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Hey RPG thread, I recently brought Ys 8 for Switch on a whim. I'm 3 dungeons in and i've been really enjoying it, enough that i'm actually pretty disappointed in myself that despite Ys being a long running and decently popular series in a genre I like I don't know anything about it. I'm thinking i'll play through the rest of the series once i'm done with Ys 8 and is there any recommendation for where I should start? I can see a bunch of games got rereleased for PS4 or put on Steam, but what's considered the best of the series?
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Jun 28, 2020 09:30
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 13:33 |
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kirbysuperstar posted:Of the 'party' type Ys, 8 is probably the best but 7 and Celceta are real fun too. The mid-group..a lot of people will say Origins, but I like Oath in Felghana a lot more. Ark of Napishtim isn't bad, but it's the lesser of the three (and the first of that style). 1 & 2 are their own thing and pretty dated but I still think they're fun. Hard to say where you should start, though, probably just whichever catches your fancy. I was thinking of playing Memories of Celceta next but now i'm wondering if I should try one of the games that has a completely different style of play. Sounds like it could be a nice change of pace before going back to the party system. I should also have asked which game has the best soundtrack since I think one of the main reasons i'm loving Ys 8 is that Sunshine Coast has been playing on loop in my head for the past few days. Although the one thing I knew about Ys before I brought the game was that the series is supposed to have excellent music so i'm sure they're all good in that department.
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Jun 28, 2020 11:49
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Man Ys 8 really took its time to introduce the villains. So much so that it's kinda weird there's villains at all. Though, I think i'm kinda down for how even this late into the game it's not afraid to still introduce new things. It wasn't so long ago that the game just introduced a whole time-shifting element which ended up being like one of the main gimmicks of the game. And it hasn't stopped switching things up since then because now we've got global apocalypse via dinosaur attacks. It just wasn't where I expected the game to go.
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Jul 9, 2020 13:29
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Oxxidation posted:i wasn't a fan of the shift, especially in the context of the larger series. no other ys game has a threat even close to what the adephagos represents, it's jarring This is my first Ys game so that didn't really bother me I guess. I'm still just kinda dealing with the idea that the answer to the question of "Why are there dinosaurs on this mysterious island" is that this island is where the apocalypse begins, and the apocalypse is dinosaurs. Anyway, Ys 8 has been really good I think.
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Jul 9, 2020 13:41
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I beat Ys 8. I was pretty down with the sudden threat of a global apocalypse via dinosaur assaults and I was cool with the random revelation that aliens existed and at one point colonised the planet. But they maybe reached too far when an hour before the game ended it suddenly revealed that the world is just the dream of a goddess (who is our parrot) and in preventing the apocalypse we woke her up thus destroying the world until Dana suddenly became a god herself and remade it. Still a great game though. Before playing this game I didn't know anything about it or about the series but I think i'm an Ys fan now. The combat is pretty straightforward but I really liked it. It has a really nice sense of progression, even towards the very end of the game I was unlocking and using new moves and once you start finding accessories that lessen SP usage it's fun to just be spamming skills that used to have only one or two uses. The exploration is pretty great too. I actually collected every chest in the game which I don't think i've ever done in an rpg before, I certainly never tried to. And it's just fun moving around the island, occasionally finding whole mini-dungeons or getting into fights with dinosaurs almost twice my level. The characters are simple but fun. The party are all cool and the npcs are charming. Dana's the only character who's really that important to the plot and she and Laxia are the only ones with an arc but the game seems to understand that and it uses the cast appropriately. It was also one of the rare games where I wasn't bothered by the silent protagonist, probably because Dana's the real main character, but still. The story's fairly barebones but it does the job it needs to and it only really falters towards the last hour or so. Every element of the game is just really solid and it comes together well. I kinda get the feeling Ys 8 is a bit of an odd duck amongst the series. The crafting system, the village and the island exploration kinda feel like potential one-off gimmicks but if the general quality of the games remains similar I think i'm going to really enjoy exploring this franchise. I think i'm moving onto Ys 4 next, hopefully I enjoy it just as much!
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Jul 11, 2020 11:05
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Sakurazuka posted:Uh which Ys 4, the 16-bit ones are going to be a shock after 8 lol The remake probably. Unless there's a reason to play the original instead? E: Memories of Celceta is Ys 4 right? Because that's the one with a cameo so i'm probably playing that one next.
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Jul 11, 2020 11:14
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I guess I didn't realise there were so many Ys 4s.
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Jul 11, 2020 11:25
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FF7R does it alright just by having there be only a few weapons. The rest of the weapon upgrade system is weak but the getting skills part is pretty solid.
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Jul 16, 2020 13:26
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Admiral H. Curtiss posted:Oh don't get us wrong here, Namco is still very cheap when it comes to localizations -- Tales has suffered for a while now from obvious lack of context and cutbacks on especially System text -- but it's still a far cry from a machine translation. Look at that Vita Sword Art Online release for how that looks, or maybe the first Digimon Cyber Sleuth (though even that is probably a step above machine translation). Did they update the Cyber Sleuth translation for the Switch release because it seemed pretty solid to me.
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Aug 19, 2020 00:24
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Oh yeah, the DigiLine was total nonsense but outside of that it seemed good enough.
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Aug 19, 2020 00:31
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Relin posted:what is it with japanese creators and making GBS threads on their games plots post release 3 video games........
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Aug 24, 2020 07:20
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Man, the last few hours of Trails of Cold Steel were a wild ride. The game took a while to really sell me on it but I ended up enjoying it a lot. It's a pretty dang good game I think. Really rude of it to end when it did though. I've heard that it's a good idea to take a bit of a break before jumping into the next entry when playing the Cold Steel games but with that ending feeling like a mid-season finale I can't imagine waiting long to start 2.
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Sep 12, 2020 08:44
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Ethiser posted:XIII has the best combat of any Final Fantasy game no matter how people feel about the other parts of the game. 7R's was better imo but I can see the argument.
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Sep 17, 2020 02:25
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And honestly unless you're doing like the savage versions of trials you don't even really need to like communicate with other plays even during coop content. I played on a JP server and was rarely matched with people using english, so I only interacted with others by occasionally using emotes and I had no trouble playing the game.
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Sep 21, 2020 01:17
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Endorph posted:neku isnt even that bad and idk what nomura has to do with the controversial decision of writing a teenage boy as a slightly whiny, sullen guy whos grumpy when he talks to girls. Neku's cool and I love him and all but he almost murders his partner on day 2 even though she's been nothing but nice to him. Until like Day 4 I don't think he's meant to be particularly likeable. I mean there's 21 days all in all so this is only the first few hours of the game but still. Agree that it's very weird people are blaming the character designer for the writing though.
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Sep 25, 2020 22:26
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The White Dragon posted:yea i'll exaggerate about nomura's OC or whatever--i like to call vincent his OC also--but i think he does pretty good modern-type costume design, and great monster design. it's not like it's a secret that fashion is what he loves; i just think he's utterly incompetent at high-level production and he gets stationed by SE in positions that aren't suited to what he likes/what he's good at. he also makes the other projects he's assigned to suffer because they aren't his baby, kingdom hearts, and i think that's unacceptable behavior for a director. Is this just Versus XIII? Because outside of that game and I think the first Dissida i'm not sure what games outside of KH he was the like main director for. E: I guess I might be underestimating how much pull the producer has in comparison to the director in regards to controlling the direction of games, because he has that role in a lot more stuff. SyntheticPolygon fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2020 23:27
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I mean Versus XIII became XV so i'm not sure they should be counted separately. And yeah the early production of 7R sounded like it was a huge mess but in the end I think the game was great. E: multijoe posted:Maybe not all of them, but when you hear he wanted to retool FFXV into a musical 5+ years into development from watching Les Mis it's hard not to think he was certainly one of the problems I don't think this happened.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:32
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Yeah there's articles that mention it but I can't find the source. It just says "Nomura admitted to wanting to do a Les mis". I've tried to find the source for that interview because it is of course incredibly badass but the closest I could find is in interview for KH3 where he wanted to have one level be a musical and he was shot down because they tried that in KH2 and it was bad.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:41
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multijoe posted:That's the point though, after five years of development the director of the game had no idea what the hell it was. I'm not even saying a musical is a bad idea for a game but as a large scale project manager it makes him sound completely hopeless that after five years of 'development' he could even consider throwing everything out on a whim. Yeah I know that article. I don't think the interview was recorded though and ign just did a story on it after the fact. It's hard to tell how much of a thing it really was or if it was just a joke or whatever because the only source is a short 2013 ign story with no transcript or anything. Like, not to say that Nomura's XV was actually progressing fine because it clearly had enough issues that it was only finished once he was kicked off but I don't think the musical thing was really a contributing factor.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:57
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multijoe posted:I'm not saying it was a major reason for his failure as to finish the project, but it is an insight into how slapdash and unfocused his management of the game was. Like it seems one of the many, many terrible business decisions Square kept making through the late 2000s and 2010s was giving all of their choicest plums to this one guy who clearly does not seem to have the skillset to run a large scale AAA project in any reasonable timeframe. I mean before Versus XIII I think all his games were coming out on time and everything. Yeah sounds like Versus XIII was a total mess under his leadership and him directing 2 of Square's biggest games at the same time was almost certainly a real bad idea and a contributing factor to all the delays but those were hardly the only Square Enix projects in the 2010s that had huge production issues and 7R even ended up being an incredibly good game. I definitely agree that Versus XIII was a failure but I don't think that its part of a larger trend with his management or anything. Though I guess I can see what people were saying about him phoning it in some times because a lot of the KH side games where he was the main director feel pretty half-assed.
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Sep 27, 2020 00:41
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I don't see how he was any worse than your standard silent rpg protagonist. Granted, silent protagonists are lame but I don't think he was more lame than the usual.
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Oct 4, 2020 13:26
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I found the Act 2 ending satisfying enough and never got back into the game for Act 3 so I guess I never realised he suddenly became really annoying.
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Oct 4, 2020 13:35
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I mean, Crono's ok I guess. There's just enough there for you to get hints of a personality but it's still basically standard hero stuff. He's easily the least interesting of the party.
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Oct 4, 2020 14:15
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Easy combat is much much better than actively bad combat.
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Oct 15, 2020 22:09
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I played Vesperia after Abyss and I definitely felt it was worse. Everybody just felt slower and their normals were bad and fatal strikes existed. It wasn't a great time.
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Oct 15, 2020 22:40
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Locking mechanics until later in the game isn't Vesperia's problem. It's that hitting buttons and fighting things isn't fun until like 70% of the way through the game when you finally unlock skills that make characters feel like they're functioning as meant to. And even then the combat's not like great it's just decent, I still found it worse than Abyss.
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Oct 16, 2020 00:48
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Infinity Gaia posted:Well, agree to disagree. I had fun right from the start trying to maximize the amount of sword spins I could tack on in a single Yuri combo. It's certainly more fun than Berseria to me, and it's not nostalgia goggles, I replayed most of the series last year and Vesperia, while not my favorite (that's still Graces F) still has a pretty high ranking. That's fair, combat really hurt the game for me though and felt like a huge step down from Abyss which y'know is mostly just a serviceable and solid battle system. Yuri's just so slow, same with the rest of the party.
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Oct 16, 2020 00:55
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Amppelix posted:this is a weird sentiment to me. action combat can only be blazingly fast twitch action? For real though like Tales games aren't blazing fast or anything, even the more recent ones. But Vesperia's slow even among some of its contemporaries in the series. Fine if you like it but there's other Tales games with slowish combat that I think are better.
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Oct 16, 2020 01:58
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Endorph posted:literally my only complaint with duvalie is that weird line in cs3 where she kind of has a crush on rean and its never acknowledged again, and the random bit towa has about angelica and george is way weirder than that so its forgivable Dang, Crow has a line about that in CS1 and I was really hoping it was just never going to come up again. Which I guess it sounds like it doesn't outside of one other time, but it's still really strange it happens twice.
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Oct 17, 2020 08:56
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Starting SC has definitely increased my enjoyment of Estelle, I was expecting the lack of Josh to make an impact but like more's done with Estelle in the first chapter of SC then the entirety of the first game. It's been fun. Though, i'm a good ways into CS2 as well and i'm still not really understanding all the complaints about Rean i've seen. Like, yeah he's kinda lame and there's some writing around him that's pretty obnoxious but he's largely fine I feel? Maybe something will click later but after probably spending over 100 hours with him he's alright. Not as fun as Estelle though.
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Oct 17, 2020 09:19
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Endorph posted:CS3 ramps up the harem stuff with Rean a bit but otoh the character whos the most forward about her crush on him is also my favorite of the new characters, so. I kinda figured it'd be something like that, just because i've seen a bunch of complaints about harem stuff but while I know there's a relationship system in the first two games the writing only really seems to push Alisa and to a lesser extent Towa. There's some stuff in a couple bonding events I suppose, and they always feel really out of place when they happen but most bonding events feel strangely disconnected from like the actual story. E: Oh and Alfin's crush which is always pretty bad when it comes up. SyntheticPolygon fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 09:29
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Josh is bad because Estelle's a fun character but once you're out of chapter 1 in FC her only real arc is her relationship with him, and hoo boy is it real lame.
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Oct 17, 2020 12:50
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The last thing Matsuno wrote was the Ivalice raids in XIV and the writing in those sucked so I think i'd be fine with a new Ogre Battle or FFT without him.
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Nov 3, 2020 02:38
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I don't mind puzzles in rpgs for the most part but I really can't think of any dungeons that like really benefit from the existence of puzzles beyond like puzzles giving them a bit more identity. I don't think they detract from the dungeon crawling experience or anything but i legitimately can't think of a time i've thought that a puzzle really made a dungeon great or anything. Though in general I can't think of many dungeons I really adore either. Like, Ys 8 is a game that I think has great dungeons but that's because it's an action rpg with fast movement that feels really fun. Dashing around the island and exploring the place is really cool so doing the same in a mountain or a forest is just as fun. Most rpgs don't have particularly fun feeling movement or exploration which is fine because its not what they're about but i'd say that's way more important to selling me on a dungeon than some simple puzzles or light variety.
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Nov 24, 2020 07:05
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Commander Keene posted:Yeah, I think as long as you don't use the class-change items, the game won't give you dupes until you have every one you can use. I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Unless it got patched since I played.
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Jan 3, 2021 00:56
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Neddy Seagoon posted:That explains quite a bit really. Was Kanji an option as well, I assume? If they're talking about the leaks I remember then it was just Yosuke. Though knowing how the persona dev team usually approaches those topics I wouldn't be surprised if it was cut real early in development and Yosuke has really terrible gay jokes not as part of a character arc that was scrapped but because the writers think that casual homophobia is funny.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:11
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Jazerus posted:in light of p5 i understand why it's hard to give the persona team any benefit of the doubt, but p4 has always felt to me like an earnest attempt to engage with queerness at a time when RPGs were, uh, not doing that at all. but somebody higher up was not really on board, took out stuff that made it work (like the yosuke romance), and then p5 was heavily managed to be as "not gay" as possible as a reaction to p4 being relatively bold I don't want to say you're wrong or anything, it was my viewpoint for a while and I think there's an argument to be had there. But I just think the whole Yosuke 'romance' is tenuous at best and it often feels like an excuse to explain that the game's lovely jokes were originally not so lovely, and considering those jokes weren't totally uncommon in 2008 and that the same team would repeat similar gags in 2016 I don't really buy it.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:40
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Justin_Brett posted:Hacker's Memory has some decent implied and more-or-less explicit representation for that crowd, more than I expected from a Digimon game. Cyber Sleuth also has one confirmed gay character but just as a gag, although thankfully not one that makes fun of him. I mean Fei’s gay and she isn’t really treated as a gag or anything. I guess it’s not exactly ‘explicit’ but I dunno how you could read her any other way.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:26
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Justin_Brett posted:She was the 'more-or-less', since while they do the expected dancing around the topic if you bring it up and neither of them outright say so, the tape you find in Hacker's Memory about her cooking for Yuuko is just straight-up called 'Time Spent with a Lover', which, yeah, you can't take in any way but that. Yeah totally, I just meant Fei was in base Cyber Sleuth too. Even if not as much as in Hacker's Memory. Forgot about that Lillymon quest though. Cyber Sleuth has some good quests.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:50
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 13:33 |
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CharlestheHammer posted:To be fair Josh is never really presented as adopted outside the sense where family members would adopt random a lot in 80s and 90s sitcoms. It’s a bit weirder for Rean as being a part of the family is kind of important to his backstory tho I dunno, maybe it's just because I played the first two Sky games a couple of months ago but Josh is pretty much presented as adopted. Like, obviously there's Cassius always calling him his son but FC also definitely has a bunch of times where people will question whether Estelle is into Josh and she'll get embarrassed and deny it saying he's her brother. I guess it's less of a thing in SC but it's definitely not gone. Estelle gets stuck in an illusion where she's a child again and starts thinking of Josh when her parents bring up she's going to have a new sibling soon. One of the last lines in the game is her at Josh's family grave and saying something like how she tried to be his sister but now they're dating. And it sucks a lot.
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Jan 19, 2021 22:48
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