I enjoyed them all, but Asylum was my favorite by far. It struck a perfect balance between being a tight, contained experience, while giving you a great set of tools to deal with things as you saw fit. It was claustrophobic in a great way, and you felt like an apex predator when you figured out how to work within the constraints.

The rest of them feel excessive in comparison, both being too open and giving you too many tools to work with. I never felt like I could get into a “flow state” with them like I could with Asylum.

If you want some really wild old storage tech, a normal VHS cassette could hold 3-5gb of data. But we didn’t have any use for that much storage at the time, and CDs were taking over by the time we did, so nobody bought the VHS storage hardware.

Archive.org is also doomed, I’ve seen to that one personally.

If you want impressive, you have 4-6 seperate terminal windows that take up the whole screen collectively. The laymen assume you’re hacking the NSA or something if they see that.

There are situations where it can be helpful, but in general I don’t think intentional cross-posting is going to help. It could just as easily homogenize the communities and stifle what momentum we do have.

Communities will establish themselves organically over time, as we’ve seen with every platform before this. Trying to force it, or really influence the process at all, is just as likely to rub some folks the wrong way and lead to more fragmentation.

Until things settle, it seems like a more effective tactic is to choose where you want to focus your attention and add to the content in a natural way. Instead of cross-posting, just decide on a “main” community for any given topic for yourself and contribute there in a meaningful way. If another community in the same space looks like it’s taking over, reevaluate where you want to place your focus. Help build somewhere for the sake of building, but not for the sake of the numbers.

Alternatively, just ignore the “problem” completely and trust the process. Post in the first relevant community that springs to mind. Engage with posts as they come through your feed without paying any mind to the size of the source. The most important thing is increasing total user count across the Fediverse, and diverse activity can be a huge drive for that.

9 was even worse for that, every fight drags on for ages. It’s the only one I struggle to replay.

For 8, it’s generally best to avoid combat anyway because of the way level scaling worked. Enemies get stronger much faster than you do, even with good junctions. And it seems like the devs knew this a, since Diablos is available so early and built for low-level play. It lets you reduce or eliminate random encounters (and very cheaply), lets you refine status magic that comes in handy at low levels, and its attack has great utility against hard targets.

The slower fights aren’t as big of a deal when you aren’t doing as many of them, they feel more “cinematic” instead.

If you haven’t already, definitely give 4 a try. The gameplay isn’t as polished, but you can see where everything you loved about 5 came from. And the story/characters are arguably even better than 5.

Multiple lists. Short-term, medium-term, long-term, “maybe eventually”. If one of them starts to feel like too much, I can kick some things down to the next one.

They’re also kinda based on how much focus will be needed to complete things, not just how important or time-sensitive things are. The medium/long lists are mostly stuff for “good brain days”.

The only reason would be playing games online, old firmware gets locked out a couple weeks after an update releases.

But there’s also no real reason not to if you’re already running CFW. As long as Luma is reasonably up-to-date, a system update can’t break anything.