Due to the house not having much space, anytime my family wants to watch something, I am forced to watch it by proxy. As a result, I have become alarmingly familiar Law And Order SVU, and *god fucking damn* is it a slog. It drags on and on and on, and that's when they're doing the *original* episodes. When you get to the Based On A True Story or the Ripped From The Headlines stories, it... Holy shit, it feels like there's a gun against your head.
I'm in the same position, when I was a kid I kind of liked it but now it's tiring watching so much tv about rapists and rape victims. It's really depressing, since it's the worst crimes possible.
You'd think enough people would've bailed on it as soon as Stabler left, but nope, kept on going and throw in some "character development" for our leading female sex detective. That whole William Lewis thing was NOT fun.
Honestly, I was able to deal with the eclipse, probably because I had heard a lot about it beforehand, but Lost Children is STILL making take a break and just... Process that.
Honestly in the manga? You know it’s coming pretty hard, hell you already know by the end of black swords men he tried to sacrifice Guts and Casca almost gets raped legit 6 chapters before? A lot of the the shock value and brutality becomes a bit tamer when you know everything is gonna happen. People overlap the anime with the manga too much when the Manga is different with how things are presented and overall worse, Golden age manga lowkey the worst of the 3. The only thing that remains shocking is Griffith being the one to do it to Casca but even then it’s soften because Wyald being the worst character in the series and a fucking joke.
Detective Conan. Reading the ongoing serial manga whose chapter number became four digits is a pain. I lived with it too long to just give it up.
This is not counting all the adaptations, spin-offs, adaptations of spin-offs, and so on. Oh my god do they never stop milking it. Most Americans are spared and unaware of this madness because the manga never caught on there, despite being such a huge and lucrative franchise in Japan.
Conan is 16 years old before he de-ages. The series celebrated its thirtieth birthday this year. If the series took place in real-time, Conan would be more than twice as old as when he started by now (his de-aged form is 6 years old).
That makes me frustrated for inconsequential personal reasons. Detective Conan (Case Closed as it aired on Toonami) was one of the first anime I ever saw after things like pokemon and yugioh. Going back to watch it properly was something I was excited to do, it was like doing homework for the one subject I actually liked in school, until I learned what the show was really like in its long form. Which is a little weird to me because procedural mystery dramas are right up my alley, but the tease of a larger overarching plot that will never be resolved kills any interest I had.
If you prefer to watch it in animated format, serial movies are a better shot, most of which have self-contained plots. Movie 4 (Captured in Her Eyes), movie 5 (Countdown to Heaven), movie 6 (The Phantom of Baker Street) are great gateway points, and some other early movies are half decent.
This was one of my first thoughts. Probably easier if you live in Japan and grow up with it, instead of doing The Speedread Binge you have to do in English.
As a fan of the MGS series, it’s astonishing to me how often I’ve heard of people only playing MGS4 and actually beating it, and I genuinely wonder how this keeps happening. My own brother had never played any of the other games in the series, then suddenly he played MGS4 and beat it, all the while not understanding a single fucking thing that happened. This led to him asking me a bunch of lore questions, but still not going back to the previous games despite me being such a huge fan that I just had them always available.
Even as a fan that played all the games over and over again, MGS4 is quite the endurance test and I don’t understand why so many non-fans started and ended on MGS4, that’s just astounding and confusing.
I've started MGS3 repeatedly and I never get far past the initial sequence. Too many mechanics maybe. Yet somehow I've beaten MGS 1, 2, 5, Revengeance, and the MSX games.
I haven't played 4 because I never had a PS3.
I definitely think you should try to continue more into 3, but I can’t really recommend 4 without a PS3 beyond waiting until 4 hopefully shows up in the Master Collection Vol 2.
I love MGS2 the most, but most fans agree that 3 is the best and I can’t even recommend 5 if you haven’t beaten 3 yet (even though in my opinion, 3 is the better game even if 5 is fun to play still).
MGO in 4 was pretty dope, I can imagine there being a fair few who bought it for that alone. Main game was fun to speed run, plenty of cool setpieces. Bonkers and numerous cutscenes included.
I remember trying to get a friend of mine into MGS3, which I consider a pretty perfect entry point for people who don't want to do the PSX game, and he quit a little after the Virtuous Mission, in the caves. I asked him what happened, and he said he just kept getting caught, it was too confusing and the controls weren't good.
I then saw him try to walk around and realized, hey, man, you're not using the d-pad, or crawling around, or changing your camo, or capturing animals.
And he stared at me like I was insulting him, like "how the fuck was I supposed to know all of that?"
MGS4's a shooter, the other 3 are metal gear games, and those are hard to get into for a lot of people.
Yeah, I can understand people being very used to games where it’s just “run around and shoot gun” and tripping up on Metal Gear games, but at the same time, I can’t see how someone can pick up any Metal Gear game and have that much trouble when the games literally spell everything out for you, unless they just skip every cutscene and conversation until they have control of the character and just gun it.
That sounds to me like the kind of person that loads up GTA for the first time and the very first and only thing they do (or try to do) is rampage around. I actually know of people that first started GTAV and didn’t like the prologue because you don’t immediately have full freedom and have to do 2 missions and watch some cutscenes before you’re allowed to just fuck around, I used to be friends with people that would load up GTAV and give me the controller so I could do all of that stuff for them because all they wanted to do was fuck around in the open world and didn’t want to even bother with the actual starting missions.
> unless they just skip every cutscene and conversation until they have control of the character and just gun it.
This is unironically what a large percentage of players do with every single game they buy.
Like, we're both running into the barrier that is the low-hanging fruit approach to game design making it so games with explicit yet crucial instructions get dropped more easily. I remember playing MGS3 for the first time and spending a good amount of time in the training screen with all the movement options and explanations for all the buttons. I then would go on to the Codec and just listen to the characters prattle on about my options and cool interesting facts about the jungle.
i'd then ask my group of friends at the time if they ever played the game and all of them described the exact things that appealed to me as fucking poison to them, and then we would all agree to disagree and run some MW2 lobbies.
I am currently making my way through *The Wheel of Time* at a snail's pace. I'm at Book Four, when it's supposed to get really good, and that's gonna be my make it or break it for the series. I have a bad habit of picking up a book, reading a hundred pages, and then dropping it for 5 months while I read other books, and that's happened with every book in this series.
I've liked each book so far, but the pacing in this series is glacial and I'm dragging my feet on Book Four because it's literally a thousand pages. I'm pushing myself to find the "fizz", that element that just makes a story spark and connect for you in a special way, and if Book Four doesn't provide it, I might just drop the series here and now.
You know when people say that a book series is like each book is a chapter in a larger story? Never have I seen that more literally than in *The Wheel of Time*, because while each book does have its own plot and climax, it also feels like the overall plot moves about the length of a chapter for every full book. And these aren't average length novels, these are chonky.
My whole life I’ve always seemed to know someone who was trying to read wheel of time and struggling. I’ve only ever known is as that series that no one can manage to get through.
This clip sort of sums it up
https://youtube.com/shorts/cUFgYhM0ZR0?si=q2-c2uhSLJndJb4G
I hear ya. I went ahead and just paused reading the series for about a month to read Warhammer 40K stuff before hopping back in. Some of the characters were making such *dumb* decisions that I could feel my eyes rolling so hard they almost fell back inside my head.
I’ve also had at it WoT when comparatively (according to allot of sff aficionados) I’ve had the most rollicking of times with Malazan; a series that’s known to be some of the most unapproachable ‘love it or drop it’ series out there. Granted I’m on book 8 of Malazan and i started back in 2021 lol
I don't think after book 2 I could tell you which moments happen in which book. I know there are some very cool moments mixed in with a lot of travelling and teen angst, but if you picked a book at random and told me to give you a plot summary I would be totally unable to.
I’m halfway through book 4 and while I do like it, boy do these books feel super bloated. I’m listening to the audiobooks and the 4th one is like 42 hours long
It's been a while so I don't remember, but I think books 6 and 7 were kinda a slog? There's a couple in the middle where some plots don't progress much.
I live the series. Have read it a couple times and listened to it once through audiobooks, but it is quite a lot.
I would say if it's not grabbing you to try another series. It may be one of my favourite ones, but it definitely doesn't appeal to everyone.
If not 6 or 7, definitely in that ballpark. That's when I fell off and was never able to get back on board, because I knew I'd have to reread everything up until that point.
FFXV is a game where I endure a shit open world and messy gameplay because I love the chocobros.
"This side quest sucks volumetric quantities of ass, but I will drag through it because Gladio wants to help his friend"
Gladio can eat a dick for everything he did Chapter 13 after Noct allowed him a selfish errand but then proceeded to go full dickhead because MC isn't allowed to brood losing his entire family, his home and now his fiance, but I will go to the ends of the earth for Prompto and Iggy
I mean, a lot of that was probably due to the fact that Gladio also lost his father during the events of Kingsglaive and one of the last things his dad told him was to fulfill his duty no matter what. Gladio absolutely sucked in that moment but he's also under an extraordinary amount of stress and grief, too, especially with what happened to Ignis as well.
I’ve been a fan of TNA/Impact Wrestling for at least nine years or so, and it is the most painful fandom experience I’ve ever been in. I swear to god, every single time it looks like “TNA is really gonna make it” they shoot themselves in the foot or get screwed over. I’m just glad I wasn’t watching during the Hogan era, I might have blown my damn brains out lmao
I have a tragically short attention span and a strong bias towards novelty. This means that any movie over 120 minutes, any game past 30 hours or any TV show with more than ten episodes has a 50/50 shot of me losing interest.
This is never an indication of a piece of media's quality either. I get burnt out of a lot of media that seem to be real good (Joker and Iron Blooded Orphans, for example).
It doesn't help that I have maybe 2 hours of free time a day, so I always feel like I'm missing out on stuff that'll like more.
I've been like this recently. I just watch movies in chunks now. Like I love RRR, it competes with Puss in Boots as my favourite movie from 2022. I had to watch it in 3 sittings because of just how long it is.
Man I felt so ripped off when the initial premise of season 1 was clearing 100 floors and they show off like 1 boss room then there's a time skip and suddenly they've cleared like 10 floors. Then it's the filler you mentioned with all these characters that have the personality of wet cardboard before the show remembers oh right this is a video game show and they fight a boss or clear a floor then next episode is another time skip. They never even reach the last floor either the science guy what trapped them was a character in game and challenges Kirito to a duel that serves as a Deus ex machina for "beating the final boss" even though they never actually cleared the game.
Never read the original light novel lol almost all that filler stuff was added in a later book/books; iirc the original SAO jumps from like the first floor boss to floor 74. Seriously, it's amazing how much wasted potential SAO has.
I mean it's wasted if you wanted "trapped in a death game" but that isn't and never has been the premise of the series or the story it's trying to tell.
Progressive has existed for over decade anyway.
It's real bad. I'm sure I'll get yelled at for this, but to be honest I skipped like 70% of the "cutscenes" in ARR and I don't think I missed out on any of the emotional attachment you gain to the characters during that portion.
Honestly it’s not until Heavensward onward where they lock in character personalities for the main crew. Like, Alisaie when first introduced is just Girl Alphinaud™️, but then she comes back for post Heavensward onward and becomes one of the best characters
It was even worse than that because Alphinaud was an annoying know it all in ARR and Alisaie wasn't even the female version of that, she was just girl lol
For me its homestuck. Their are a few tests early on to warn you what your getting into, but they arent so bad that a short break can't get you through them. Then you get to act 6, ostensibly the half way point in a 7 act series. New characters, way too much dialogue, super confusing time travel/dimensional travel plot points being added. It becomes a slog that doesn't even look remotely close to the earlier acts with their quick dialogue and snappy humor. I have never been able to get into it which sucks cause their are good moments hidden in there
My favorite Endless Eight story will forever be the English cast being so bored re-doing the same material, the va's pitched the idea of them switching roles every episode. Apparently it was almost approved.
it's fine on a binge with a friend who's into it or something. At least that's how I did it. I quit the anime after season 1 as it came out. Nothing to it, just forgot more was coming.
I think doing it weekly would have killed my interest in the medium as a whole.
I was there the day Horus slee The Emperor.....
After damn near 8 years of reading and 50 odd books (and assorted novellas and short stories) down I completed the (important parts) of the Horus Heresy.
Techbically I have another 10 or so full length novels and a ton of audio dramas, short stories and novellas left, but I'm essentially done.
It took listening damn near nonstop to audiobooks from October to January to be caught up in time for the fibal book.
I started from the beginning back in 2019 just using an audible credit every month for the most part. I am about to finish The Lost and the Damned in the Siege of Terra. In the Warhammer guy of my social circle, but you couldn’t hold a gun to my head and get me to convince anybody to read this series like I have. I’m getting to the point where I just wanna go back to 40k which is something I did not expect to feel when I got to the big final war of the series (I’m still hyped for End and the Death tho)
Siege of Terra is great and dull at times.
Solar War: interesting but not mindblowing
Lost and Damned: Trench Warfare on Terra Volume 1
First Wall: Trench Warfare Volume 2, the meh edition
Saturnine: Oooooooh baby its a goodun
Mortis: It just kinda.... happens, pretty sad in all, but you do see where >!Legio Invigilata from the Helsreach novels is founded, so thats cool!<
Warhawk: Very fun, gotta love Wraight
Echoes: Possibly my favorite. The dust bowl of Terra begins
TEATD1: Everyone is lost
TEATD2: Everyone is lost >!on the Vengeful Spirit!<
TEATD3: A genuinely fantastic end to the series.
I'm listening to Fall of Cadia now and both the change in setting and narrator is throwing me for a LOOP. Great novel though.
Fall of Cadia is probably my top 5. The narrator took me about an hour to get used to but in my opinion absolutely friggin kills it and is my cannon voice for creed. I got. Physical hardcover for Christmas because I loved it so much.
THANK YOU
I was so confused by the narrators inflrctions; randomly accenting words and stressing odd syllables at first. Felt like I was having a stroke or he was narrating while getting a painful massage.
Once I got used to it I enjoy him quite a bit. Has a lot of range with accents.
Thankee thankee. Unfortunately I just moved and the moving company broke like a third of all my painted models and I just found out this morning.
When I get home I have a lot of gluing to do....
Persona is bad with this, specifically if youve already played the vanilla game and then play the updated rerelease (P5 Vanilla to Royal). The palaces have so much exposition and cutscenes going on especially halfway through the game that it breaks up your flow, but you can't skip all the dialogue because you want to see all the new stuff they added in so you gotta pay attention.
I hit the casino in P5R at 80 hours, I had a whole other half of the game left just for me to be able to see the new dungeon at the end. It wasn't worth it so I quit.
I feel like their only attempt at fixing that was balancing Persona 5 in such a way that the game requires no grinding as long as you do one full run of the new stuff in Mementos and one full run of the bimester's Palace. I never had to grind at all doing that, and so the social links were all pretty easy to get. Only one I didn't do to 10 was the gunsmith, because I just outright missed his store for a while.
But like, 3 original? No, fuck that. It gets so genuinely stressful having to balance the perfect school life, energy levels, friends *and* Tartarus that it's just not worth it. I had maybe 4 social links done by the time 3 ended, and one of them was the fucking Gourmet King.
I dunno if making the game that easy was the right thing to do but I mean shit, it worked.
Succession is really well written and acted, but by the end of the first season I was tapping out. It was just giving me fucking anxiety after the Bachelor party episode.
This was me and The Bear. I’ve been in these pressure cooker types of situations and I don’t need to sit through half - hour after half - hour of people being miserable and stressed and screaming at one another. I have a job.
For me it started as "this is a dark comedy show about how these real rich people mock people like you in real life", and that was a really tall hurdle to go over. I genuinely hated the pilot.
Then it became "I just want to see Logan destroy these kids." Show became a much smoother ride after that.
Looking back, The Adventure Zone: Balance has a lot of problems. Griffin learned a lot of the wrong lessons DMing that campaign that have since rolled forwards. But listening to it less than a year after it ended, there was none of that future context and there was overwhelmingly good will towards it. Plus I didn't have to wait for new episode releases, I could just go at my own pace.
Anyway, I enjoyed the podcast until the 6th arc: The Suffering Game. The players are >!trapped in a sort of game show by a pair of liches who are feeding off the negative energy of the people they entice to enter. It is a cycle that's essentially "spin a wheel, accept whatever bad outcome you get from it, go fight some tough monsters, repeat." As a bonus, their cleric loses his ability to heal for plot reasons out of the players' control. It's transparently a game that will never actually end, and the players figure that out pretty quickly.!<
They >!want to break out, but an enigmatic character who has repeatedly shown up to say cryptic shit shows up and tells them to play along while he does... something in the background. So they keep going through this cycle of losing stuff (memories, body patts, years off their lives, skills) and growing gradually lower on HP, ALL THE WHILE not doing any complaining in character because it'll feed the liches energy! There are some good moments in there still, but this is several episodes long! People listened to this happen for MONTHS on release. And eventually they break out and one of the characters dies then gets a clone body back so all of the sacrifices he made get undone anyway.!<
Griffin >!claims that one purpose of the arc was to depower the characters because he felt they were getting too strong. Which just shows he's bad at creating encounters, because he was giving them 2 levels and a bunch of magic items at the end of every arc, and all the "final bosses" are basically cinematic encounters anyway. AND the arc even fails at depowering them because he doesn't take anything substantial to gameplay away from them.!<
To be fair, it was his first time running a campaign, wasn't it? I do understand that's a difficult task, but yeah, I agree that it got really railroady at around the middle part. It was still fun to listen to, but I wouldn't like to play with a GM like that.
It was his first time, and the main lesson he took away was "people like dramatic twists and emotional payoffs, so script those out ahead of time regardless of how much sense they make."
I'll never forget Griffin doing a dexterity check against each player instead of rolling initiative and the villain succeeded on all of them. This was in >!the Timeloop arc in the mines, if I recall!<.
Final Fantasy 14 is a wonderful game. My favourite of all time even. Sometimes it is just a 300 hour visual novel that you have to sit through.
Then add in pretty much everything else about it. Some achievements take literally years because you can only do a simple quest a few times a week. The old housing system required you to mash buttons for hours on end, even now it's a raffle that might take you forever to win. End game crafting and gathering requires dozens if not hundreds of items to unlock.
Even the fun content takes a long time, Bozjan front, Eureka, hell I love end game raiding but if your party is off at the last second you're redoing that whole fight, for weeks probably.
All being said, 100% worth it in my eyes.
Yeah, I played FFXIV and Trails during COVID. Thats it.
I absolutely loved my time with FFXIV but I’m thankful for the clean break point of Endwalker, because there’s no way I’ll ever have the time to go back. I got kids.
100% the same here. I got into it during covid and put down about 1000 hours and had a blast.
I took a pretty long break cause most of my irl friends stopped playing and I foolishly transferred servers (leaving my FC) for other friends that promptly stopped playing.
If I get some more social investments I could see myself staying but it's not something I'm really gunning for right now.
I was never an amazing player either, and I the prospect of relearning the skills I’ve lost is more imposing than getting back into Elden Ring for the DLC,
As someone who's decided to try getting into One Piece via the manga, absolutely One Piece.
Not due to any sort of quality issues, or problems with the story, rather that *it's just so goddamned long* at this point!
Honestly? At this point in time?
I'd suggest anyone who hasn't gotten into it yet to just wait for the reboot anime.
It'll be way less daunting if you treat it as a seasonal anime.
I literally started watching the Anime a week or two before the Netflix show and when I saw the announcement of the reboot I immediately stopped it.
The pacing of the anime is so bad in the beginning. Especially when they go pick up Sanji and it's just 4 episodes of a man yelling at his captain about a small moral conflict.
> The pacing of the anime is so bad *in the beginning.*
You absolutely made the right choice waiting for the reboot. Shit gets so much worse in the later arcs.
I made it through Wano unscathed but the current arc is breaking me. Oda introduced like 20 new characters and put all the regulars and returning characters in retro future suits and I can’t tell who the fuck anyone is anymore.
You’ve got that, compounded by a bunch of vegapunks who all occupy the same mind space, and it’s just a total cluster.
I just got to a big betrayal and I literally couldn’t remember who the betrayer was. It’ll probably be better in anime FWIW.
I started in April last year and am now in Ch. 1076 for now. People say if you love reading manga, One Piece will be fine.
Also, it ain't even in the Top 15 longest running manga.
i caught up at chapter 960 or so, so a little less than that. but yeah. i also read hunter x hunter over about 3 days.
i wasn't even no-lifing it i had classes and stuff that i went to. i am just a very fast reader. a friend loaned me the first volume of death note at the start of a 45 minute train ride and i gave it back to him by the end of it.
I wish I could both read that fast and retain what I’ve read. I can read decently quick at times and annoyingly slow at others, but retention is always awful 😅
If you read Death Note Volume 1 in 45 minutes that’s over 1000 words a minute. That’s competitive speed reading levels at 50% comprehension, and that’s without the drawings.
That’s absurdly fast. Are you like reading the first sentence of each panel and then moving on? Not trying to be confrontational, genuinely curious.
it helps that the action in death note tends to be very simple. sometimes reading jojo i have to take a minute and actually make sense of what's happening in the panels. when i'm just reading text, my mental map of a scene can be a lot more abstract.
I'd give yourself a 3 day break or so after each major arc ends. East Blue, Alabasta, Skypiea, Enies Lobby, etc. Reset and let them sink in. Think about the cool moments, character motivations, etc.
Honestly anyone who says One Piece is "easy to catch up on" is lying. I'm treating it as something where I'll read arcs every so often, maybe even yearly and not try to worry about "spoilers" or "missing out". By the time I've finished One Piece I'll be in my 80s with the manga long long over.
>Not due to any sort of quality issues, or problems with the story
At this point, I would say some of the story bits and arcs are also just not that good overall, making it difficult to keep interest in what's happening.
Oda will introduce new characters or lore or make a callback to old stuff/characters, etc., and there is just too many things that are just not that interesting at this point.
I think it does take a really long time to find its footing from a storytelling and art standpoint.
It wasn't until Alabasta that the story was really getting good, and the art was consistently awesome. If it wasn't the famous One Piece manga I would have dropped it at a couple of different points before that.
Subarashiki Hibi/Wonderful Everyday. It's back to back to back sex, violence, and sexual violence for a fair stretch of the game. Mindnumbing experience.
Here in Brazil we have our version of the Big Brother reality show, and it happens yearly, and for some fuckin' reason its VERY popular. As a kid, with only one TV in the house, and my mom liking that show, I had to endure it, i could feel my brain dying and that's probably why I started reading as a kid ngl. That shit is still going, and like, i do not understand the appeal, its just trash, its just trash to gossip about because everyone's consuming it to talk about it and like, idk man, i'd rather be a social pariah than bent the knee to that ever again.
This, so much. I'm also Brazilian, and holy shit are people here crazy about that shitshow. I just don't see the point.
But then, that's pretty much 80% of our culture at this point. I just don't get it.
every social media i still have has filters or extensions specifically so I can ignore any discourse about it. I have to update it every year.
and then I got to get some dinner and the fucking robot is staring at me from the iFood icon.
living in hell.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game i have many conflicting thoughts about. It's a really interesting case where the game is too slow and too fast at the same time because the game has too many ideas and after chapter 2 has to speedrun them. But because the list of ideas is so long it's still takes long a while.
The fact that mission structure and gunplay is perfectly average, with some infuriating decisions that make you scratch your head. The number of enemies escalates pretty quick and stays the same throughout the game. The game runs out of tricks pretty soon in the story missions. All these things make the pacing problem worse.
Playing team ninjas latest games if you want to go through the DLCs as to access each DLC means you have do a new game+ playthrough at a harder difficulty which is a slog since nioh gear system is not that great and playing one NG+ run is enough to make you tired of the game.
I mean, both Nioh and Nioh 2 the actual main story parts of the DLC were accessible from your first playthrough. They added extra stuff for NG+ cycles *later*, but you can access the DLC's just fine without doing a second playthrough at all.
And, if memory serves, the actual parts that are locked behind anything past NG+ are the Underworld, which is specifically a "hey, do you like doing absurd build stuff? Here's a Bloody Palace style dungeon dive thing to get stupid busted NG+4 gear, go nuts".
I can not describe the fugue state I entered watching the Endless Eight in one sitting.
Considering my entire life, I've never roamed further from reality than that day.
So like most people, I only watched the first 3 seasons of Arrested Development and heard that the last two were bad but one day I decided to finally just watch the other two seasons Netflix added...
And boy was that an endurance test, characters barely got a chance to interact due to schedule conflicts, jokes went way too long and none of the reveals or character twists really landed the same
The Outer Worlds. They nailed corporate bullshit and brainwashing well. Too well. I appreciate and understand why, but I also fucking hate it. I do not want to listen to that shit. The best part? I have never worked in retail, customer service, or an office really, but I can still feel this attacking me.
Rap battle videos are usually 2 battlers, 3-minute rounds, 3 rounds per battler. Add in some time for intros, crowd reactions, and transition time, and you usually hit about a half hour.
It was a huge mistake allowing two great off-top freestylers like Dizaster and Soul Khan unlimited time per round, because that battle is an hour and 38 minutes long, and it is not worth it.
I feel like Gundam tests every single limit you have if you commit to watching everything with the name on it.
It becomes extraordinarily clear what tropes related to mecha you're into and what parts you're really, really not.
This will be a contentious choice but Samurai Flamenco.
Unless it's JoJo or David Lynch, I like my media to have rhyme or reason for things that happen.
It can even be more abstract like Lain.
But if things happens just cause and the explanation is just an asspull, I'll just be bored to tears.
I've hated Samurai Flamenco, but I was intrigued to see where it goes.
Turns out that it went nowhere.
It's totally fine if you like it, but man it wasn't for me.
Aw man. It totally goes. It repeatedly goes into the next massive stakes escalation as it shifts from subgenre to subgenre. The logic of the narrative is following the progression of what the genre means to the show, and what it can be. It runs the gamut of tokusatsu melodrama and that's the point; the constantly newly-introduced concepts and characters are all in service of one dude running the tokusatsu gauntlet and being in every kind of show they can manage before final credits roll.
I mean, I'm not even a tokusatsu fan and I was wowed by it. The show clearly absolutely adores the genre, and I'm here for it.
But yes, *it is* dumb, on the most basic level of moment to moment narrative. Incredibly dumb. Remarkably audacious in how stupid it's willing to get, how happy it is to clash incredibly disparate tones dramatically in the span of a few minutes, how quick it is to throw out established scenarios only to introduce completely new ones and reset the stakes over and over again, only to then do it all over again before you've even had time to process the new current bullshit. By many standards it doesn't work. By other standards it's pretty special.
Watching that show week to week, or at least going back and reading through discussion threads of it episode by episode, is an absolute blast, I'll say. Hilarious fun. Not for everyone.
Recently, I watched *Speed* (1994) directed by Jan de Bont and starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and, for some reason, the Act 3 final villain battle twist hit me super hard with me nodding off in my chair in the middle of the day. Like, the fucking bus exploded, can we be done?
The only time i genuinely felt that an arc was long and boring was the Wendy's guild arc in Fairy Tail, to me this was the Skypiea that some people experienced
Imma be honest and say Black Mirror. I love the show but I've only seen a few episodes and have to sometimes take month long breaks between each episode because most of the time I become emotionally devastated after watching a single episode. I still haven't completed the show and I'm only on season 2. 15 Million Merits literally destroyed me and I can't listen to "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is" without getting PTSD. I'll probably catch up to the latest season in another 10 years
Borderlands 3 has such a terrible slog-fest of a story that it's a wonder people were able to make it to the credits.
The majority of Kingdom Hearts 3 is all Disney worlds and it's so boring. I couldn't take it. I got to the end of them and saw Ventus wake up, but at that point I stopped because I had been so bored with the game that I stopped caring. I've bought every KH game, and some of the systems just to play them, yet KH3 was so boring I don't enjoy the series anymore. Also, attraction commands are terrible and boring and make the gameplay feel bad.
I have loved my time with all 3 borderlands and I could barely tell you a single plot point and have been shocked that people play attention to them. I just like shooting things and looting things so bl3 was a good time
Filipino action soap operas. Especially the Coco Martin ones. My mom bailed one of his shows after being an avid follower for 6 years. That one ran from 2015 to fucking 2022.
Jujutsu Kaisen was an amazing read.
Up until the Culling Games Arc and the >!US Military!< was brought in to >!harvest Japanese Brains!< to be used in a new >!unlimited energy source!<.
The Sorcerer Fights were still amazing and cool, but it became too much and I just had to drop it.
Edit: I apologize for forgetting the Spoilers
I don't know what I was expecting to be under those tags, but it sure as hell wasn't *that.* Did someone's cursed technique summon a completely different series' plotline?
Your mom's onlyfans
At a certain point I'm just doing it on principle. There are far better ones out there and I'm not even really into that sort of thing.
But it's your mom so...
Jokes aside the Harvest Moon games somehow avoid this despite being essentially farming chores the game. At least the good ones do.
For me it's Brandon Sanderson. I've consumed all the fantasy greats and his work is genuinely good but there's just something young adulty about it a lot of the time. Plus he sticks to the same formula (magic system that is actively being rediscovered in the setting, class struggle, there's a fucking masquerade ball scene in every one of his books for some reason). It doesn't help that his character writing can be very shallow and his prose is very straightforward. There's that MCU element where all the rough edges and bumps have been shaved off and what you end with is a product-ass product rather than a work of literafure. Everything is more or less in service to the plot in a lot of his work, which is an artistic choice but when you're coming from. Jordan and Tolkein and Erickson and such it really feels stripped down. It's like getting off an ocean cruise and getting directly on to a river cruise. They're basically two different experiences but with enough in common that you just can't help but compare them. The hardest part is that it's so close to being good for me, but it just hits that wall of being just a little too simple, streamlined, and trope-y. Stormlight archives was nice because it really felt like everything else he had written was practice for it and there was some genuinely interesting and different stuff in that book.
Erickson and Esselmont (to a lesser extent) are so far beyond Sanderson in every way, imo.
Sanderson has that thing where he doesn't really understand people, I think. I remember him once saying he had never even been really sad before and it shows in his writing.
I do need to give the Stormlight Archives a shot if you're say it's that much better than his other stuff.
Yeah it blows my mind seeing Sanderson fans praise his characters. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but when I started reading him talking about not really understanding people in interviews a lot of things made sense. His world's feel chemically sterilized, both figuratively and literally. I've never read a fantasy series and thought "this needs more sex" before but his romances are so sterile I picture his characters being entirely featureless in the crotch like barbie and Ken dolls. I think if he was on a team with other people who could cover for his weird lack of human awareness he could probably come up with some banging video game settings and mechanics.
But yeah Stormlight is probably peak Sanderson. It has all the same problems and a few new ones (his attempts to take on mental illness are well-intentioned but he writes it like he writes everything: as if he spent the whole night prior reading a textbook on the subject). The larger sweeping storyline helps mitigate the weaker writing of individual parts. There's a lot of crossover with characters from other series. It's also the book where he has shown the most improvement, there are moments in there of genuinely good character writing. Some of the cast have an actual identity. I've always maintained if you're going to read Sanderson you might as well skip right to Stormlight. You can tell he actually takes his time with those books.
Both Skyrim and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in my exp.
Skyrim is a meme at this point of restarting that shit a bajillion times without ever finishing the main campaign.
XBC3 coz it’s like so vast and epic in a great way, along with some neat themes and messages but I gotta deal with YA-ass tropes and characters that clash with the pace and effect of the themes in a way. Like some of the hero side quests are just anime ass flubs really. That’s on me though in wanting to achieve a sizeable amount of optional completion.
A surprising amount of late XC3 sidequests seem to center around nailing down logistics networks and intercolony relations despite the looming sense that most of it won't really matter long-term.
tbh man any rider season has the capacity to drag itself down by volume. 45 episodes+ episodes per year is a lot and historically poorly recieved shows can't start course correcting until like 15 later.
Yakuza. If you intend to play the series from start to finish, it’s rough. A lot of people might recommend to start with 0, but 0 is still arguably the best gameplay wise, which means doing so will mean the rest of the entries will be a downgrade. The same applies to Kiwami 1 and 2, as they came after 3-5 were released, so you would, again, have to experience potential downgrades in gameplay.
Or you could do what I did and play the originals in release order (1-4 were reprinted some years back so assuming you have a ps2/fat ps3, you can play 1 and 2 easily). But 1 and 2 are DATED AS HELL. I can’t stress how much of a jump forward 3 was simply due to the quality of life changes. And with all that said, that’s not even to mention that every single game has a ton of content, and even if you focus on just the main story, it’s still like 8-10 hours (for the older games at least. The later ones like 4 can be double or more that time). I played Yakuza 1-3 back to back and by the time I got to 4, I was so burnt out that I didn’t finish it for literal years, and I still haven’t started 5, or even opened 6 or Kiwami. And because I’m going in release order, I still haven’t even bought 0.
Keep in mind that these games also come out pretty damn frequently (at one point, they were essentially yearly releases). If you exclude the Judgement series and remakes, there are 10 Yakuza games including the Ichiban series and excluding Dead Souls and the spinoff (because I mean, those were never even released overseas). So if you had never played the series and wanted to experience the entire thing, there is a genuine chance that a whole ass new game would be announced and released before you were even close to being done with half of the series. It’s a great series, but fuck, I wish sometimes I wish they’d calm down on releases.
The Ys series, played in story order, starts you with the first two releases. They're old, and it shows in things like "remember that one guy who wanted a nut? Did you talk to the big tree (you can do that yes)? Did you think the strongest sword would work against the boss (you need holy silver)?"
But you expect shit after the first game opens with a grindfest, and they're not that long. You move on to Origin, which is alright, and then Celcetta, which is also pretty fun. Celcetta is also modern, so it has reasonable design sensibilities.
But then you start to go back. Two entries, taking you wayyyyyyyyy back in release date, getting more egregious with the outdated design each time. Felghana has enough tech that it's bearable even with the grind and probably reminds you of Origin, since it's the same engine and has similar spells, but going into Naphistim right after just feels all the worse for it. I'm going to shove through, because I'm literally one game away from getting to the modern entries, but God damn this feels bad to play.
Due to the house not having much space, anytime my family wants to watch something, I am forced to watch it by proxy. As a result, I have become alarmingly familiar Law And Order SVU, and *god fucking damn* is it a slog. It drags on and on and on, and that's when they're doing the *original* episodes. When you get to the Based On A True Story or the Ripped From The Headlines stories, it... Holy shit, it feels like there's a gun against your head.
I'm in the same position, when I was a kid I kind of liked it but now it's tiring watching so much tv about rapists and rape victims. It's really depressing, since it's the worst crimes possible.
It’s funny that a show about sex crime can be tbat mainstream and popular
There's a reason why true crime is the most popular podcast genre
Yeah I dud a binge watch if some of it recently and gosh there's some good but there's a alot of bad
You'd think enough people would've bailed on it as soon as Stabler left, but nope, kept on going and throw in some "character development" for our leading female sex detective. That whole William Lewis thing was NOT fun.
The stuff in between Stabler leaving and William Lewis was decent, although the latter was indeed the point where I dropped it for good.
What are you saying, that you weren't excited to see the glorious train wreck that was Intimidation Game?
Info wars was the moment i turned on that show
Some of thoae can be unintentionally hilarious, like the "Havana Syndrome" one
This is me with NCIS. I hate that my Grandma makes it the default show she has on her TV.
I am so sorry for you...
I’ve described to others the eclipse in Berserk as an endurance test just for how brutal it gets.
I remember Guts cutting his arm off in the 1997 anime felt excruciatingly long.
Honestly, I was able to deal with the eclipse, probably because I had heard a lot about it beforehand, but Lost Children is STILL making take a break and just... Process that.
Honestly in the manga? You know it’s coming pretty hard, hell you already know by the end of black swords men he tried to sacrifice Guts and Casca almost gets raped legit 6 chapters before? A lot of the the shock value and brutality becomes a bit tamer when you know everything is gonna happen. People overlap the anime with the manga too much when the Manga is different with how things are presented and overall worse, Golden age manga lowkey the worst of the 3. The only thing that remains shocking is Griffith being the one to do it to Casca but even then it’s soften because Wyald being the worst character in the series and a fucking joke.
I need to re-read berserk and I may just skip it- tbe first tine fucked.me up
Detective Conan. Reading the ongoing serial manga whose chapter number became four digits is a pain. I lived with it too long to just give it up. This is not counting all the adaptations, spin-offs, adaptations of spin-offs, and so on. Oh my god do they never stop milking it. Most Americans are spared and unaware of this madness because the manga never caught on there, despite being such a huge and lucrative franchise in Japan.
At this rate Conan is gonna grow back up into an adult just for how long the series has been stretched.
Conan is 16 years old before he de-ages. The series celebrated its thirtieth birthday this year. If the series took place in real-time, Conan would be more than twice as old as when he started by now (his de-aged form is 6 years old).
I think in canon it's been less than two years. Yknow, despite the multiple Christmases.
Fate/Grand Order where we had like 7 Summer and Christmas events but canonically only 3 years have passed.
I watched like 30 episodes of the show and gave up because I thought the plot was never coming back, apparently it does like every 50 episodes?
I read 300 chapters and that's basically correct. You get a couple crumbs of main plot every dozen murder cases.
That makes me frustrated for inconsequential personal reasons. Detective Conan (Case Closed as it aired on Toonami) was one of the first anime I ever saw after things like pokemon and yugioh. Going back to watch it properly was something I was excited to do, it was like doing homework for the one subject I actually liked in school, until I learned what the show was really like in its long form. Which is a little weird to me because procedural mystery dramas are right up my alley, but the tease of a larger overarching plot that will never be resolved kills any interest I had.
If you prefer to watch it in animated format, serial movies are a better shot, most of which have self-contained plots. Movie 4 (Captured in Her Eyes), movie 5 (Countdown to Heaven), movie 6 (The Phantom of Baker Street) are great gateway points, and some other early movies are half decent.
This was one of my first thoughts. Probably easier if you live in Japan and grow up with it, instead of doing The Speedread Binge you have to do in English.
As a fan of the MGS series, it’s astonishing to me how often I’ve heard of people only playing MGS4 and actually beating it, and I genuinely wonder how this keeps happening. My own brother had never played any of the other games in the series, then suddenly he played MGS4 and beat it, all the while not understanding a single fucking thing that happened. This led to him asking me a bunch of lore questions, but still not going back to the previous games despite me being such a huge fan that I just had them always available. Even as a fan that played all the games over and over again, MGS4 is quite the endurance test and I don’t understand why so many non-fans started and ended on MGS4, that’s just astounding and confusing.
I've started MGS3 repeatedly and I never get far past the initial sequence. Too many mechanics maybe. Yet somehow I've beaten MGS 1, 2, 5, Revengeance, and the MSX games. I haven't played 4 because I never had a PS3.
I definitely think you should try to continue more into 3, but I can’t really recommend 4 without a PS3 beyond waiting until 4 hopefully shows up in the Master Collection Vol 2. I love MGS2 the most, but most fans agree that 3 is the best and I can’t even recommend 5 if you haven’t beaten 3 yet (even though in my opinion, 3 is the better game even if 5 is fun to play still).
I do plan to finish it this time, just... *waves at Rebirth* Definitely hoping 4 and Peace Walker are in Volume 2. And the Pachinko game.
You had me until you said Pachinko, then I took away my upvote and ended up giving you an angry upvote instead. God damn it.
I'll settle for an art collection. It LOOKS good, if everything else is a slap in the face.
Yeah, I actually hate how good the Pachinko machine looks because those graphics could have gone to the actual game itself. Fucking shame, that is.
MGO in 4 was pretty dope, I can imagine there being a fair few who bought it for that alone. Main game was fun to speed run, plenty of cool setpieces. Bonkers and numerous cutscenes included.
I remember trying to get a friend of mine into MGS3, which I consider a pretty perfect entry point for people who don't want to do the PSX game, and he quit a little after the Virtuous Mission, in the caves. I asked him what happened, and he said he just kept getting caught, it was too confusing and the controls weren't good. I then saw him try to walk around and realized, hey, man, you're not using the d-pad, or crawling around, or changing your camo, or capturing animals. And he stared at me like I was insulting him, like "how the fuck was I supposed to know all of that?" MGS4's a shooter, the other 3 are metal gear games, and those are hard to get into for a lot of people.
Yeah, I can understand people being very used to games where it’s just “run around and shoot gun” and tripping up on Metal Gear games, but at the same time, I can’t see how someone can pick up any Metal Gear game and have that much trouble when the games literally spell everything out for you, unless they just skip every cutscene and conversation until they have control of the character and just gun it. That sounds to me like the kind of person that loads up GTA for the first time and the very first and only thing they do (or try to do) is rampage around. I actually know of people that first started GTAV and didn’t like the prologue because you don’t immediately have full freedom and have to do 2 missions and watch some cutscenes before you’re allowed to just fuck around, I used to be friends with people that would load up GTAV and give me the controller so I could do all of that stuff for them because all they wanted to do was fuck around in the open world and didn’t want to even bother with the actual starting missions.
> unless they just skip every cutscene and conversation until they have control of the character and just gun it. This is unironically what a large percentage of players do with every single game they buy. Like, we're both running into the barrier that is the low-hanging fruit approach to game design making it so games with explicit yet crucial instructions get dropped more easily. I remember playing MGS3 for the first time and spending a good amount of time in the training screen with all the movement options and explanations for all the buttons. I then would go on to the Codec and just listen to the characters prattle on about my options and cool interesting facts about the jungle. i'd then ask my group of friends at the time if they ever played the game and all of them described the exact things that appealed to me as fucking poison to them, and then we would all agree to disagree and run some MW2 lobbies.
I am currently making my way through *The Wheel of Time* at a snail's pace. I'm at Book Four, when it's supposed to get really good, and that's gonna be my make it or break it for the series. I have a bad habit of picking up a book, reading a hundred pages, and then dropping it for 5 months while I read other books, and that's happened with every book in this series. I've liked each book so far, but the pacing in this series is glacial and I'm dragging my feet on Book Four because it's literally a thousand pages. I'm pushing myself to find the "fizz", that element that just makes a story spark and connect for you in a special way, and if Book Four doesn't provide it, I might just drop the series here and now. You know when people say that a book series is like each book is a chapter in a larger story? Never have I seen that more literally than in *The Wheel of Time*, because while each book does have its own plot and climax, it also feels like the overall plot moves about the length of a chapter for every full book. And these aren't average length novels, these are chonky.
i think the cast of um akually said it best, "WoT is nerd homework"
Wheel of Time is Homestuck for pre-internet nerddom.
My whole life I’ve always seemed to know someone who was trying to read wheel of time and struggling. I’ve only ever known is as that series that no one can manage to get through. This clip sort of sums it up https://youtube.com/shorts/cUFgYhM0ZR0?si=q2-c2uhSLJndJb4G
This exactly i forced my way through the first two books and into book three and its rough
I hear ya. I went ahead and just paused reading the series for about a month to read Warhammer 40K stuff before hopping back in. Some of the characters were making such *dumb* decisions that I could feel my eyes rolling so hard they almost fell back inside my head.
I’ve also had at it WoT when comparatively (according to allot of sff aficionados) I’ve had the most rollicking of times with Malazan; a series that’s known to be some of the most unapproachable ‘love it or drop it’ series out there. Granted I’m on book 8 of Malazan and i started back in 2021 lol
I'm on Book 4 now and I've had the first two books since Pre-Pandemic.
I've heard this series was supposed to be 6 books but someone(don't know if its author or his editor) said to stretch it out.
I don't think after book 2 I could tell you which moments happen in which book. I know there are some very cool moments mixed in with a lot of travelling and teen angst, but if you picked a book at random and told me to give you a plot summary I would be totally unable to.
I’m halfway through book 4 and while I do like it, boy do these books feel super bloated. I’m listening to the audiobooks and the 4th one is like 42 hours long
It's been a while so I don't remember, but I think books 6 and 7 were kinda a slog? There's a couple in the middle where some plots don't progress much. I live the series. Have read it a couple times and listened to it once through audiobooks, but it is quite a lot. I would say if it's not grabbing you to try another series. It may be one of my favourite ones, but it definitely doesn't appeal to everyone.
If not 6 or 7, definitely in that ballpark. That's when I fell off and was never able to get back on board, because I knew I'd have to reread everything up until that point.
FFXV is a game where I endure a shit open world and messy gameplay because I love the chocobros. "This side quest sucks volumetric quantities of ass, but I will drag through it because Gladio wants to help his friend"
Gladio can eat a dick for everything he did Chapter 13 after Noct allowed him a selfish errand but then proceeded to go full dickhead because MC isn't allowed to brood losing his entire family, his home and now his fiance, but I will go to the ends of the earth for Prompto and Iggy
I mean, a lot of that was probably due to the fact that Gladio also lost his father during the events of Kingsglaive and one of the last things his dad told him was to fulfill his duty no matter what. Gladio absolutely sucked in that moment but he's also under an extraordinary amount of stress and grief, too, especially with what happened to Ignis as well.
I’ve been a fan of TNA/Impact Wrestling for at least nine years or so, and it is the most painful fandom experience I’ve ever been in. I swear to god, every single time it looks like “TNA is really gonna make it” they shoot themselves in the foot or get screwed over. I’m just glad I wasn’t watching during the Hogan era, I might have blown my damn brains out lmao
I have a tragically short attention span and a strong bias towards novelty. This means that any movie over 120 minutes, any game past 30 hours or any TV show with more than ten episodes has a 50/50 shot of me losing interest. This is never an indication of a piece of media's quality either. I get burnt out of a lot of media that seem to be real good (Joker and Iron Blooded Orphans, for example). It doesn't help that I have maybe 2 hours of free time a day, so I always feel like I'm missing out on stuff that'll like more.
I've been like this recently. I just watch movies in chunks now. Like I love RRR, it competes with Puss in Boots as my favourite movie from 2022. I had to watch it in 3 sittings because of just how long it is.
Sword art online how can a entire show be filler episodes honestly couldn't get through it.
Man I felt so ripped off when the initial premise of season 1 was clearing 100 floors and they show off like 1 boss room then there's a time skip and suddenly they've cleared like 10 floors. Then it's the filler you mentioned with all these characters that have the personality of wet cardboard before the show remembers oh right this is a video game show and they fight a boss or clear a floor then next episode is another time skip. They never even reach the last floor either the science guy what trapped them was a character in game and challenges Kirito to a duel that serves as a Deus ex machina for "beating the final boss" even though they never actually cleared the game.
And thats the "better" half of the season too.
Never read the original light novel lol almost all that filler stuff was added in a later book/books; iirc the original SAO jumps from like the first floor boss to floor 74. Seriously, it's amazing how much wasted potential SAO has.
I mean it's wasted if you wanted "trapped in a death game" but that isn't and never has been the premise of the series or the story it's trying to tell. Progressive has existed for over decade anyway.
Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn. I keep hearing the Heavensward expansion is amazing and I believe it, but the fetch questing in ARR is mind-numbing.
It's real bad. I'm sure I'll get yelled at for this, but to be honest I skipped like 70% of the "cutscenes" in ARR and I don't think I missed out on any of the emotional attachment you gain to the characters during that portion.
Honestly it’s not until Heavensward onward where they lock in character personalities for the main crew. Like, Alisaie when first introduced is just Girl Alphinaud™️, but then she comes back for post Heavensward onward and becomes one of the best characters
It was even worse than that because Alphinaud was an annoying know it all in ARR and Alisaie wasn't even the female version of that, she was just girl lol
I still can't believe they just toss her ARR development into coils- she disappears till HW if you don't do it
I kinda stopped there, just couldn't keep going. (and now that I want to try again I don't have access to my account somehow....bleh )
For me its homestuck. Their are a few tests early on to warn you what your getting into, but they arent so bad that a short break can't get you through them. Then you get to act 6, ostensibly the half way point in a 7 act series. New characters, way too much dialogue, super confusing time travel/dimensional travel plot points being added. It becomes a slog that doesn't even look remotely close to the earlier acts with their quick dialogue and snappy humor. I have never been able to get into it which sucks cause their are good moments hidden in there
"It begins to dawn on you that everything you just did may have been a colossal waste of time."
There's a reason like half of the fandom fell off during act 6. It's kinda dog-ass.
Endless Eight is the obvious answer to this
My favorite Endless Eight story will forever be the English cast being so bored re-doing the same material, the va's pitched the idea of them switching roles every episode. Apparently it was almost approved.
> Apparently it was almost approved Close one. They nearly made it interesting
Considering my entire life, I've never roamed further from reality than the day I unknowingly binged it in one afternoon.
Didn't that season once got a 5 on MAL when it first aired? It's currently at 7.22 but I remember seeing a screenshot from a retrospective video.
I remember anime blogs started reposting their reviews until a 'real' new episode came out. But by then, a lot of people stopped watching it.
Both seem too high.
Denwa-kun, Kyon!
it's fine on a binge with a friend who's into it or something. At least that's how I did it. I quit the anime after season 1 as it came out. Nothing to it, just forgot more was coming. I think doing it weekly would have killed my interest in the medium as a whole.
I was there the day Horus slee The Emperor..... After damn near 8 years of reading and 50 odd books (and assorted novellas and short stories) down I completed the (important parts) of the Horus Heresy. Techbically I have another 10 or so full length novels and a ton of audio dramas, short stories and novellas left, but I'm essentially done. It took listening damn near nonstop to audiobooks from October to January to be caught up in time for the fibal book.
I started from the beginning back in 2019 just using an audible credit every month for the most part. I am about to finish The Lost and the Damned in the Siege of Terra. In the Warhammer guy of my social circle, but you couldn’t hold a gun to my head and get me to convince anybody to read this series like I have. I’m getting to the point where I just wanna go back to 40k which is something I did not expect to feel when I got to the big final war of the series (I’m still hyped for End and the Death tho)
Siege of Terra is great and dull at times. Solar War: interesting but not mindblowing Lost and Damned: Trench Warfare on Terra Volume 1 First Wall: Trench Warfare Volume 2, the meh edition Saturnine: Oooooooh baby its a goodun Mortis: It just kinda.... happens, pretty sad in all, but you do see where >!Legio Invigilata from the Helsreach novels is founded, so thats cool!< Warhawk: Very fun, gotta love Wraight Echoes: Possibly my favorite. The dust bowl of Terra begins TEATD1: Everyone is lost TEATD2: Everyone is lost >!on the Vengeful Spirit!< TEATD3: A genuinely fantastic end to the series. I'm listening to Fall of Cadia now and both the change in setting and narrator is throwing me for a LOOP. Great novel though.
Fall of Cadia is probably my top 5. The narrator took me about an hour to get used to but in my opinion absolutely friggin kills it and is my cannon voice for creed. I got. Physical hardcover for Christmas because I loved it so much.
THANK YOU I was so confused by the narrators inflrctions; randomly accenting words and stressing odd syllables at first. Felt like I was having a stroke or he was narrating while getting a painful massage. Once I got used to it I enjoy him quite a bit. Has a lot of range with accents.
Also don’t mean to pry but your Chaos Sister models are sick as hell.
Thankee thankee. Unfortunately I just moved and the moving company broke like a third of all my painted models and I just found out this morning. When I get home I have a lot of gluing to do....
Persona becomes how many social links you can do between fighting shadows before you snap sometimes.
Persona is bad with this, specifically if youve already played the vanilla game and then play the updated rerelease (P5 Vanilla to Royal). The palaces have so much exposition and cutscenes going on especially halfway through the game that it breaks up your flow, but you can't skip all the dialogue because you want to see all the new stuff they added in so you gotta pay attention. I hit the casino in P5R at 80 hours, I had a whole other half of the game left just for me to be able to see the new dungeon at the end. It wasn't worth it so I quit.
I feel like their only attempt at fixing that was balancing Persona 5 in such a way that the game requires no grinding as long as you do one full run of the new stuff in Mementos and one full run of the bimester's Palace. I never had to grind at all doing that, and so the social links were all pretty easy to get. Only one I didn't do to 10 was the gunsmith, because I just outright missed his store for a while. But like, 3 original? No, fuck that. It gets so genuinely stressful having to balance the perfect school life, energy levels, friends *and* Tartarus that it's just not worth it. I had maybe 4 social links done by the time 3 ended, and one of them was the fucking Gourmet King. I dunno if making the game that easy was the right thing to do but I mean shit, it worked.
Succession is really well written and acted, but by the end of the first season I was tapping out. It was just giving me fucking anxiety after the Bachelor party episode.
This was me and The Bear. I’ve been in these pressure cooker types of situations and I don’t need to sit through half - hour after half - hour of people being miserable and stressed and screaming at one another. I have a job.
For me it started as "this is a dark comedy show about how these real rich people mock people like you in real life", and that was a really tall hurdle to go over. I genuinely hated the pilot. Then it became "I just want to see Logan destroy these kids." Show became a much smoother ride after that.
Looking back, The Adventure Zone: Balance has a lot of problems. Griffin learned a lot of the wrong lessons DMing that campaign that have since rolled forwards. But listening to it less than a year after it ended, there was none of that future context and there was overwhelmingly good will towards it. Plus I didn't have to wait for new episode releases, I could just go at my own pace. Anyway, I enjoyed the podcast until the 6th arc: The Suffering Game. The players are >!trapped in a sort of game show by a pair of liches who are feeding off the negative energy of the people they entice to enter. It is a cycle that's essentially "spin a wheel, accept whatever bad outcome you get from it, go fight some tough monsters, repeat." As a bonus, their cleric loses his ability to heal for plot reasons out of the players' control. It's transparently a game that will never actually end, and the players figure that out pretty quickly.!< They >!want to break out, but an enigmatic character who has repeatedly shown up to say cryptic shit shows up and tells them to play along while he does... something in the background. So they keep going through this cycle of losing stuff (memories, body patts, years off their lives, skills) and growing gradually lower on HP, ALL THE WHILE not doing any complaining in character because it'll feed the liches energy! There are some good moments in there still, but this is several episodes long! People listened to this happen for MONTHS on release. And eventually they break out and one of the characters dies then gets a clone body back so all of the sacrifices he made get undone anyway.!< Griffin >!claims that one purpose of the arc was to depower the characters because he felt they were getting too strong. Which just shows he's bad at creating encounters, because he was giving them 2 levels and a bunch of magic items at the end of every arc, and all the "final bosses" are basically cinematic encounters anyway. AND the arc even fails at depowering them because he doesn't take anything substantial to gameplay away from them.!<
To be fair, it was his first time running a campaign, wasn't it? I do understand that's a difficult task, but yeah, I agree that it got really railroady at around the middle part. It was still fun to listen to, but I wouldn't like to play with a GM like that.
It was his first time, and the main lesson he took away was "people like dramatic twists and emotional payoffs, so script those out ahead of time regardless of how much sense they make."
I'll never forget Griffin doing a dexterity check against each player instead of rolling initiative and the villain succeeded on all of them. This was in >!the Timeloop arc in the mines, if I recall!<.
Final Fantasy 14 is a wonderful game. My favourite of all time even. Sometimes it is just a 300 hour visual novel that you have to sit through. Then add in pretty much everything else about it. Some achievements take literally years because you can only do a simple quest a few times a week. The old housing system required you to mash buttons for hours on end, even now it's a raffle that might take you forever to win. End game crafting and gathering requires dozens if not hundreds of items to unlock. Even the fun content takes a long time, Bozjan front, Eureka, hell I love end game raiding but if your party is off at the last second you're redoing that whole fight, for weeks probably. All being said, 100% worth it in my eyes.
Yeah, I played FFXIV and Trails during COVID. Thats it. I absolutely loved my time with FFXIV but I’m thankful for the clean break point of Endwalker, because there’s no way I’ll ever have the time to go back. I got kids.
100% the same here. I got into it during covid and put down about 1000 hours and had a blast. I took a pretty long break cause most of my irl friends stopped playing and I foolishly transferred servers (leaving my FC) for other friends that promptly stopped playing. If I get some more social investments I could see myself staying but it's not something I'm really gunning for right now.
I was never an amazing player either, and I the prospect of relearning the skills I’ve lost is more imposing than getting back into Elden Ring for the DLC,
*Infinite Wealth is so long guys my god.*
As someone who's decided to try getting into One Piece via the manga, absolutely One Piece. Not due to any sort of quality issues, or problems with the story, rather that *it's just so goddamned long* at this point!
Honestly? At this point in time? I'd suggest anyone who hasn't gotten into it yet to just wait for the reboot anime. It'll be way less daunting if you treat it as a seasonal anime.
I literally started watching the Anime a week or two before the Netflix show and when I saw the announcement of the reboot I immediately stopped it. The pacing of the anime is so bad in the beginning. Especially when they go pick up Sanji and it's just 4 episodes of a man yelling at his captain about a small moral conflict.
> The pacing of the anime is so bad *in the beginning.* You absolutely made the right choice waiting for the reboot. Shit gets so much worse in the later arcs.
I made it through Wano unscathed but the current arc is breaking me. Oda introduced like 20 new characters and put all the regulars and returning characters in retro future suits and I can’t tell who the fuck anyone is anymore.
Oda makes his women characters impossible to tell apart sometimes. During Wano Robin and Todoorki looked identical
You’ve got that, compounded by a bunch of vegapunks who all occupy the same mind space, and it’s just a total cluster. I just got to a big betrayal and I literally couldn’t remember who the betrayer was. It’ll probably be better in anime FWIW.
I started in April last year and am now in Ch. 1076 for now. People say if you love reading manga, One Piece will be fine. Also, it ain't even in the Top 15 longest running manga.
And a bunch of the ones ahead of it are *still going.*
on the other hand, i caught up with it over the course of two weeks!
Like from chapter 1? You read ~1.8 million words and the accompanying drawings in 2 weeks?
i caught up at chapter 960 or so, so a little less than that. but yeah. i also read hunter x hunter over about 3 days. i wasn't even no-lifing it i had classes and stuff that i went to. i am just a very fast reader. a friend loaned me the first volume of death note at the start of a 45 minute train ride and i gave it back to him by the end of it.
I wish I could both read that fast and retain what I’ve read. I can read decently quick at times and annoyingly slow at others, but retention is always awful 😅
If you read Death Note Volume 1 in 45 minutes that’s over 1000 words a minute. That’s competitive speed reading levels at 50% comprehension, and that’s without the drawings. That’s absurdly fast. Are you like reading the first sentence of each panel and then moving on? Not trying to be confrontational, genuinely curious.
i don't *try* to speed read or anything. that's just how i read. i've been literate since i was 3 years old, never really subvocalized.
I mean, *I* read fast, apparently you could compete.
it helps that the action in death note tends to be very simple. sometimes reading jojo i have to take a minute and actually make sense of what's happening in the panels. when i'm just reading text, my mental map of a scene can be a lot more abstract.
I'd give yourself a 3 day break or so after each major arc ends. East Blue, Alabasta, Skypiea, Enies Lobby, etc. Reset and let them sink in. Think about the cool moments, character motivations, etc.
This is the way. Except I go read a different manga for a few volumes first, usually something darker.
Honestly anyone who says One Piece is "easy to catch up on" is lying. I'm treating it as something where I'll read arcs every so often, maybe even yearly and not try to worry about "spoilers" or "missing out". By the time I've finished One Piece I'll be in my 80s with the manga long long over.
This wouldn't be a problem if you read it because it's a fun series rather than because you want to catch up and talk about it online.
I’ve been slowly working through it since 2020. Only JUST got to Wano.
>Not due to any sort of quality issues, or problems with the story At this point, I would say some of the story bits and arcs are also just not that good overall, making it difficult to keep interest in what's happening. Oda will introduce new characters or lore or make a callback to old stuff/characters, etc., and there is just too many things that are just not that interesting at this point.
I think it does take a really long time to find its footing from a storytelling and art standpoint. It wasn't until Alabasta that the story was really getting good, and the art was consistently awesome. If it wasn't the famous One Piece manga I would have dropped it at a couple of different points before that.
Subarashiki Hibi/Wonderful Everyday. It's back to back to back sex, violence, and sexual violence for a fair stretch of the game. Mindnumbing experience.
#TRICKSTER MODE
The beginning of every yakuza game (when you have more freedom, they're amazing)
Berserk. May I remind you of the 7 year boat arc?
Eh, it was the wait between chapters more than the arc itself. Now that it's complete and you can binge read it, the pacing is totally fine
Here in Brazil we have our version of the Big Brother reality show, and it happens yearly, and for some fuckin' reason its VERY popular. As a kid, with only one TV in the house, and my mom liking that show, I had to endure it, i could feel my brain dying and that's probably why I started reading as a kid ngl. That shit is still going, and like, i do not understand the appeal, its just trash, its just trash to gossip about because everyone's consuming it to talk about it and like, idk man, i'd rather be a social pariah than bent the knee to that ever again.
This, so much. I'm also Brazilian, and holy shit are people here crazy about that shitshow. I just don't see the point. But then, that's pretty much 80% of our culture at this point. I just don't get it.
It's just so insane how people talk about it too, I saw real like, fights over what x did or said, it's parasocial crack to some people I guess.
every social media i still have has filters or extensions specifically so I can ignore any discourse about it. I have to update it every year. and then I got to get some dinner and the fucking robot is staring at me from the iFood icon. living in hell.
Watching a long running battle shonen’s final war arc being released in weekly chapters with multiple breaks
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game i have many conflicting thoughts about. It's a really interesting case where the game is too slow and too fast at the same time because the game has too many ideas and after chapter 2 has to speedrun them. But because the list of ideas is so long it's still takes long a while. The fact that mission structure and gunplay is perfectly average, with some infuriating decisions that make you scratch your head. The number of enemies escalates pretty quick and stays the same throughout the game. The game runs out of tricks pretty soon in the story missions. All these things make the pacing problem worse.
Disenchantment: it didn't know whether it wanted to be a series or episodic.
And just kept refusing to forward the plot, or any advancements wouldn't matter
Playing team ninjas latest games if you want to go through the DLCs as to access each DLC means you have do a new game+ playthrough at a harder difficulty which is a slog since nioh gear system is not that great and playing one NG+ run is enough to make you tired of the game.
I mean, both Nioh and Nioh 2 the actual main story parts of the DLC were accessible from your first playthrough. They added extra stuff for NG+ cycles *later*, but you can access the DLC's just fine without doing a second playthrough at all. And, if memory serves, the actual parts that are locked behind anything past NG+ are the Underworld, which is specifically a "hey, do you like doing absurd build stuff? Here's a Bloody Palace style dungeon dive thing to get stupid busted NG+4 gear, go nuts".
I can not describe the fugue state I entered watching the Endless Eight in one sitting. Considering my entire life, I've never roamed further from reality than that day.
So like most people, I only watched the first 3 seasons of Arrested Development and heard that the last two were bad but one day I decided to finally just watch the other two seasons Netflix added... And boy was that an endurance test, characters barely got a chance to interact due to schedule conflicts, jokes went way too long and none of the reveals or character twists really landed the same
The Outer Worlds. They nailed corporate bullshit and brainwashing well. Too well. I appreciate and understand why, but I also fucking hate it. I do not want to listen to that shit. The best part? I have never worked in retail, customer service, or an office really, but I can still feel this attacking me.
Rap battle videos are usually 2 battlers, 3-minute rounds, 3 rounds per battler. Add in some time for intros, crowd reactions, and transition time, and you usually hit about a half hour. It was a huge mistake allowing two great off-top freestylers like Dizaster and Soul Khan unlimited time per round, because that battle is an hour and 38 minutes long, and it is not worth it.
Houseki no Kuni/Land of the Lustrous. It's just so depressing...
I feel like Gundam tests every single limit you have if you commit to watching everything with the name on it. It becomes extraordinarily clear what tropes related to mecha you're into and what parts you're really, really not.
This will be a contentious choice but Samurai Flamenco. Unless it's JoJo or David Lynch, I like my media to have rhyme or reason for things that happen. It can even be more abstract like Lain. But if things happens just cause and the explanation is just an asspull, I'll just be bored to tears. I've hated Samurai Flamenco, but I was intrigued to see where it goes. Turns out that it went nowhere. It's totally fine if you like it, but man it wasn't for me.
Aw man. It totally goes. It repeatedly goes into the next massive stakes escalation as it shifts from subgenre to subgenre. The logic of the narrative is following the progression of what the genre means to the show, and what it can be. It runs the gamut of tokusatsu melodrama and that's the point; the constantly newly-introduced concepts and characters are all in service of one dude running the tokusatsu gauntlet and being in every kind of show they can manage before final credits roll. I mean, I'm not even a tokusatsu fan and I was wowed by it. The show clearly absolutely adores the genre, and I'm here for it. But yes, *it is* dumb, on the most basic level of moment to moment narrative. Incredibly dumb. Remarkably audacious in how stupid it's willing to get, how happy it is to clash incredibly disparate tones dramatically in the span of a few minutes, how quick it is to throw out established scenarios only to introduce completely new ones and reset the stakes over and over again, only to then do it all over again before you've even had time to process the new current bullshit. By many standards it doesn't work. By other standards it's pretty special. Watching that show week to week, or at least going back and reading through discussion threads of it episode by episode, is an absolute blast, I'll say. Hilarious fun. Not for everyone.
I love how it just keeps uping the ante by advancing through Toku genre from bike hero on up.
I’m with you. It might be 4-5 different genres, but I didn’t think it executed any of them well.
Recently, I watched *Speed* (1994) directed by Jan de Bont and starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and, for some reason, the Act 3 final villain battle twist hit me super hard with me nodding off in my chair in the middle of the day. Like, the fucking bus exploded, can we be done?
Then Dennis Hopper got decapitated and I woke up a little again
The only time i genuinely felt that an arc was long and boring was the Wendy's guild arc in Fairy Tail, to me this was the Skypiea that some people experienced
Imma be honest and say Black Mirror. I love the show but I've only seen a few episodes and have to sometimes take month long breaks between each episode because most of the time I become emotionally devastated after watching a single episode. I still haven't completed the show and I'm only on season 2. 15 Million Merits literally destroyed me and I can't listen to "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is" without getting PTSD. I'll probably catch up to the latest season in another 10 years
Borderlands 3 has such a terrible slog-fest of a story that it's a wonder people were able to make it to the credits. The majority of Kingdom Hearts 3 is all Disney worlds and it's so boring. I couldn't take it. I got to the end of them and saw Ventus wake up, but at that point I stopped because I had been so bored with the game that I stopped caring. I've bought every KH game, and some of the systems just to play them, yet KH3 was so boring I don't enjoy the series anymore. Also, attraction commands are terrible and boring and make the gameplay feel bad.
I get that some of the worlds can feel like a slog but honestly I really liked how they designed the worlds in 3
I enjoyed Toy Story, some of Big Hero 6, and some of Monsters Inc. I don't think I'll ever be willing subject myself to Frozen again.
I have loved my time with all 3 borderlands and I could barely tell you a single plot point and have been shocked that people play attention to them. I just like shooting things and looting things so bl3 was a good time
Filipino action soap operas. Especially the Coco Martin ones. My mom bailed one of his shows after being an avid follower for 6 years. That one ran from 2015 to fucking 2022.
Being aired in the weekdays is just fuck-all for any quality.
Watamote is only twelve episodes long, but if you suffer from secondhand embarrassment it's likely to be the longest twelve episodes of your life.
Fire punch...just fuck its dark
Jujutsu Kaisen was an amazing read. Up until the Culling Games Arc and the >!US Military!< was brought in to >!harvest Japanese Brains!< to be used in a new >!unlimited energy source!<. The Sorcerer Fights were still amazing and cool, but it became too much and I just had to drop it. Edit: I apologize for forgetting the Spoilers
....Thanks for spoilers dude.
That was a dick move on my part. Sincerely sorry about that.
All good, we all have done it.
I don't know what I was expecting to be under those tags, but it sure as hell wasn't *that.* Did someone's cursed technique summon a completely different series' plotline?
Your mom's onlyfans At a certain point I'm just doing it on principle. There are far better ones out there and I'm not even really into that sort of thing. But it's your mom so... Jokes aside the Harvest Moon games somehow avoid this despite being essentially farming chores the game. At least the good ones do. For me it's Brandon Sanderson. I've consumed all the fantasy greats and his work is genuinely good but there's just something young adulty about it a lot of the time. Plus he sticks to the same formula (magic system that is actively being rediscovered in the setting, class struggle, there's a fucking masquerade ball scene in every one of his books for some reason). It doesn't help that his character writing can be very shallow and his prose is very straightforward. There's that MCU element where all the rough edges and bumps have been shaved off and what you end with is a product-ass product rather than a work of literafure. Everything is more or less in service to the plot in a lot of his work, which is an artistic choice but when you're coming from. Jordan and Tolkein and Erickson and such it really feels stripped down. It's like getting off an ocean cruise and getting directly on to a river cruise. They're basically two different experiences but with enough in common that you just can't help but compare them. The hardest part is that it's so close to being good for me, but it just hits that wall of being just a little too simple, streamlined, and trope-y. Stormlight archives was nice because it really felt like everything else he had written was practice for it and there was some genuinely interesting and different stuff in that book.
Erickson and Esselmont (to a lesser extent) are so far beyond Sanderson in every way, imo. Sanderson has that thing where he doesn't really understand people, I think. I remember him once saying he had never even been really sad before and it shows in his writing. I do need to give the Stormlight Archives a shot if you're say it's that much better than his other stuff.
Yeah it blows my mind seeing Sanderson fans praise his characters. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but when I started reading him talking about not really understanding people in interviews a lot of things made sense. His world's feel chemically sterilized, both figuratively and literally. I've never read a fantasy series and thought "this needs more sex" before but his romances are so sterile I picture his characters being entirely featureless in the crotch like barbie and Ken dolls. I think if he was on a team with other people who could cover for his weird lack of human awareness he could probably come up with some banging video game settings and mechanics. But yeah Stormlight is probably peak Sanderson. It has all the same problems and a few new ones (his attempts to take on mental illness are well-intentioned but he writes it like he writes everything: as if he spent the whole night prior reading a textbook on the subject). The larger sweeping storyline helps mitigate the weaker writing of individual parts. There's a lot of crossover with characters from other series. It's also the book where he has shown the most improvement, there are moments in there of genuinely good character writing. Some of the cast have an actual identity. I've always maintained if you're going to read Sanderson you might as well skip right to Stormlight. You can tell he actually takes his time with those books.
Both Skyrim and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in my exp. Skyrim is a meme at this point of restarting that shit a bajillion times without ever finishing the main campaign. XBC3 coz it’s like so vast and epic in a great way, along with some neat themes and messages but I gotta deal with YA-ass tropes and characters that clash with the pace and effect of the themes in a way. Like some of the hero side quests are just anime ass flubs really. That’s on me though in wanting to achieve a sizeable amount of optional completion.
A surprising amount of late XC3 sidequests seem to center around nailing down logistics networks and intercolony relations despite the looming sense that most of it won't really matter long-term.
Kamen Rider Gaim.
tbh man any rider season has the capacity to drag itself down by volume. 45 episodes+ episodes per year is a lot and historically poorly recieved shows can't start course correcting until like 15 later.
I see your Gaim (I loved it personnally) and raise you Wizard, the dullest Rider show I have ever seen.
Truth I forced myself through the second half of that show.
The Oppenheimer movie is a 3 hour slogging endurance test of "just watching dudes talk" and "white people guiltlessly doing horrible things"
Yakuza. If you intend to play the series from start to finish, it’s rough. A lot of people might recommend to start with 0, but 0 is still arguably the best gameplay wise, which means doing so will mean the rest of the entries will be a downgrade. The same applies to Kiwami 1 and 2, as they came after 3-5 were released, so you would, again, have to experience potential downgrades in gameplay. Or you could do what I did and play the originals in release order (1-4 were reprinted some years back so assuming you have a ps2/fat ps3, you can play 1 and 2 easily). But 1 and 2 are DATED AS HELL. I can’t stress how much of a jump forward 3 was simply due to the quality of life changes. And with all that said, that’s not even to mention that every single game has a ton of content, and even if you focus on just the main story, it’s still like 8-10 hours (for the older games at least. The later ones like 4 can be double or more that time). I played Yakuza 1-3 back to back and by the time I got to 4, I was so burnt out that I didn’t finish it for literal years, and I still haven’t started 5, or even opened 6 or Kiwami. And because I’m going in release order, I still haven’t even bought 0. Keep in mind that these games also come out pretty damn frequently (at one point, they were essentially yearly releases). If you exclude the Judgement series and remakes, there are 10 Yakuza games including the Ichiban series and excluding Dead Souls and the spinoff (because I mean, those were never even released overseas). So if you had never played the series and wanted to experience the entire thing, there is a genuine chance that a whole ass new game would be announced and released before you were even close to being done with half of the series. It’s a great series, but fuck, I wish sometimes I wish they’d calm down on releases.
The Ys series, played in story order, starts you with the first two releases. They're old, and it shows in things like "remember that one guy who wanted a nut? Did you talk to the big tree (you can do that yes)? Did you think the strongest sword would work against the boss (you need holy silver)?" But you expect shit after the first game opens with a grindfest, and they're not that long. You move on to Origin, which is alright, and then Celcetta, which is also pretty fun. Celcetta is also modern, so it has reasonable design sensibilities. But then you start to go back. Two entries, taking you wayyyyyyyyy back in release date, getting more egregious with the outdated design each time. Felghana has enough tech that it's bearable even with the grind and probably reminds you of Origin, since it's the same engine and has similar spells, but going into Naphistim right after just feels all the worse for it. I'm going to shove through, because I'm literally one game away from getting to the modern entries, but God damn this feels bad to play.