CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Yeah, the game toke me by surprise when a cute and cuddly character suddenly turned into red mist. The scene was rather effective as well. You may want to play trough the game before letting your lil sis play it.

I remember the wanderer's multi-target healing to hit random actors, making it unreliable. The character who needed to be healed the most could end up getting maybe only one heal and then subsequently killed. The random nature of that healing made it very unappealing for me. I think I should try a "don't use Lyla" playtrough though and see how it compares to a playtrough where I do use her.

I'm playing it. I'm at chapter 3 and it's fun so far.

If the plush runs out of life and I buy a new, does it have it's level reset to 1? It toke forever to get it to level 2.

author=LockeZ
A lot of people would argue the opposite - that the only reason to play on a harder difficulty is if there are better rewards, and the only reward good enough for playing through the entire game on a higher difficulty is extra content. People enjoy taking risks in games if there is some potential benefit. If you don't get a better ending or more game or anything at all, then many of them just won't see the point. To them, increasing the difficulty is equivalent to throwing away the new armor you just got. Wearing the armor makes you stronger, it improves how well you play, therefore you should do it. Same thing for lowering the difficulty.

Not all people think this way. Some people are achievement whores, some people enjoy doing things they've mastered, some people enjoy trying to become a better player, some people like to cheat, and some people beat a NMNINEQNLBSCCNAMBLAWYSIWYG challenge of FF7 in 7 hours 38 minutes, but are aiming for 7 hours 20 minutes next time. You can't please them all.

If to them increasing the difficulty is the equivalent of throwing away the armor, then they would benefit from getting the full reward from playing at any difficulty. That way they can both keep the armor and get the full reward anyway. But yes, some people do want to play a harder difficulty, but they also want the game to provide a reason for it.

While you can't please everyone, I still think you should pay attention to who you are encouraging to do what. It's not a healthy practice to encourage a child who's very interested in machines and want to work with them when he grows up, to instead become a lawyer. Cutting out major content in order to encourage improvement does seem to me like the equivalent of encouraging every child, regardless of interest, to become a lawyer. It's an unfocused measure that's likely to do a lot of harm compared to the amount of good.

Another example is if you give the player a sad ending on easier difficulties and a happy ending on hard difficulties. Some players like happy endings, some sad and some like variance. However, there is no known correlation between people who wants to play on harder difficulties and people who like happy endings, so you're now again encouraging the wrong people to play the harder difficulty.

I think achievements and other bragging rights enhancers works better. Players who just play a game once and then puts it away is less likely to care about such things. Most people also don't think you get any bragging rights unless you have something to brag about to begin with, therefore it's safer to deny them bragging rights than major content of the game.

There's no perfect way to encourage people to become better, but I think it's better to stick to measures that have a correlation between those it encourages to become better and those who even are interested at becoming better, even if that correlation won't be 100%.

20 minutes? You can probably summarize everything relevant that happens in the first two golden sun games with about 1,000 words. Of course, if they add stuff like "...and then Felix barged in on a trial designed to test an ability that, as far as he knows he doesn't possess, in the hopes of triggering an event flag that would let him proceed" then I can see the 20 minutes.