Ne0

Yeah, sotenbori arena is much better as it allows the player to retain all the cash+rewards+xp and takes him back to the entrance upon defeat. Also the enemies there are constant and expected. As i remeber, when i played, the party was at around 35-36 when entered and by exit, it was around 43-44. Arena levels 26-30 give lot of cash and xp and best for grinding. Yokohoma tunnels on the other hand is purely luck based, both w.r.t rewards and enemies, you might get very low return for the time invested and any defeat is game over and you've to reload previous save. There're some Save points inside the tunnels, but it's sparse. Also, i usually followed the storyline and didn't really explore outside unless a sub story or main story sent me specifically to an area. So i didn't feel the need to grind at all. The difficulty increases steeply from chapter 12 onwards and that's where sotenbori arena opens up. Bonding won't exceed the current level outside of survive bar. For ex, if bonding level is near to 1, by eating together etc it can only reach until 1 and stays there. To move beyond the level, ichiban has to initiate conversations at survive bar. The party members have their own sub stories and at the highest bonding level, ichiban usually gets to play out the sub story finale/help out the party member concluding the sub story arc. I think there are 4-5 bonding levels per character, don't remember this number exactly though. Jobs wise, i had set ichiban to hero, adachi to enforcer, nanba was the default one, saeko as idol (i think that's the healer). You'll get more party members later on, so i used nanba only when i needed his skills. Also not sure if you found this out already, but you can swap out party members even during battles, anyone can do it, but one turn is lost. Also don't hesitate to use pound mates, some enemies are weak to specific attributes and summoning pound mates might help against tough boss fights.

Nice setup, is that custom made table ?

Well I'm almost towards the end of like a dragon (i think last but one chapter), and I've to say this is like the best in the series. There's full English language support, so you're not forced to read subs and much better side stories and charcters. Some points: - There's lot of grinding, especially when chapter 12 starts. So get that mindset and adjust the difficulty (easy/normal). - Complete sub stories as and when they open up, some of them give really good rewards like companions who can assist in battle. Some of them like Nancy Chan makes some of the boss fights manageable. - Don't spend too much time grinding in Yokohama underground tunnels, waste of time. Until chapter 12, i didn't feel the need for grinding. - Once sotenbori arena opens up, try it before attempting the chapter 12 boss. It easily helps levels up by 10. - Have atleast one healer (saeko) and one tank(adachi) in the party. Get the jobs changed as soon as it opens up in the game. Job xp and level xp levels up separately. - Invest in bonding by ensuring ichiban talks to party members in the survive bar. The passive party members gain good xp this way. - Eating at certain resturants increases bonding and also buffs up the party. Invest in that regularly. - Money can be saved in in-game poppo shops. Losing battles, results in los of half of income of you want to retry boss battles, better save up often.

First, why should we as customers worry about business sustainability ? That's for their investors/share holders/suits to decide. As long as it's avilable at low price, let's make the most of it and enjoy while it lasts. Second, just for argument sake, looking at/having worked in this sw dev industry for over 1.5 decades, i can say that it looks mostly to be a cash burn project for some time to come. But i don't think MS is looking at profitability right now. Their goal looks to be to create/turn Xbox into a platform, something like their office, which will have it's dedicated customers at internet scale, paying for services and third party Dev's paying MS for hosting their games on it's platform. Maybe they want to be the fb of gaming in the long run (like marketplace for buying in game assets, a social network of online gamers etc etc), who knows ? If your see gamepass/xcloud is not limited to consoles, it's on Android/iPhone too. Expensive acquisitions like Activision won't payoff in the short term, but will help them churn/maintain content for this ubiquitous platform that they're planning to build for years to come. Again, all this is pure speculation, it may work out or not, nobody knows. But as consumers, we should not be worried so much about their balance sheets or what their long term plans are. I atleast would be happy if a time comes when i can play my AAA games on my mid range laptop/tv directly thru some cloud based gaming subscription, instead of having to buy a plastic box every few years.

It'll take time, for ex, in PS2/ps3 era, most gamers in India still preferred gaming on pc with cracked games and whatnot, but by the ps4 gen, there were far many who were playing paid games. Of course, market share wise, it's still small as compared to the pubg crowd or the western console gaming market. But i feel, with time and decent local friendly pricing, it might grow steadily to a decent size.

Times are changing, may not reach mobile scale on consoles anytime soon, but with right price of consoles+subscription, i think gamepass can grow to a decent audience in India.

That's just one perspective, not the full picture. I feel, low cost consoles like xss+gamepass lowers the barrier of entry for a whole lot of gamers, especially in developing countries like India, where spending $70 on one game might sound unreasonable/out of reach, but ₹500 per month to access a large catalog of games might sound more vfm. Having an internet scale(100 million+) subscriber base would be a much more reliable revenue stream, which would mean more opportunities for gamedevs, not less. Anyway, i think that's where MS is going with gamepass (revenue by subscription volume instead of royalty thru specific titles).

I feel Bollywood should first stop copying and invest in same good writers/musicians. Earlier they used to copy Western movies/songs etc and now they're copying Southern language movies/songs etc. Bollywood's strength was pre-dominantly in music/rom-com/family/drama movies, especially after the angry young man's era of AB. Just look at top grossing Hindi/Bollywood movies and more than 50% if them would be from these genres. Instead of playing to their strengths and making good decent original movies , they are simply remaking hit movies just to get in the multi hundred crore club. Maybe they think it's risk free, but they're losing the audience who would've seen these movies already on ott/dubbed versions on tv or in theaters in the original language. Also they need to stop relying on the same handful of actors for big budget movies. Anyway, I'm no movie business expert, but i think Bollywood really need to get it's act together, else it's going to start losing relevance in the coming years.

Saw kgf: 2 in theaters finally, first movie in theater after a long break of 2 years. I don't know if the theater's audio had some issue, but the movie was played at full volume, way too loud. Apart from that, it's quite good, and kept me engaged until the end. The movie picks right where the first one ended, and goes at breakneck pace. The style of narration is non linear with events from multiple places/timelines playing out together in parallel to create short bursts of euphoric whistle-worthy scenes. It's a larger than life spectacle movie and doesn't pretend otherwise for a minute. Overall, it's bigger and more badass compared to the first movie, and Yash really rocks throughout the movie with his amazing screen presence.

Nah dude, I've actually played more variety of games thanks to gamepass. I never seriously took jrpg before, but this game called 'yakuza: like a dragon' has me hooked in. Same with this other game called 'desperados 3' which i finished to completion over few months. I hardly play like 4-5 hours a week these days, but good enough to complete the ones I start. Best part is, if i get bored in between, i don't feel so bad to drop it (ex Greedfall) and just move onto something else on gamepass.

Yeah saw like half of it, it's based on a real story too. This was a complete surprise, didn't know about this guy at all, debuting in ipl at 41 years, that's really something

Haven't seen Ludo, but 83 was decent. The riots thing felt a little far fetched, did that really happen ?

It's the same handful of actors/directors making most of the mainstream movies since the past 2 decades. I know it's the producers money and all that, but i feel, nepotism might have a role in the steady decline of Bollywood cinema. I thought OTT might infuse some new talent, but even they've started taking these same known faces and the regular mainstream directors. I fail to understand why a multi hundred crore industry decides to operate in such a closed manner.

Nice, I thought it's releasing tomorrow ?

NPCs are really bad in the game. For ex, whenever v gets out of her mega building, there would be 2 cops having food/discussing something. And then, everytime v passes thru it's the same exact conversation. It's literally like a background motion wallpaper that keeps running in a loop.