Cutler as Meltzer
Oh is THAT what the tweet was? Man, I've been trying to make sense of that all day!
Still playing Nier:Automata, still on Route A. I forgot how much the side quests ask you to run back and forth the same few areas, but knowing what the game is truly about, it actually makes a lot of sense, so I'm okay with it.
I'm halfway through the second world of Mario/Rabbids Sparks of Hope and my first impression is that I preferred the first game in every single way. The battles are no longer rated in any way, so you don't need to try to play all that well, just win and move on. Most of the maps are kinda bland. No weapon upgrades, it's just cosmetics. having two characters fully voice-acted when everyone else is silent is really jarring and it's the first time I turned voice volume to 0% in a game, now I can actually enjoy the comedy more.
But the most jarring thing to me is that it seems like Ubisoft tried to make the Rabbids... cool? Thankfully the volume decrease also gets rid of the snippy one-liners, but why do they speak in the first place? Rabbids say Bwah, nothing else. And why am I picking up pieces of lore about the planets I'm on? It's Mario and Rabbids, I'm here for slapstick, not world-building! I'm not sure where to even begin about Edge...
I'll keep playing it out of curiosity, but I'm really tempted to boot up the first game again afterwards to see if it's really the game or me that changed so much.
The second game has a secret dungeon that is unlocked by collecting all Djinns in both games. No Djinn is missable within their own game, but this obviously doesn't apply across games. You can miss 1 Djinn of each element in the first game and the second one will give you an opportunity to encounter them there to help you out, but that's the end of the leeway.
I stand by what I said originally: Shantae is great when you're in the dungeons, but annoying in the overworld. I'd say it's definitely worth looking at for the visuals though. The game is so ambitious that I have to wonder why they made it for the GameBoy in the first place. When the game released, the GameBoy Advance and the GameCube were already out for a year, too! I can only assume development took a really long time and the overall bad timing affected sales enough to get the sequel cancelled. Luckily, it's being revived now, so I might actually wait for that to keep playing the series in order.
And that's why I only get my AEW news from Brandon Cutler.