In many ways, DQM3 does this very well. But it falls flat in enough places that in my opinion it completely cancels out all the parts that go well.
Seasons and Weather
A really good example is the Flute of Seasons. Square Enix clearly realized that, in the post-game, the changing of the seasons that was such a positive during your story playthrough will become a huge negative. If you really want a monster that appears in the summer and it’s currently fall you don’t want to have to wait 30-40 minutes just to get the monster you wanted. So they give you the Flute of Seasons so you can change the season at will! Great idea!
…except that they forgot about weather? So…if you need a monster in clear weather and there’s currently a weather event going on…you still have to wait until that’s over. And there’s no timer for when that might happen…so…the benefits of the Flute of Seasons are entirely negated in any case where a monster spawn is also related to weather. So close, but this one detail was a huge one to miss so ends up being that, in the post-game, weather is just a huge source of frustration and nothing else.
Eggsclusive Monsters
There’s no way I can not mention Eggs in this section so let’s talk about egg-exclusive Monsters. The idea behind the eggs is really fun, especially before post-game. It’s great getting a random monster every now and then, especially rare ones! I don’t even mind some monsters being exclusive to eggs, but if that is the case, there either has to be a more straightforward way to get those monsters out of eggs, or the RNG for eggs has to be a lot more forgiving, or maybe both. If, say, there were 1 egg-exclusive monster that appeared in each of the 19 zones and there was a reasonable pity timer of how many eggs it would take you to get your egg-exclusive monster, and you could reason out which map held which egg-exclusive monster from information in the game, that might not be so bad. But players are reporting 9-10 hours spent farming eggs looking for certain monsters. The playerbase has already developed a mildly convoluted way of regenerating the random egg seed in order to try taking some of the pain away from farming these things. And it still sucks.
This just wasn’t well executed, even if the idea is not inherently bad. It directly contrasts the ease in getting most monsters you need in post-game, especially with the Mole Hole DLC. It just ends up being a very frustrating and tedious grind for all players, and a soul-crushing one for players with bad luck.
Specific Information
The lack of specific information is another one. How much does Ultra Crafty Banger/Frizzer/Cracker/etc reduce resistance by? How much does it raise potency by? Is Big Banger or Kaboomle better to run on monster X? What about monster Y, where I don’t want to run Wisdom on it? The experimenting that was fun during your story playthrough is no longer fun if you’re trying to optimize for competitive play. Now I no longer want that information abstracted away from me. There should be a way to get it at some point in the game.
Positives and summary
There are some positives here though! Metal King Slime grinding is dramatically improved once you finish the final boss in the base game, making leveling a breeze. I love that. Also, the Talent scrolls you can get are a huge time saver; allowing you to almost completely revamp your monsters without having to resynth and relevel them. Getting them is the slightest bit tedious and I really wish they’d have alluded to it a little more, but, it’s there and not too bad to grind. Mole Hole is…well, we’ll talk about that later. So it’s not all bad by any means. But to me it’s like…say there were 10 things that were cool during your playthrough that would become tedious in post game; maybe they solved 5-6 of them, but since there are still 4-5 remaining it doesn’t really matter. The post game still ends up being needlessly tedious.
Online Features – 2/5
I won’t spend a lot of time on this because frankly I haven’t spent a lot of time on online play, so my opinion here isn’t as informed. But from my brief foray it’s not been fun.
The “Quickfire Battles” are an entirely useless feature until you’re done with the game and have a level 100 team of your own. I tried them when I first unlocked online play and my level 15 team got wrecked, as expected. They should scale matchmaking on this to where you are in story progress.
Then online ranked battles…let’s just say I haven’t been a fan yet, but, it’s still early and competitive metas take time to develop and settle. Maybe it’ll settle into something I find fun. But for now, I typically love competitive turn based games like monster battlers and card games…but I found DQM3’s PvP to be quite underwhelming. There’s a clearly dominant strategy and you’ll see it on 100% of teams. That’s just not real fun.
No ability to Synth with friends, no way to do dungeons together or anything…just underwhelming online capabilities IMO. I give it a 2/5, but it’s not contributing to my overall score of the game much. I play this mostly for the single player stuff anyway. _________________________
The Ugly:
Performance: 1/5
Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat this at all. This game performs like hot ass on the Switch. It did not keep me from having fun with the game, but it still needs to be called out.
You might see players claim they see no problems. I dunno, maybe someone at Nintendo stuffed better hardware in their Switch. Or maybe they’re emulating the game, or maybe they just haven't gotten far enough to experience it yet. But even if they do truly not experience it, it doesn't take away from the fact that most people do.
I’m really not that picky when it comes to this stuff. I’m not someone who’s going to be like “Omg I dropped from 30FPS to 24FPS this is unplayable” or “I see screen tearing!”. But the game runs like crap. Forget frame drops, there are plenty of times I get complete stuttering. There are of course frame drops though. Candy land while it's raining is oof.
Monsters in the distance rendering in as low texture/low frames is particularly jarring to me. The Lumbering Lizard in the Circle of Conquest lower echelon in particular stands out as an example. Maybe someone can convince me I’m ignorant and wrong to say that after falling from a Sky Island to the Underground in Tears of the Kingdom without a load screen, with minimal frame drops, and with everything looking gorgeous I expect better than highly pixelated monsters drawn in the distance but that is my expectation.
Speaking of load screens. Holy fucking hell the load screens. I’ve got about 80 hours in my file, I have to assume somewhere on the order of 20 hours of that is just staring at a little slime in the corner of a black screen stutter-jumping up and down. I’m pretty sure there are 30 second cutscenes that have 5 load screens, each taking 5-10 seconds, doubling the cutscene time. Heaven forbid you try one of the grinding techniques for post-game where you have to cut back to the title screen.
And lastly, most importantly, I want to say this: I would’ve given this game a 2/5 in performance except for the fact that the further I got into it, the more it started crashing. I’ve crashed all the way back to the switch home screen maybe….10 times? Maybe 15? Sometimes mid battle, sometimes right after a synth…then I have to figure out where my last auto-save was so I know what I have to redo…The longer I’ve played the more this issue has cropped up. Just this morning I crashed twice while trying to climb Zoma’s synth tree. Once or twice I could forgive, but it’s become too common to rate the game any higher than 1/5 on performance.
Regional Exclusives: 1/5
Yeah Imma knock Square Enix for this one. It’s some crap that Japan gets exclusive monsters. It’s pretty much par for the course sure but in a monster collection game locking some players out of collecting everything because they don’t live in a region is crap.
Also, seriously, Japan exclusive McDonald's monsters? What's more American than McDonald's? I wouldn't want it to be a US-exclusive monster either but c'mon.
Day 1 DLC – 1/5
In general, I find Day 1 DLC indefensible for one simple fact. It means that the game developer/publisher/some rich ass with a C in his job title made 100% of the game, then took out some percentage of that 100% and said “Sell this as extra.” To me, DLC should be adding extra to the game. Day 1 DLC can only ever be taking away from the game.
That said, some are worse than others. Costumes/Cosmetics…I still pine for the days when costumes and such were unlockables instead of DLC you have to buy, but, that kind of stuff bothers me the least.
The DLC for this game is straight up egregious IMO. The Treasure One is just “Have some extra useful items every day forever”. Like. DLC stands for downloadable content. Is that really content? That’s just the online store that you offer for free except better. But, whatever. The items are nice but not necessarily game-breaking. Just…pretty damn nice and you’re at a minor disadvantage without it.
The dungeon DLC? Man, remember that whole bit I said about post-game lacking replayability/challenges? Well, here it is! Just you have to pay extra for it instead of it being in the game. I find that to be infuriating. The content itself is cool, I like the challenges, it’d be great to do them with friends…and since it was clearly finished by the time of the game’s launch it should just be in the damn game.
And then there’s Mole Hole. Mole Hole is the most unforgivable. The Mole Hole puts you into a little dungeon with each floor being a rank, starting with G, then F, E, etc. On a given floor you can find monsters of that rank that you’ve scouted before. If you happen to unlock it during your playthrough it can be abused to make your playthrough extremely easy. If you’re looking to complete the Monsterpedia in the post-game….With how many duplicate monsters you’ll need to Synth the entire Monsterpedia, this is insanely useful. I’d say it could save you dozens of hours easily if you’re trying to 100% the Monsterpedia.
Since so much effort, quality, and care was put into the monster designs/collection systems/synth systems, clearly Square Enix recognizes the value of the Mole Hole. Which is why they took it out of the game and sold it as Day 1 DLC instead of just adding it to the game as a post-game unlock. Seriously, that’s some egregious predatory bullshit to me.
For the record, it’s an awesome area and absolutely worth the money. Like, as content, I rate the Mole Hole 5/5 easily. But to make it day 1 DLC is bullshit. Just leave it in the game for everyone to enjoy, don’t make the most enticing area pay2play.
Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.
Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user's benefit.
If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don't see that with what Wrapped shows.
Plus it's fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.
It's just a fun and cute thing imo.
I feel people are way too quick to jump down Biden's throat for the rail union.
First off, it's worth noting he continued to work with the railroad to get the employees the sick pay they wanted on the back end.
But in the midst of the situation... I'm not going to pretend this hypothetical is completely correct. But I don't think it's crazy.
Imagine you're Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production. On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.
Imagine you're that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don't care, the strike continues.
I'm super pro labor and anti corporation and even I would struggle to make that call. Especially if someone proposes the idea that on the backside of forcing the railroad workers to work we could pressure the railroad to give into the demands.
I'm not saying he's perfect and I'm not saying there wasn't a better way. But I think that hypothetical is plausible. And I think people are too quick to forget that often times these decisions are which tragic situation would you rather allow to happen, and it's not as clear cut as it sounds.
Edit: Oh yeah, the comparison. This time, cars don't get built and these corporations will see problems to their bottom line. The impact to human life isn't there. The economic impact still may be, but it's not as devastating across the board like shutting down the railroad would be. Much easier decision to make.
Mr. Happy if you like anything Final Fantasy! Excellent stuff and he goes deep into all lore.
Josh Strife Hayes also does a good job just in general.
I'm still sad that steamingpileofshit.com finally got killed. I think within the last year or two.
Used to redirect to steam.com since the old days when everybody hated Steam lol. It's hugely improved now and I love everything that GabeN has done for the PC gaming community; Steam being a huge part of it.
But I still laugh a bit at the old days.
