This is pro-shadehaven propaganda. Do not believe their autogen modded village building lies.

jk I love what you’ve all done with the place it’s utterly gorgeous

I told you to get extra saves for a reason, the game will fuck you over for a choice you made 30 hours ago with no warning if you don’t.

Rad that you did a wizard Denam though

There are several. All of them are Ramza 1v1s though, but very difficult ones. Also all of them can be almost softlocks if you picked the wrong zodiac. Which I did. They’re still possible but way harder. It is easily the worst part of the game and it means mage Ramza is an even worse idea than mage Denam is.

They’re not unusably bad, it’s just Cid exists and breaks the game in half.

Most of the best named characters are locked behind late game sidequests that I didn’t do. The others are usually better but not by so much that generics become useless. And you can’t even run a full party of nameds until after the hardest boss fight in the game anyways, a fight which is hard for reasons entirely unrelated to your party since it’s a Ramza solo.

They exist because the game still has a permadeath system and the devs didn’t want you softlocking. Plus they represent the way they wanted you to get invested, to take these randoms and turn them into your big special characters, like how FF1, 3, and 5 were. And I mean it works when you do put in the effort to, Joyse was a joy (heh) to level and build into my cute adorable red-but-red-doesn’t-actually-exist-so-she’s-really-black mage. Named characters are just the path of least resistance since they’re already very good when they join and don’t need investment whereas generics do. Kinda like prepromotes in FE.

Glad I could help lol.

I do think the five-man partes are fine but there’s a real adjustment period while you get used to it and I still would have preferred like, 8. Part of it is also that early game you really need to turtle but once you start getting the named characters (who are all stronger than any generic could hope to be and you should just use them once you can instead of bothering with leveling generics) they allow you to do a lot more since they have better damage output or survivability. In my run with the exception of one generic black mage (Joyse my beloved) all of my units by endgame were named and the only one I had ever grinded in any way was Ramza to get him into Samurai. (And also monk for that one stupid god damn boss fight)

Yeah gonna second what everyone else is saying in that you need to grind. The way that the class system works basically necessitates it since you need to get individual characters levels in one class to unlock a new one which effectively resets their progress so you have to restart. I usually try to avoid grinding in SRPGs (because Fire Emblem elitism brain) but I realised at like mission 5 that I was going to have to. Once you get a bit ahead levels-wise you can skip grinding for a while until you add a new class onto a character. Also keep several save files, there’s one or two multipart missions that will fuck you up if you aren’t ready for it and you can’t go back if you don’t have a save before it.

The small party size is a full game thing, it’s not 4 units but rather 5 for the majority of the game though. The idea was that FFT wants you to get really invested in a small number of units that you build up in the same way that you would in a normal FF game. (Although the game also wants you to have access to the majority of classes on your party so you can swap when necessary, which means more grinding. I just didn’t do this barring a few particular builds in my party which made some maps harder than they should have been, but I think it was ultimately doable.)

I use local libraries and bookstores mostly. When I’m reading comics/manga/big publisher fantasy I tend to pirate until I know that I like the series to justify the purchase. For theory I use a mix of the usual Marxists.org alongside my uni library, libgen, and Iskra’s pdf versions of their books. I also read a lot of visual novels, usually pirated until I know I like them.

I’m currently rereading two things: The Hobbit as a bit of a comfort read, and Sekien no Inganock since I never got around to finishing it and I found its steampunk mutants setting cool. Unfortunately I forgot that its first chapter’s villain is a transphobic stereotype, so I haven’t continued it for the past few days. Although I’ll probably push through anyways cuz the vibes are so good.

For theory I’m taking a bit of a break now that my exam season is done before I restart reading theory again.

Machete order is evidence that extreme plot twists-brain is counterproductive to actually enjoying art.

In my experience a lot of the “haha genocide” types just don’t play the game super often, which makes sense since genocidal empires are by far the least interesting playstyle.

🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀 RIP BOZO 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀

That’s great! I hope that you feel comfortable to be your authentic self soon.

I mean, reread the definition. Oddity specifically states that animals are the thing to avoid cruelty towards. Bacteria are not animals, therefore they don’t matter under this definition.

There are some microscopic animals that exist, but they still don’t really contradict the definition because of the “as far as is possible and practicable” clause. You can’t really stop your immune system from working so it’s a moot point. Hand sanitizer doesn’t matter since tmk the actual microscopic animals like tardigrades or roundworms aren’t really affected by it.

Blade of Arcana, an untranslated japanese game with a tarot card gimmick. From my understanding it’s a mostly standard d20 only game but I’m really curious how they managed to incorporate the cards into its gameplay. Unfortunately I don’t speak Japanese so I can’t read it.

TFU

Nah you don’t get it, that extra 3mm is actually the source of the cost since it’s made out of solid gold, and obviously if it costs more it must be better. So it’s actually very normal for an artillery round to cost that much.

Please ignore the fact that gold wouldn’t even be close to that price because it ruins my joke.

They’re a man or woman now

This is why, this statement means that you don’t view trans people who haven’t “finished transitioning” as their actual gender. This is a transphobic and pretty reductive understanding of how transition works (albeit one that some trans people hold themselves, usually transmeds). I won’t write an entire essay on why but here’s just a small bit to chew on: consider that a “finished transition” is very different from person to person and some people might never consider it finished. Some people only want to socially transition, others have to medicate for their entire lives, both could consider reaching their ideal state “finished” or they could consider it a continual work in progress.

Also,

This isn’t defense, this behavior actively makes things worse for trans people.

The idea that pointing out someone’s transphobia will somehow support the transphobes is laughable. If being called out is seriously enough to make someone stop supporting trans people then their support was conditional and only surface-level.

Staying civil, as you suggest, is what actually helps conservatives since it allows their views to go unchallenged when their views are bad and should be challenged. Part of this includes challenging people who may think they are supportive but harbour transphobic beliefs that they haven’t analysed fully. And these wrong beliefs can have actual harm. As a simple example, there are a lot of “allies” who say that trans people are their gender but not their sex, which is a belief that can harm trans people when brought into a medical context where our bodies are (if on HRT) closer to those of our actual gender than to our AGAB.

Genuinely, some of the most painful things I’ve ever read were texts written by small evangelical communities about their history and folk heroes who were doing missionary work. The way they write about the subject is just extremely uncomfortable to read. Especially when they complain about the way other christians treat them and then do the same shit to others.

Like, one was about a man who was basically disowned by his family for being in a different denomination from them. But then he fought in WW2, found others like him and built a community that came back home with him to establish their churches. Afterwards, he went to Brazil and “heroically” tried to convert people there and fight against the Catholic majority who didn’t want him there. And the text tries to imply a parallel between the isolation from being disowned, the war, and finding community to the work of a missionary. Like, he’s so isolated here but he’s fighting back against the Catholic oppression to found a new community type stuff.* Meanwhile, the book is mentioning how faithful his wife and kids were for being there to support him while he does this, and I, being someone who moved around a lot as a kid, just feel bad for them.

*(This may be slightly off but it’s how I remember it. It’s been a year since I speed-read it so some parts are a bit hazy and my entry in my reading diary for it was just a simple “fuck missionaries.” It’s safe to say I won’t be rereading it anytime soon)