Jon detailing his commitment to being the best consumer is a highlight.

I'm kind of hoping the Joycon grip or playing wii style will be satisfactory and negate the need for pro controller. Then maybe down the road there will be a joycon L with a normal d-pad.

I plan to get a Pro Controller probably before I even get the console itself (even with my employee discount I'm paying $63 for it.)

Jon,
If you look closely at the listings on Amazon, the $20 screen protector claims to be "scratch proof" and the $10 one doesn't.

I'm glad 7th Dragon III Code: VFD got some love (although I didn't expect it to be anyone's number one, including Guillaume!). It kinda came out of nowhere and ended up being on my favorite games of 2016 as well. I would also have it somewhere in my top three games of the year, in what I consider to be a stellar year of gaming on Nintendo platforms (...well, on one of Nintendo's platforms, at least).

I knew Jon's list would be out there, but I'm surprised he avoided the low-hanging fruit of Miitomo. Frankly, I'm disappointed.

I don't know what exactly you heard about the ending of Dragon Quest VII, Guillaume, but I thought it was one of the best parts of the game. The story takes some "interesting" turns, there's no insane "hey, you got to the end of a JRPG" difficulty spike, and it actually felt like the best paced part of the game to me. If you're enjoying Dragon Quest VII so far, I think you'll like the ending too.

Oh, that's encouraging, Oedo!


My twitter feed wasn't as encouraging, especially a friend of mine who kept raging against the game and especially the final boss, which he had trouble beating. Said it was one of the worst games he played that year.


Then again, he said the same of 7th Dragon. "Too easy".


I'm currently exploring the Aeolus Vale in the present, in DQ7. Still enjoyable. But I kinda wish the ending were in sight, and yet I know I'm about maybe halfway through the game. I'll probably take a break before I burn out.

I actually took a chance on 7th dragon III Code: VFD at this podcast's suggestion, and came out of it feeling very bitter and sour. I think I wrote a big piece on it in the thread about games I've beaten.

essentially, I feel like once you hit a tipping point, the battle system loses a lot of it's gimmicky fun. I felt that this game desperately needed a proper world map with proper safe havens that weren't confined to NODENS alone, and that it's attempts to do Trope-y JRPG stuff came off as something that made me disdain the game rather than think it was an endearing satire.

The place where this game falls apart is chapter 6. I feel like that's the point where I literally stopped giving a single shit about... anything, really. the nihilistic tonal shift actually managed to turn me off, and I was forcing myself to play on by the end, worse than even with Bravely Default.

That being said, I want to really dig into the fan translation of the original DS game when I get a PC that isn't from the era the DS Phat was a cutting edge piece of hardware. that game seems to have a lot of what I felt NODENS was missing and I felt this game needed... like The dragonsbane on the overworld map actually doing something or there... y'know, actually being an overworld map with multiple towns where you're not just centralized to this mostly static place... that it might have an actual sense of adventure.

There being just the one town is one of the refreshing things I liked about it, actually. I don't care much for getting to a new town and having to find and talk to every NPC before moving on. I mean, I do it, but I don't particularly care for it.


I loved having a one stop shop for all the gear in the game, one stop for all the quests. Loved the streamlining, and thought they could have pushed it even further.


It's a dungeon-crawler for sure, even if it looks like a traditional DQ-inspired RPG.


Stay away from Etrian Odyssey.

Huh, that's strange. I found the final boss battle in Dragon Quest VII to be very easy; I defeated it on my first try without a single party member going down at any point. I did save all my stat-boosting seeds to use right before the fight so I'd have better idea of where my party member's weaknesses were, and I did save most (if not all) of the best healing items I found throughout the game for this battle, but it felt like a relatively straightforward battle in general. As long as your party is set up to buff and debuff very quickly, it shouldn't be difficult at all.

Aeolus Vale definitely felt like it was past the halfway point to me, but you do still have a lot of (good) game ahead of you. Taking a break at some point is probably a good idea, yeah.