Christian

I began writing this comment with the intention of answering your question, but it actually ended up mainly being me venting myself.

Obviously no, it’s never been a flawless experience, but a few months back I decided I wanted to try gaming so I put an nvidia card in my pc and reinstalled linux to start fresh. All of the examples you’ve given sound like the sort of problems I’ve had since then, but never in the ten years before when I was using intel integrated graphics. I was aware going in that nvidia is massively more problematic than AMD, but this card was a spare from someone I know.

Obviously there are games I can run well now that were unrealistic before, but there are also a couple 2D games with SNES-quality graphics that I’ve tried which spike my CPU to 100% and lag like crap in spite of working perfectly before I installed the card. I’ve had two experiences where a game suddenly has issues immediately after an update to the nvidia-utils package. I’m not new to linux, but I am new to gaming on it and I’ve kind of given up on troubleshooting this stuff in favor of “maybe there will be an update tomorrow that fixes this”.

There’s reason for optimism, everyone is saying the situation is steadily improving because nvidia has been much more cooperative in the past couple years. It’s not realistic to say you won’t find annoyances regardless, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of your struggles are a direct result of decades of one company’s deliberate decision to ignore pleas to stop making life as hard as they possibly can on software developers trying to support their hardware.

Telling my five-year-old that if they can beat Ecco the Dolphin in front of me I will take them out for ice cream, but I’m not sitting down to watch more often than once a week.

I remember not enjoying this one anywhere near as much as Dawn of Sorrow. I remember I saved right before a boss fight that I was pretty confident was Dracula and would be the final boss (could have been mistaken in thinking that though) and then never felt compelled to actually enter that room and finish the game. There was also a plot turn that kind of annoyed me just because I had been expecting it from the start of the game. I did enjoy the voice acting during the boss battle where he keeps yelling at you for being a “stupid disciple” though.

I clicked your link not expecting to watch more than thirty seconds but watched the full thing, that was a great lecture.

Being clichés was exactly it, I would find all of the other things perfectly tolerable if the characters had depth. I think three of the four introductions I saw just felt like “this character has actual values that you, the player, will totally align with” but completely hamfisted. If the protagonists are going to be the good guys then a story making that clear should be enough, rather than having “being the good guy” be an entire personality at the very start. (The exception to that came across as a generic oonga boonga beast woman, so having her dialogue be the least taxing for me to read was not exactly reason for optimism.)

I expected they’re all going to be given more depth as the story advances but I didn’t feel excited to wait around to see if that makes them less annoying, especially with four more intro stories remaining.

If you’ve played the second game I would like an opinion on if that one has a better cast.

I tried the first one a few years back and it seemed right up my alley as far as art style and gameplay but I gave up after finding my fourth character because all four of them had personalities and dialogue that were grating on me. I like jrpgs and I can’t remember another one I bailed on explicitly because I found the dialogue annoying.

When I looked through reviews they seemed mostly positive, and even for the critical reviews that did share my complaint it was mostly an afterthought to other concerns that were not a big deal to me personally. If anyone felt similarly and also tried out the sequel I’d really like to know if it’s any better in that regard because I really wanted to like the first one.