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Persona 5 is almost definitely coming to Switch, right? Hopefully we get P4 Golden and some form of P3 at some point, too.

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@arbitrarywater: The biggest hurdle in transferring Pokemon from those older games up is that you need a game from each gen as an intermediary to get there. I wound up having to drop 40$ on a copy of Black 2 in order to fill that link in the chain, since I skipped Gen 5 when it came out. And unfortunately, old Pokemon games, even used ones with no original box, tend to sell for equal to or more than their original retail price since they're never not in demand. Also, I then had to go and beat the entire main quest of Black 2 in order to unlock the transfer feature, because Pokemon games like to be backwards sometimes.

@commodoregroovy:I dunno, Pokemon people are kinda purists. Myself included... probably. It's maybe one of the reasons the games rarely change that dramatically from entry to entry.

I do have a Pikachu in what looks like some sort of wrestling outfit, though. That is a thing.

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@captaincharisma:Of the ones I actually have, my Gallade and Gardevoir set is pretty high up there. Actually, I'm pretty fond of a lot of the ones I've caught, since in many cases I went out of my way to search for them because I wanted them really bad. My Porygon-Z is pretty cool looking, as are my Gastly, my Geodude, and my Pheromosa. And of course the aforementioned Umbreon.

If you mean in general, including ones I don't have, I have a hard time answering that for sure. Since there are ~800 different Pokemon at the moment, I don't know what a good 80% of them actually look like shiny. I tend to look them up if they meet a few other criteria and then go for them if they look cool. Off the top of my head, Ponyta is the first thing that comes to mind. It looks genuinely rad. Though I really, really like the way shiny Mega-Gardevoir looks, maybe more than any other shiny I've seen, including ones I don't have. I think it's probably my favorite shiny overall.

@imhungry: It's really very tedious. I've never gotten one through breeding yet, which is the method I've anecdotally seen the most people use to find their firsts. I find it more tedious than soft resetting, and I am pretty averse to soft resetting. Soft resetting requires zero mental input. Hatching eggs requires a little bit of juggling in order to be as efficient as possible. Though not in Gen 2. Those eggs show up so infrequently that I've almost never had a situation where my party is full of eggs when there's another one available.

Across all of my games, I have a total of 55 shinies, though 2 of them are the red Gyarados from Gen 2 and about 20 of those were obtained through a hunting method so easy it's almost trivial. If you go really far through the wormhole you unlock at the end of Ultra Sun/Moon, there is a really decent chance the Pokemon you find there is shiny. The odds can be as good as 1/10 in some cases. It's a method I used to just do a few times before going to bed; it probably takes under an hour on average to obtain shiny Pokemon doing this. The pool of available Pokemon is really limited, and limited mostly to Pokemon I don't care for, and additionally you have very little input on what actually shows up, but if you just want to find a shiny for the sake of it, it's the absolute easiest way aside from Event Pokemon.

My favorite is probably the shiny Gardevoir. Gardevoir is a very cool Pokemon with good stats and a strong moveset that looks cool shiny and even cooler mega AND shiny. I have a pretty strong affinity for Psychic-type Pokemon in general, too, and the Ralts that evolved into Gardevoir was also the first shiny I ever found using the Dexnav, so there's some sentimental attachment there, too.

@nicksmi56: My younger sister's first shiny was a totally random encounter, and she's had some very good luck with the Masuda method since then, too. And fairly recently, a friend of mine ran into a shiny in the first ten minutes of booting up Ultra Moon, full non-shiny-charm odds and everything. I had never seen a totally random shiny in one of my own games before, so I was extremely jealous. Literally the very next day I randomly encountered my shiny Geodude in Omega Ruby while just walking to the place I was planning on hunting. That was pretty cool. Also, I found my second Ralts (which happened to be male, too, meaning it's a Gallade now) while just walking between two areas and deciding to Dexnav a handful of times on a whim before moving on, and it showed up after less then 10 encounters. I found my Growlithe after burning out looking for something else, deciding to search for a Charmeleon in the Friend Safari. Growlithe showed up shiny after only 7 encounters.

That said, I've also had some crazy bad luck with them, too. It took me months to finally find my shiny Pheromosa, doing at least a handful of soft resets every day, and usually way more than a handful. That Eevee was a real nightmare, too. And I've been trying on and off to find a Ponyta for a loooong time, with no success.

@bleshoo: Honedge is definitely one of the cooler shinies out there. If I had more patience for Masuda method-ing, it would be a pretty high priority for me, but that method is just one I struggle with.

@mezza: I have only ever encountered one shiny Pokemon completely randomly, and even that was in a game where I had the Shiny Charm, so the odds were three times as high as they would have otherwise. I have witnessed a total of three random shiny appearances, in person, happening to be with my sister when she found hers and with my friend when his showed up, but as for ones actually appearing in my games, there's only my Geodude. His name is John Rocket. My brother said I should name him that, giving no explanation, and I did, and as it turns out, there was no explanation to give; it was a meaningless combination of a name and a word that popped into his head randomly. That's honestly better, though.

@strangestories: That's rad; Ampharos is probably one of my ten favorite Pokemon, and my Pokemon Gold save is actually in the middle of trying to hatch a shiny Flaffy right now.

Man, what I'm gathering from this is that it sounds like people have had a lot more luck seeing random shiny Pokemon then I ever have. I played these games obsessively growing up, and now play them obsessively as an adult, and in my cumulative thousands and thousands of hours playing Pokemon games since shinies became a thing in Gen 2, I have still only personally encountered one random shiny, and even that one had increased chances since it was on a save with a Shiny Charm.

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The Tales games have co-op, but it's only during the battles and most (if not all) of the games handle the camera in co-op very poorly. It'll still center on Player One even if it means Player Two isn't on screen at all. You don't always need to be visible, exactly, but it's not ideal.

But it's not first person, not isometric, and it's not split screen. Though it doesn't exactly sound like you're necessarily looking for a JRPG, so this suggestion is maybe not that helpful. My younger brother and I had a lot of fun playing through Tales of Symphonia (which has a PC port, though it's rough in places) together a few times, in spite of the not-so-great implementation of the co-op. He liked what basically amounted to backseat driving most of the time but actually getting to play the game himself during the battles.

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NES: Super Mario Bros. 3

I technically owned a Genesis, but it was many years after its release and I bought it almost as a novelty. I guess I owned the NES many years after its release, too, but at the time it was the only console in the house. But yeah, I can't pick something for Genesis.

SNES: A Link to the Past

N64: Paper Mario

GBC: Pokemon Gold Version

GBA: Not sure on this one, I played a lot of games on GBA and remember so few of them. Maybe... Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

GCN: Tales of Symphonia

PS2: I barely owned anything on PS2, unfortunately. Tales of Legendia would be my favorite by default because it was one of the few games I played on it. It's a serviceable Tales game, but not one of the best, not by far.

DS: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

I technically owned a PSP, but did not play much on it. Can not choose a game for it.

Wii: Super Mario Galaxy

PS3: Steins;Gate

360: Bastion

3DS: A Link Between Worlds

Wii U: Tokyo Mirage Sessions

Vita: I had my best experiences with Spelunky on this platform, so for now, that's the one. Though I still use my Vita regularly and could possibly change my opinion, like, tomorrow.

Switch: Breath of the Wild

My family has a PS4 and had an Xbox One for a while, but I'm generally only there during summers and have had so little time with either console (since I spend my gaming time on the Switch, usually...) that I can't pick anything for them.

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According to the edit history, I wrote that page in September of last year, which is right around when loot boxes started getting seriously discussed on major gaming sites (at least, that's my memory of the situation; maybe the discussions started earlier, but I wasn't paying attention to them yet) and also a little while before more mainstream outlets started covering the subject.

At this point, I am of the same sentiment as most everyone on this thread: they're functionally the same thing. For me, the distinction is one of presentation; games with "gacha systems" present their slot machines more like traditional Japanese capsule machines, while games with "loot boxes" present their slots like treasure chests. But that aesthetic difference is pretty much the only distinction between them now.

The pages probably should get combined. While they were things with different meanings at one point, that isn't true anymore.

My only worry about eliminating this distinction from our vocabulary (and/or wiki) is that the long and storied history of Japanese mobile games using predatory monetization tactics would end up buried under the more recent history of Western games fucking up loot boxes. Game developers have been preying on people's vulnerabilities with "it's not gambling because you're not trying to win real money"-style mechanics way, way before Shadow of Mordor (Shadow of War? What did they call it?) or Overwatch.

The massive (seriously massive) success of Puzzle and Dragons in Japan is very likely one of the reasons loot boxes became a thing at all, even though PAD has been making fistfuls of money for years and years and the loot box thing is only really blowing up now. The skill with which they manipulated their player base into spending exorbitant sums of money on their game, even with no promise of a reward... it's frightening. So frightening, in fact, there were actual laws made in Japan that forced PAD to tweak their game in an attempt to make it less predatory. (They found some loopholes and are still very successful, but that's a digression.)

We may not have felt the impact of gacha games nearly as much in the west, but they were hugely impactful in other parts of the world, maintaining massive playerbases and making disgusting amounts of money. The gacha is (was?) a cultural phenomenon in Japan, on the level that something like Pokemon Go was in America. It was a really big deal. There's no justification for distinguishing them from loot boxes anymore, but when people talk about the problems with loot boxes, Puzzle & Dragons and Fire Emblem Heroes don't really enter those discussions. Battlefront and Overwatch and Hearthstone do.

Recent trends in Western game monetization have made the mechanics functionally identical at this point, so yes, they are the same thing. But when you hear someone say "loot box", different games and different news stories come to mind than when you hear someone mention gacha games. I'm all for combining the pages, I just don't want the years and years of predatory monetization schemes utilized by Japanese mobile games to be ignored, because the term "loot box" is mostly evocative of the relatively recent attempts by Western publishers to ruin video games. It doesn't immediately bring to mind the literal thousands of dollars I have spent on gacha games over the last 5+ years that I could've spent on literally anything else and been better off; it doesn't evoke the years and years Japanese mobile developers have been ruining video games in exactly the same way.

In my heart, I want to keep them separate because I have more fun playing the gacha than I do opening loot boxes (even though I actually hate the gacha system enough that I've written multiple blog posts mentioning how toxic it is.) In my brain, though, I know that's ridiculous and that the two terms mean exactly the same thing. I voted "yes" in the poll, too, after all.

If the pages get combined, and I think they should, there should definitely be a section that brings up the rise of gacha games and their influence on the modern loot box, along with what used to distinguish the two from each other. There's a long history of companies preying on people's addictive tendencies through these manipulative mechanics, and I don't want to see it buried and forgotten because the "loot box" discourse is so focused on the more recent (and clunkier) Western implementation of the same predatory practices. Japanese companies have been bringing me financial ruin with their "loot boxes" since I bought my very first smartphone; Overwatch has nothing on Puzzle and Dragons.

tl;dr: Yes, they're the same. But I worry that the years of history of gacha games being awful will be lost if the terms are consolidated, because the term "loot box" is generally used more in discussions of recent triple-A games. I want to hold those mobile games accountable for their years of doing this awful shit.

But yeah, probably combine the pages.

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@genessee: That is a solid endorsement. When I have a functioning Ps3 in my life again, I might give it a shot. Or, you know, they could just do PC ports of the whole Tales catalogue; that'd be cool too.

@facelessvixen: I mean, when you know something's not for you, that's totally fair. It's good to hear that Berseria holds up to someone who isn't a fan, though; I know I have some rose-tinted glasses when it comes to my feelings about the series, so I don't always trust my own opinions of them.

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@wollywoo: Thank you! I have never been huge on The Lord of the Rings, though The Hobbit is a personal favorite.

Anyways, sometimes there doesn't seem to be any cure for whatever hurts in any given moment, and in those cases, it's alright to wait for the wound to heal naturally. There are obviously extremes one can take this to, too; I personally have had serious problems with alcohol in the past, and it was never as effective an escape as Zelda games were, it was just easier to get into that escape headspace in the first place.

So yeah, this is not a universal endorsement of all things escapism or anything, though I feel similarly to Tolkien here. It does not deserve the scorn it gets. And that prison metaphor doesn't feel like a stretch to me, either; I mean, this piece is about coping with being a burn victim through escape. I 100% understand the sentiment.

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#8  Edited By generic_username

Actually, PS+ is how I play Spelunky on my Vita, which I do very frequently. This is moderately distressing. I'm gonna have to actually spend fifteen dollars on a game that easily deserves my money. Damn.

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@wchigo: I totally get where you're coming from with the Legend of Zelda thing. My period of worry and anxiety about the series was a little less concrete than yours, as I mostly got worried about where the series was headed with Skyward Sword. I tried with that game, I gave it an honest shot, playing it for hours and hours longer than I wanted to in the hopes that it would change my mind, but... it never did. Thankfully I had my faith restored fairly quickly with the release of A Link Between Worlds, which is one of my personal favorite Zelda games.

But Breath of the Wild was a similar sense of relief, anyway. Because for me, BotW was definitive proof that Nintendo was still capable of making "greatest games of all time" contenders. It was proof that they could still make industry-changing games like they used to. And as a lifelong Nintendo fan who has stuck with them even during their dark periods, this was an incredible weight off my back. The first video game I ever played was Link to the Past. Losing faith in Nintendo or even just the Legend of Zelda would have been something incredibly difficult for me to get over. Link Between Worlds and especially Breath of the Wild have given me hope that there's a new generation working at Nintendo, and they're doing amazing things.

If you ever want to chat about Zelda stuff, I have a lot to say. Enough that I really, really need to do an entire blog post (or series of them) about Zelda games.

[On my phone keyboard, by the way, so excuse any bizarre typos or grammar, please]

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@pyrodactyl:Tales of Berseria came out on PS4, so that'd be the standout entry you're looking for in my opinion.

@mindbullet: I would agree that the equipment system is a huge hassle. It's overly complicated, and it forces you to wear shitty armor for way longer than you want to. Yuri is probably my favorite Tales protagonist too, for similar reasons. They need to give us a PC port of Vesperia someday. Symphonia got one, so it's not totally out of the question.