That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.
For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.
But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.
Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.
I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.
I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.
Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?
In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.
But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).
Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.
I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.
Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.
Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.
Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.
Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?
He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.
In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.
It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.
What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.
You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.
The published spec sheet says it does dual book with Android 13.
Wasn’t Snapdragon support added recently? I feel like I saw a note on that having happened when I was looking up what SOC this thing was packing, but I could be wrong.
This thing is supposed to be fairly powerful, I don’t know that the straightforward, minimal approach of Garlic/Onion makes sense on it. Ideally you’d want a bit more versatility. For that I think the Anbernic SP and that class of slightly cheaper devices probably make more sense.
I mean, as I said above that’s my thing with these flagship ARM handhelds. At some point it takes a lot to justify spending a couple hundred on one of these instead of a bit more for a more flexible Steam Deck. The smaller, cheaper ones are a lot more charming, and they fit in your pocket, so they can be a throwaway toy to carry with you.
But hey, we live in the handheld golden age, I’m not gonna complain about more options.
Nah. This is running a Snapdragon 865 SOC with an older Adreno GPU. If you think Windows on ARM gaming is a struggle this isn’t going to be your Linux handheld killer. There’s also no reason for it to be, the Steam Deck already exists.
For its intended use case as a retro handheld (or an Android gaming handheld, I suppose), this seems like it’ll be fine, but I’m also less excited about these mid-tier ARM handhelds now that we have good x64 alternatives with decent battery life and better performance that aren’t much more expensive. I still think the cheap, tiny ones are cool, though.
I guess this is nominally cool because other comparables like they Ayn Odin 2, need a bunch of tinkering to run Linux, but beyond that it seems Linux is well represented on both extremes around this awkward middle ground of more expensive ARM handhelds.
Hah. It may be, I don’t know. Maybe both?
I mean… is this a big deal? Every retro ARM handheld out there runs some version of Linux or Android. I gues Retroid was an Android-focused brand, hence the name, but if you wanted to run Batocera on a handheld there is no shortage of options.
Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.
How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.
I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.
I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.
Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”
I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?
Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.
If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.
In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!
I don’t care about Steam, but I’d appreciate a GoG release for convenience.
I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…