A single shoot for everything like the cloaca sounds terrible though

For sure, enemy variety is important.

Haha I have thought about that too actually. Mainly because my career path and favorite hobby were both decided by small random moments. It’s definitely made me more open to new experiences.

I also hate grinding but sometimes I get addicted to it. Like my lizard brain likes watching the numbers go up. I recently loaded an old save in final fantasy and saw my level at 99, health at 999/999 and gold at 999999 and was like “I don’t remember grinding any of this”. It happens in a trance.

I agree these games made big improvements but I still see them as bandages to the inevitable problems that came with random encounters. There’s no undoing the interruption of flow you know.

I think it’s a tradeoff though like I said. Because I don’t know how you can have a combat system as cool and creative as say Undertale (blending turn based and realtime bullet hell) or battle network (blending turn based, real time and card game) without it being completely separate from the overworld.

Good point. I guess it is 2 things I’m talking about.

I think battle transitions are a tradeoff. They free combat but at the cost of interrupting flow. If you don’t do anything with the freedom they give you and you just make the same tired pokemon style choose from a menu combat it’s not worth it.

I haven’t played any CRPGs and I’m not familiar with them. Any recommendation of an intro to the genre?

But many of your points are still familiar. Trivial encounters feeling like an annoying waste of time, items or abilities that control the encounter rates, etc.

I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?

That’s a good point. Trivial encounters feel like a grindy and annoying waste of time. I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way though.

I also think Final Fantasy falls too much on the old turn based choose from a menu, watch a cut scene system, when there was room for something more interesting. That’s just taste though I guess. I haven’t even played any other than Final Fantasy I and Tactics Advance maybe they changed.

Nice try, pickpocket

What about all the lions vs all the lionfish?

Can’t get rid of it if I tried

Get ready for the next battle

That’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry about forgetting words. You will forget them, look them up again, forget them look them up again, eventually they’ll stick. Focus on the reading. Don’t treat it like a vocabulary lesson. Every day you’re here to read, as long as you reach the end you’re good, over months you’ll realize you learned a lot of vocabs.

At first because the text will be so dense with new words yes it will take a long time to read, that’s why I typically only read a short maybe half a page per day. Then gradually increase that as your vocabulary grows over months. The goal should be to encounter say 50-100 new words a day. Notice I said encounter not learn.

Those websites where you look up words are really useful. Make sure they have text to speech and read out loud in the language not in English even if you see the translation in English that’s fine.

Also do a lot of listening along with the reading. I usually get myself an audio book and its corresponding text, chop it up into 1 minute and half a page segments, for each segment listen once, then read looking new words up, then listen while reading at the same time a few times, trying to follow a long, looking up any words I forgot, then listen without reading a dozen or so times until I can follow along. Then movd on to the next segment.

Do a lot of reading and listening to material you find interesting. The learning happens in the background.

Reminds me of space force dollars

Nope

Because demographics

You can probably check that out in the performance section of your browser dev tools

No

I think the cgp grey video about thought germs gives a high level overview