If even one of you gets a post removed during one of these bit struggle sessions you failed the bit and should feel immense shame. Doing a bit successfully is Praxis.

Find things to struggle about that doesn’t get out of hand. It’s important to let off some steam now and again but do it in a way that doesn’t harm your fellow comrades or add work to the mod team.

I’ll start: Some beans are better than other beans. Like kidney beans are bad nasty icky beans but black beans are actually amazing.

  • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    We do this all the time. Video games are a big one. For example, some absolute freaks on this site defend Dark Souls 2 and Final Fantasy X-2 cringe

      • CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I remember buying X-2 used back in the day and it would always crash after the opening FMV :(

        Traded it back for Viewtiful Joe, a game which worked great for about a week before breaking completely.

        Never bought a used game again after that.

      • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I’ve tried 3 times and never managed to get more than a couple hours into it. If Dark Souls 2 is like a fan-game that misses the point of the original, FFX-2 is like one of those bizarre total conversion mods that misses not only the point but also fundamentally fucks up the gameplay loop and is written by a 16 year old with a really sick fanfiction idea

        • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          FFX-2 is like one of those bizarre total conversion mods that misses not only the point but also fundamentally fucks up the gameplay loop and is written by a 16 year old with a really sick fanfiction idea

          yes-chad

          To me X and X-2 are a pair. The former is one of my favorite games, but you are on rails the whole time. At least with X-2 goofing off in the world is the point. Mechanically X-2’s Job system delivers on the flexibility that X’s sphere grid only promised. Existentially it was a fun way to explore After The End of a favorite game, or what does the protagonist do after they saved the world.

          I also see part of X-2's "weirdness" as a coping mechanism for Yuna's loss in the first game, and the rest of everybody trying their best to distract or support her as she works through that.

          I also deliberately ignore the “secret” ending in X-2 because that’s like Reviving Aerith levels of heresy.

    • CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Final Fantasy X-2

      Final Fantasy X-2 is unironically one of the best FF titles in terms of gameplay. The combat is fast and frenetic, there are tons of strategies to find within the job system, you can explore the world in any order from the get-go and 50% of the game’s content is side content that rewards exploring the game’s locations and talking to all the NPCs, which means that a lot of the interesting bits of the story get told to you incidentally as you explore. Every other FF game made you play through 80% if the story before they gave you an airship, but X-2 cuts out the BS and gets straight to the good part.

      The “Charlie’s Angels” stuff was pretty cringe tho I’ll give you that.

      • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I don’t think the beautiful slow-paced story full of mystery and wonder and discovery is “BS” that needed to be cut out, so I guess there’s the core of the disagreement

      • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        It’s like a fangame made by people who thought the point of dark souls was to be really unfair and kill you a lot

        It’s amateurish and haphazardly designed, and the story/lore has nothing to do with the quite broad and unexplored world set up in the lore of Dark Souls

        It fails as a sequel narratively and in gameplay, and it fails as an independent game gameplay-wise too, especially after the following couple years when the soulslike market was flooded with a thousand better entries

        • Orannis62 [ze/hir]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          The story has everything to do with Dark Souls 1, they just chose an unexpected aspect to explore. Honestly that’s my favorite part of it, and I think it’s telling that DS3, a game slavishly devoted to DS1 fan service, still rests its basic premise on a logical extension of the idea of endless cycles established by DS2

          • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            The idea of the world of Dark Souls being locked in endless cycles was not established in Dark Souls 2, that was a concept strongly favored in the community of Dark Souls lore nerds long before Dark Souls 2 was ever conceived

                  • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    8 months ago

                    Idk what you want me to say to someone who hones in on “x has nothing to do with y” and goes all in on " actually actually I think you’ll find that it does technically have something to do with it, I award you ten pinnochios smuglord "

                    Like wtf do you want me to do, pretend the other person wasn’t being an asshole? You want a respectful dialogue then don’t start that reddit shit lol

        • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.netOP
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          8 months ago

          Yeah but it’s different enough from the other Souls games that it feels unique and special. It’s like the most well polished fan overhaul ever. I’ve played pretty much all the mods and fan overhauls of all the souls games and there’s just something about Dark Souls 2 that feels special.

          I mean it’s still my least favorite entry in the series but. I dunno. Maybe it’s the nostalgia though, I remember when it came out I had a friend come over for the weekend and brought his playstation and his TV and we did nothing but co-op most of the game together that weekend. That nostalgia definitely factors into my rosy view of it.

          • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            It does have some good co-op, I’ll give it that. I’ve got a friend who loves the game, and I’ve played hundreds and hundreds of hours of it by now so I know its quirks and flaws and how to get the most out of it, so I still have fun when I play it with him. But I also mercilessly tease him for thinking it’s good

    • Kras Mazov
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      8 months ago

      Dark Souls 2 is a great fucking game, and that’s precisely why it is the worse in the series.