It took a lot of inspiration from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but the two games had basically the same creative team anyway.

I’ll point out that you can use Dragon Age Keep to plan out key choices in the narratives of the first two games, and even create a world state for import into Inquisition. Helpful if you want to play Inquisition and want a refresher and/or don’t want to replay the earlier games

I think those screenshots look like something closer to Ogre Battle or the recently released Unicorn Overlord rather than any RTS.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

Well, there’s the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer™ to you, even if you aren’t interested. I guess they assume that you’ll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there’s my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube’s algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.

I see where the disconnect is now.

I, and presumably others, associate obsession with religious minutiae with religious fervour. I have a lot first hand experience with this, as some of the most ardent Christians I knew were also the ones who were eyeballs deep in apologetics and church history (and also adult converts). It makes a certain amount of logical sense too, as you wouldn’t expect a casual church-goer to care that much about all that.

With that in mind, it isn’t a big leap to connect the original post to the phenomenon of the zeal of the convert.

What it comes down to, then, is that the original post has more than one layer to it. Rather than focus on the difference between charity and dogmatism, I chose instead to highlight contrast between the simplicity [of charity] and the convolution [of dogmatism]. Once again, my personal experiences informed the way I approached this post.

I’m completely lost. How and when did this become about religious people behaving badly? I am 99.9% sure that the point of the original topic was a commentary on how recent converts tend to be more enthusiastic about their faith than people raised in the church, regardless of what the individual beliefs actually are. The example beliefs from the original post (“feed the poor” and “women shouldn’t drive”) are just examples to help characterize this dichotomy in an amusing way.

In fact, that second example, about women and driving, is almost certainly not an actual Catholic doctrine. Any search for the full phrase leads only to reposts of this image, and I’d wager it was made by just stringing together some Christian buzzwords for humorous effect. While I don’t doubt some Catholics do believe women shouldn’t drive, I also very much doubt they’d use the phrasing and justification found in the original post.

Why would I need to be more specific about the different branches of Catholicism? The author in the screenshot doesn’t do that either. They simply point out their observation that lifelong Catholics tend to value broad teachings that aren’t necessarily specific to Catholicism, while adult converts become fanatical about doctrinal minutiae. In other words, the former is relaxed about their faith, while the latter is zealous.

I then related that to my own experiences, where someone who is raised in a belief system tends to be less aggressive about those beliefs than someone who converts to later in life - i.e. the “zeal of the convert.” This observation isn’t exclusive to Catholicism, it’s just being made into relation to it in this instance. This phenomenon isn’t even exclusive to religion, as one can observe it with political beliefs as well.

I don’t think anything here requires a differentiation between branches of Catholicism, because the observations are about the act of converting, not about what specific belief system the converts moving to and from.

The “belief” in this case is Catholicism.

I’d say this is part of the “zeal of the convert” phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.

There’s probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.

I mean, I didn’t develop my own musical taste until my mid-20s. My parents only played Christian worship music, while all my friends in highschool and university were various flavours of music snob. I was literally convinced that no one actually liked pop music because everyone I knew seemed to hate it.

I don’t know if I was ever a “people pleaser,” in that I never pretended to like a band or song just because everyone else did. However, I definitely avoided saying anything negative about the music I was exposed to for fear that I’d be ostracized all the same.

It took me a long time to overcome all that, and it took even longer to admit my tastes publicly.

Part of it is the pendulum of Canadian politics. The Liberals have been in power for a long time and enough people in the “great Canadian middle” have swung over to the Conservative side. That makes the prospects of another Liberal government forming in the next election are slim.

But also, yes, there are some people who hate Trudeau on principle. My holidays this year were exhausting.

Don’t be afraid to mess around with the class system and try out things beyond the default mono-elemental classes. There’s no penalty for changing your class setup every so often, or even after every fight

Maybe Radiant Historia fits your bill. It’s a JRPG by Atlus originally on the DS, with a remaster on the 3DS. You can time travel to different nodes in the story and the game will replay identically, which of the “loop” part. It has a branching storyline stemming from a choice early in the game, and you have to hop to the other branch to get abilities and information for the other.

My story is a bit different than others. I am not a Trekkie, and most of what I know about the franchise is from cultural osmosis and from catching the odd rerun of TNG in the 90s.

I have, however, been a junior officer in a ship, and much of Lower Deck’s content struck a chord because I’ve been there. I’ve been assigned the banal tasks, I’ve argued with other crew members on an opposite watch, and I’ve had to fight for the attention of the senior officers.

Disclaimer: I am not encouraging you to join the navy just to enjoy LD. That would be silly.

The only Canon printer I ever owned was a piece of garbage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t just select my home wifi from a list like literally any other network-enabled device. I instead had to select an option buried several layers deep in the menus to have it try to automatically connect to an open network. Only after waiting 5 minutes for this to fail would it show a list of available networks.

Of course, it also forgot the network and password settings every time it lost power, so I had to go through the whole process again after time I unplugged the thing to clean behind the shelf.

I mean, it should have died years ago the last time they unceremoniously dumped talent over apparently ideological reasons, but they survived.

Granted, this time is different because now they are losing their primary breadwinner. They plodded along before because ZP still brought in people. This wound may actually be fatal.

It looks like there’s a lot of Ogre Battle in there as well.

I seem to remember them being surprised by the success of Bravely Default, not expecting a deliberately old-school RPG to appeal to modern audiences.

The cynical part of me believes this is performative on their part - they know a game like that will be popular, but it won’t be the most popular thing ever and they won’t make all the money. So, they try to push bigger games that are more easily monetized in hopes that people will just forget their own preferences.

My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.

I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).

Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.