DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Count me with Ilan as one of the people who likes seeing relationship systems in games. I mean, I guess some of them have crappy implementations, but I'm usually sympathetic to the attempt anyway. I feel like video games are actually an uncommonly good medium for conveying romances, whose potential has so far gone dismally untapped.

Other likes/dislikes:

Distinct character roles. I like it when every character has their own particular usefulness in gameplay which doesn't overlap too much with other characters. The Wild Arms games (at least as far as the ones I've played) are all good at this, giving each character both a distinct combat role, and a set of unique tools they contribute to the solving of puzzles. The Suikoden games do a surprisingly good job with really large player casts. On the other end, Final Fantasies VII and VIII pretty much completely throw this out, and XII amounts to the same thing by endgame.

Interesting inspectable environments. Visual appeal is nice for the games with the resources to pull it off, but I care more about having plenty of things to poke for entertaining text. In fact you could probably string me along for a whole game with this alone, like in the walkaround portions of Prequel Adventure, even though it might not even qualify as a game anymore. On the flipside, I hate games that hide random useful items around scenery which is otherwise non-interactive. Who likes clicking every fucking barrel in town to find out which ones have some kind of permanent stat-raising fruit inside? It makes grinding on monsters seem like the height of entertainment by comparison.

If it's not too long and too difficult, I personally like the occasional mandatory minigame. If they're done well, I think they can help diversify the narrative, not just the gameplay, by putting the characters in situations which they can't resolve by finding the next enemy to kill dead. I generally thought Final Fantasy VII did a good job handling this. There were plenty of mandatory minigames, but they were mostly brief and never really required you to win as such, you just got greater or lesser advantages depending on how well you did. If you're lousy at the submarine combat minigame, you'll still get a submarine in the end, but it helps break up a narrative which would become tedious if all the conflicts were resolved by swording things to death.

I never did manage to pull off the huge materia unlocking minigame to get Bahamut ZERO without using a guide though.

You know, I decided near the middle of my first playthrough that Nel was my favorite of the available characters, and I tried to aim for her ending, and failed to get it. I tried to aim for it from the beginning of a later playthrough, and failed again. I tried using a guide from near the beginning of another, later playthrough, and discovered that as close to the beginning as I was, I had already missed a lot of points with Nel even though it she hadn't even been introduced yet. I quit and never picked it up again.

While it's definitely suspicious, depending on how many applicants they receive for the position, it strikes me as plausible that they might just not give a thorough reading to more than a small fraction of resumes. If I remember correctly, the average time recruiters spend checking a resume is only a few seconds (this article says six,) so there's probably an element of randomness in whether even a single recruiter takes notice of anything in a resume enough to give it a further reading in that time, and there may be more than one recruiter working their way through the applicants.

The first application might have been rejected out of hand for having the disability box checked, but if the same recruiter looked at both applications, if they paid much attention to the first one, they probably would have noticed that the second one (which they clearly did pay attention to) was a repeat application. Unless it refers to specific content in the application, I'd assume the email which claims that you didn't meet qualifications was a stock rejection message, because companies generally don't put any significant time investment into reaching out to all the people they don't consider hiring.

I'm another one who pretty much always finishes the games I start. I sometimes left games unfinished when I was a kid if I got hopelessly stuck, back before I could just check GameFAQs or something, but I'd generally come back and finish them eventually as I got older and better able to figure stuff out.

There have been a few games which pissed me off to the point that I permanently dropped them though. Final Fantasy X-2 was one. I made it far enough for the final dungeon to be accessible, but I found the encounters inside overwhelmingly too powerful for my party. The basic idea is that you're supposed to tackle enough of the various sidequests and subplots before you're strong enough to complete it, and most of the game is composed of said sidequests. And normally, I'm extremely completionist with this kind of optional content. But the fact that I just wanted to head straight for the final dungeon to wrap things up, and got pissed off when I realized I had to go back and play more of the game, drove home just how obnoxious I'd been finding most of the game up to that point. Once I realized I couldn't see finishing the game as anything other than a chore, I put it aside for good. It's one of very few games I have never attempted to replay.

Rogue Galaxy is another one which just completely failed to win me over. I bought it in a spate of buying up PS2 games on Amazon, and I considered it a more disappointing purchase than Okage: Shadow King, which I bought around the same time, which I paid for and was simply never delivered. While I can appreciate a finely constructed or innovative gameplay experience (which Rogue Galaxy didn't offer,) I approach RPGs primarily as a storytelling medium. A lot of reviewers criticized Rogue Galaxy for having cliche storytelling, but plenty of games I've enjoyed (Grandia and Forever's End for instance) have gotten the same criticism. But Rogue Galaxy isn't just cliche, it's just flat out inane. Every scene made me want to punch the writers. It's not even funny-bad, just endlessly, tediously irritating.

Final Fantasy V was another. Probably if I'd played it as a kid I'd have finished it eventually (although the combat is way harder than VI, and it probably would have taken me a while to figure out how to finesse it.) But by the time I actually played it, the writing just came off as juvenile. I wasn't sold enough on the plot and characters to put in the effort to finish it (and either that game takes a lot of grinding to develop the job skills necessary to handle the combat effectively, or I was just playing it wrong.)