ARGH'S PROFILE

Beautiful. I chose to save the world, but somehow I missed the area for planting the seed! Unfortunate.

And what's this about a new version? :o

I would recommend it, the joke is quite funny. Supposedly it's also possible to beat Prattle in the opening cutscene, but I gave up on that one.

Oh hey! This is a pleasant surprise. I was worried you had abandoned this page entirely. A shame about the Greenlight, but some people do get pretty hung up on art.

Personally, I agree that though a challenging game can be fun, there is fun to be had in figuring out how to break a game too. If you didn't intend for the battles to be terribly challenging, then I think the gamebreakiness is fine. A lot of those exploits (like farming infinite epiphanies) take a lot of time and are only feasible after you've completed most of the game anyway. Maybe fix the l'espirit de l'escalier bug since it was unintentional, unless you want to legitimize it?

I would say that Reinvention deserves some consideration though. That's easily the most gamebreaking thing, since it makes you practically invincible and lets you stall battles indefinitely. When something turns the secret boss' "you lose now" attack into a slap on the wrist, I think that's going a bit too far. Empty Mind at least requires proper timing and if I remember correctly has a higher cost. Anemnesis might also need rebalancing; though I do like the idea of subverting typical RPG mechanics by giving well-coordinated players infinite mana, it is what enables a lot of the bigger exploits and doesn't really have any drawbacks. Avoiding all damage on rebuttal triggers is also a little extreme.

In general, I think it's really that the player just gets so many options and combos; my experience was that the early game was difficult when I had few options and no idea what I was doing, and the midgame was decently challenging, and then the game kept giving me more skills until I could do pretty much anything. That was probably the intention though, and it is quite fun to play around with everything! Enemies remain varied and interesting enough to keep the game engaging even if they don't put up much of a fight, I think.

(In regards to the puzzle side of things, I'd really appreciate a better hint on how to get the prismatic claw. If it was just a cool Easter egg its obscurity would be fine, but since it's necessary to get the full story there should really be a way to find it other than blindly stumbling around in the attic. Maybe tweak the Composer's hint to mention it.)

Something to push the player toward the Forgotten Plantation early might also be nice? Maybe I just outfoxed myself, but I went on the sandbox logic of wanting to do all the sidequests before starting the story, even though that's a bad idea since everything outside of the Plantation is way beyond the starting party's capability and there's nothing that indicates that in advance.

That's a shame, I will miss them. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

I would like to request you revive the one on religion in videogames if nothing else, as one of my Dragon Quill reviews references it, so whatever poor soul stumbles across my thoughts on Final Fantasy X will probably be a little confused now.

Edit: So hm, will How Far be postponed while you work on The Tenth Line? That's a bit unfortunate, but this new project does look quite interesting. It'll be neat to see you branching out into a new universe.

Edit edit: Wait, are the dev blogs for IMTS and The Drop gone too? I do feel like those should be backed up somewhere, since they contain a lot of useful trivia and behind-the-scenes stuff people can't find anywhere else. Also I referenced them a lot in my review series so that's more broken links I'll have to remove.

Ah, paying attention to NPCs pays off! That is pretty convoluted, though. I get that it's supposed to be vague, but after the very explicit directions in the previous steps it really threw me off.