Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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@Mariotag late reply! Sorry! Happy new year to you too

The ads really ruined a couple of binge-watching sessions I had. I remember I was binge-watching the first season of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure back in September and the ads were the WORST there compared to previous months when I watched on Crunchyroll. The ads were okay back when I was watching anime in January-March (episodes were still littered with them but they’d actually start), but with JoJo, the ads on that would either just not play and take minutes to start, replay the same ads over again, and I’d always have to keep leaving the app and going back to the show to fix it. It didn’t help a lot given I did most of the binge-watching late at night at the end of the day since I was busy earlier, so it would sometimes go on for long and I’d get sleepy before starting the next episode. I was usually only able to finish one episode a night because the ads went on for too long and never started.

It gave you trouble when you did a free trial? Was it because they charged you even though your trial ended? I hear issues like that sometimes happening with free trials on streaming services that are not the greatest quality. I was considering subbing to a higher sub so I could watch a few more episodes and seasons of anime I saw for free on Crunchyroll, but I’m not really sure I would actually use it actively. I feel like I’d only use it for the following seasons of JoJo, but the fifth and most recent season of JoJo isn’t even on there and is locked on Netflix, and Crunchyroll only has four of five seasons, so I don’t think it would be worth it for me to get it, plus I wouldn’t be able to see all JoJo episodes in time with a 7-day trial.

I don’t actually remember Hulu originally being free since it’s been so long ago, but I remember Netflix used to be at a much better price, had none of those tiers and didn’t have shows being locked and unwatchable on lower and cheaper tiers, plus it had all your favorite shows and movies in one place and you didn’t need to get multiple services to watch what stuff you like. Physical media was also far more popular than digital. Although I am all-digital with most of my stuff now, I still would hate for physical to go away, I just want everyone to have options and being able to pick what game format they would want instead of being forced to pick a single one.

Yeah, with them already remaking Moana, it tells me that they’ll probably remake newer movies too even though I feel like live-action remakes are unnecessary, kind of surprises me they haven’t gotten onto remaking Frozen yet. I just wonder if they are going to change parts of Moana (like the Shiny musical number) or keep everything the same. Either the remakes will add in new characters and scenes or remove stuff from them completely. I heard the Mulan remake had a lot of that, like notably removing Mushu and Cri-kee and Li Shang and having the matter’s role split into two characters and I think Shan Yu’s hawk was replaced by a shapeshifting witch that takes the form of a hawk. I think a lot of those changes came from them wanting to make the story more realistic so a few of the fantasy elements from the original were removed, but people pointed out how they added that shapeshifting witch in the story and didn’t make the story realistic like they were aiming for. I just wonder how they are going to handle the Moana remake and if it’ll have a lot of changes like a few of the other Disney remakes.

Wait, is it true Disney is planning or aiming to buy Sega? I tried to look up stuff about it but I saw nothing and people are saying it’s likely fake. If it is true, that’s just bad, and I definitely think Sega will say no to them if Disney is actually attempting that. I just think some game companies should be left alone and should stay away from gigantic companies like that. I know once I read that there were rumors and people wanting Microsoft to buy Sega, but they said they weren’t open to acquisitions at the time. I think Microsoft is not good at managing some of the subsidiaries they currently have, so I don’t think they should buy Sega at all.

I really think that cool concept could have been handled and used better just by making the battles themselves a bit more fun and making the Adventure mode exciting by having the fighters interact more besides the opening cutscene, have varied Spirit battles and making the cool map of mishmashed gaming worlds not act as a virtual board game map. I still think they could have saved a board game map if they brought back Smash Tour from Smash for WiiU. I am expecting a roster cut in the next game, but I don’t think it’ll be a super significant one. Only characters I can think of that’ll get cut are the ones that might have licensing issues tied to them and could be hard to work out again, but who knows what direction the next game will go in. I wouldn’t really want a reboot that kind of undoes all the stuff that Smash has done over the years and significantly makes the roster smaller akin to earlier games. I don’t think that direction would be a popular choice at all and I feel like Nintendo probably wouldn’t do that for the next game.

The later films do a good job setting events up by introducing game characters in the films, since just by seeing what characters are introduced during the movies and what characters are revealed in post-credit scenes of the movies, it can kind of tell you what game(s) the next film will draw inspiration from and semi-adapt. Tails being revealed in Sonic 1 and Knuckles being introduced in Sonic 2 had the film take elements and storylines from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 3, and Sonic & Knuckles, and G.U.N. being introduced during Sonic 2 and Shadow debuting in the post-credit scenes told everyone Sonic 3 was going to semi-adapt Adventure 2. I’m unsure what game Sonic 4 is going to semi-adapt and take inspiration from, and I’m stuck between CD and Heroes in terms of what game Sonic 4 will be inspired from. With them revealing Shadow survived the explosion, I do feel like they’d want to use him in another film ASAP, and given the characters they revealed in the post-credits, I am leaning a bit more on Heroes. The films get exciting each time, and get way better. 3 is the best so far in my opinion.

That’s surprising with the whole romance thing in 06, I guess it’s received differently because of cultures. The reception with the romance makes sense given Japanese mythology isn’t popular in the West and a couple of the Japanese myths and stories are considered niche in America compared to other myths like Greek and Norse, so some people wouldn’t know certain Japanese myths.

That whole thing with the person getting hacked and losing their Xbox games and then getting completely ruined by the Xbox’s poor DRM is just scary. It makes me wish most consoles nowadays didn’t require having to make digital accounts just to play the console, since any kind of digital account is open to being hacked, even if the account was made on a secure site. Although not related to hacking, I recall reading this forum on Push Square that got a bit of attention, but I think this user said he was trying to log into his PSN account and play his games, and he lost access to his account and games thanks to an age-verification system that unexpectedly locked him out and didn’t function correctly, even though he wasn’t even young and was older, and I remember he couldn’t fix it. I didn’t know that Sony tried to improve security once and got hacked again! That stinks. It sucks that no matter how much companies and people improve and strengthen security, they can unfortunately still be subject to hackers and cybersecurity breaches.

I am trying to be more positive (also since a new year started) but I do still feel a bit nervous and sometimes anxious at moments. Luckily it’s not super bad or out of control, and my days have been going well so far. By the way, are you doing well? I hope your New Years went good

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@Mariotag I was talking to another user on the site a bit about Crunchyroll, and from what she said the site seemed to be far more functional back in the early 2010s since she used to use it. I can’t comment on that since I only started to use Crunchyroll last year for some of the popular and famous animes and I’m very late to the experience, but the app is just so bad with the ads on it. Streaming services that have ads littered throughout episodes more than once are really awful experiences. That stinks to hear about your experience with Crunchyroll, so it sounds like the site was kind of non-functioning back then a bit. I’m not so used to ad-supported subs, because I’ve used ad-free ones like Disney+ a ton in the past, but I think they recently added a tier with ads to that one and I haven’t used it in a while.

I am seeing a lot of a push now with subscription services including ads in their tiers and it stinks. I feel like that it’s clearly an attempt to get people to pay more for the higher subscription tier with no ads, and I think it started more after Netflix did it, but I’d assume it also comes from inflation. I can remember Microsoft had this questionnaire one time that I think hinted that they were experimenting with adding ads to Game Pass or considering creating a tier with ads. I think it’s been a while since they last discussed that, but I hope it doesn’t happen. I think the worst thing about sub tiers is when they lock specific shows, movies, or games behind higher tiers to try and get you to spend more money on a higher tier. I know Crunchyroll does that with a good majority of its library, as well as Netflix (though only a small select) and Xbox Game Pass with the Game Pass Standard sub having a reduced selection of games compared to the Ultimate sub. The original Game Pass for Console had all games (sans EA games) available for free. Them doing that just really kinda irked me and convinced me to not get a Game Pass sub anytime soon, plus I coincidentally cancelled my subscription a week before they announced that change.

Just miss when streaming services were like that and when there were only about 2-3 major ones. There are way too many now and I also miss when they didn’t have so many different tiers that locked specific shows and movies behind the higher tiers.

I just think live-action remakes in general are unnecessary, they just sap a lot of the life and vividness of the animated originals and I think in live-action it’s super hard to replicate the same look and effects animation gives you. Sometimes they ruin the originals a lot and change things up a bunch (people mentioned that some of the changes in the Mulan remake ruined and even changed the message of the original animated film) and some are just the exact same film but in live-action, which I think is especially unnecessary. Not Disney, but there is this live-action remake they are making for How To Train Your Dragon and when you see a side-by-side comparison of live-action scenes from the trailer with scenes from the animated film, the remake isn’t even really different from the original besides being in live-action and everything is kept the same, which kind of makes me think that a remake is unnecessary because it seemingly looks as if the remake isn’t different and lacks originality because it looks the exact same. In general I think live-action remakes are unnecessary and don’t add nothing new or fun to the animated films they are remaking. Disney especially has an issue with that and they only really do remakes because they make a ton of money and even make more than their animated films.

Disney really wants to own every company it seems. With them purchasing Fox and all of their assets and companies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to buy more major companies, but in the far far future though. I didn’t know about them trying to apparently buy Nintendo at one point. Coincidentally, Microsoft did try to buy Nintendo once but nothing came out of it. They held a meeting with people working at Nintendo, and Microsoft’s deal could be summed up as “you stop making consoles and develop games for our console” (I read that the pitch was basically “Nintendo consoles are worser compared to Sony consoles but Nintendo software is good, so have Microsoft manage consoles instead and Nintendo develop games”) but Nintendo workers were laughing at how absurd that pitch was. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said a few years ago that it would be a big moment if Microsoft acquired Nintendo, but I know for sure Nintendo would still say no, especially since they are doing so well without having a company manage them.

I think a lot of the worlds in Adventure mode could have been far more fun if they didn’t function like a board game, there were some small touches to them that were kind of fun but given how much bigger, detailed, and kind of mighty the Dark Realm map was and the kind of mishmashed nature of the Light Realm that brought together a bunch of game worlds, they could have made it so much greater! The Mysterious Dimension map especially looks so freaking cool but it being used as more of a board game map was disappointing, because there is a TON of stuff going on when you look at the stunning art of the map, and just imagine if you actually could walk around and fight on actual parts of the map instead of the same stages over and over again, but I do feel like that idea could be too much work. I am going to be a bit sad if the next Smash game has a ton of roster cuts, but I think that is inevitable. Hopefully the characters I main and like a ton don’t get axed and come back for another go, but we’ll never find out until they announce the next game and discuss it. I feel like that it will be a few more years till they announce Smash 6 since Ultimate’s development was longer with the two DLC passes.

The characters they revealed in Sonic 3’s post-credit scene and Shadow being alive in the other post-credit really make me wonder what game they are going to semi-adapt next, but I’m super unsure since I have two games in mind for that, but they could do another game that isn’t one of the two. They probably won’t say anything on 4 until maybe a few months before it releases. I feel like they’ll likely release a trailer with more info on 4 in late 2026 a few months before they release 4 a year later sometime in Spring, but that’s my speculation, they could do something different with the release schedule of the first trailer.

Yeah, Japanese mythology or otherworldly creatures don’t usually come to my mind when I see the Sonic characters because of the universe they live in (most characters being anthropomorphic animals and there only being a small amount of human characters in the games), but since the animal characters co-exist with some human characters like how most stories in Japanese mythology center around humans co-existing with supernatural creatures and their interactions with them, that definitely makes sense. The otherworldly aspects kind of come to my mind a bit more when seeing the films though, since the Sonic characters originated from different worlds and planets before living on Earth, though they are of course not spiritual like yo-kai. Some people consider the film’s versions of Sonic and Shadow as “aliens” because of their origins, the latter especially since the film’s version of Shadow came from a meteorite that crash-landed on Earth, which kind of reminds me of some fictional stories about extraterrestrial creatures riding in a UFO that crashes on Earth.

Situations like the Xbox Live account getting hacked and then being gone permanently with its game data and digital content was pretty scary to read, but it reminded me to make sure I keep all of my accounts and content secure and private, though reading that story and some of the comments (like a person who set up two-factor authentication mentioning that they got constant failed login alerts attempts from hackers) did instill a bit of constant fear about DRM and game security in me even if nothing happens, plus some other story NL talked about with this game publisher having its store website hacked and all of their customers’ info was leaked too when the site was hacked. Just all that time, money, and games going away is so terrible to think about. If that did happen, I’d probably lose a bit of motivation to game, makes me miss when consoles never required digital accounts and emails to be played.

I hope you feel better and are feeling good now. I hope that things will get good fast!

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@Mariotag The ads on Hulu were in my opinion, far more better and preferable compared to the experience I had with Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll played the same few ads over and over again and of course they would freeze or not play. The ads on CR had little variety, I can remember I got a ton of the same Xbox (advertising Star Wars Outlaws) and Honkai Star Rail ads so much and I just got tired of them so much because they were the same things over and over again.

Yup, some gaming services do it too, axing cheaper tiers and replacing them with expensive ones and locking content behind them. The one for Game Pass irks me a ton, plus I think for years Microsoft promised no price hikes for Game Pass and it keeps happening over and over again. I don’t really have the same feelings over how Nintendo does it, mainly because they haven’t raised the prices on NSO ever (I think) compared to Microsoft, but I still think having N64 games and a few of the more popular and high-quality retro games locked behind the Expansion Pack, now that I think about it, is kinda terrible. I do think the Expansion Pack definitely has a ton more retro game services and content now to justify the price more (plus they seem far more speedy with NSO drops now) and I didn’t really mind the Expansion Pack when I had it (only issue being the N64 controls were slightly janky and off and some slight technical hiccups like slower frame-rates on occasions) but I still would have loved if they just had the N64 games available for everyone, especially since they are adding a ton of good games on both the Teen and Mature 17+ N64 apps and how there might be a chance they release Diddy Kong Racing and Donkey Kong 64 on there. I’ll admit that despite being a big Rare fan, I haven’t played them.

What Crunchyroll makes unavailable on the Free Tier is that you can’t watch simulcasted anime, most shows and movies are unavailable on Free (save for a few series that can be watched without a higher sub), no offline viewing when you don’t have internet, anime with multiple seasons only have their first season available on Free, most dubbed episodes of anime shows are locked, you can’t play Crunchyroll Games, and on occasions, some subbed anime episodes can be watched for free but the rest are locked (e.g. Dandadan), but dubbed anime has a majority of its episodes locked on CR compared to subbed anime. It’s very hard for me to watch shows that look interesting because of how much they limit the library on the Free tier.

I do wish Disney would stop remaking films, and I feel like that will probably influence other studios to copy what they are doing and remake their own films given Disney remakes have been super successful and gross a bunch. The older remakes, to me, seem less money-hungry compared to the newer ones they are releasing. There is just so many things in animation that you can’t replicate well in live-action, and a ton of the stories in those animated Disney films are fine and don’t need to be retold or done again but in live-action.

I wonder if most of the DLC characters could get removed in the next Smash games, and I am a bit worried about that since my two mains are DLC characters. I feel like the ones that were easy to negotiate and come from companies that have close alliances and good partnerships with Nintendo (such as Microsoft characters) will likely come back, but I still can see a few of the DLC characters not coming back if a few of them have licensing issues tied to them, I just wonder how they’ll deal with Sora in the next game and if he’ll come back, since everyone says he is the character that likely had a couple of licensing issues tied to him (mainly coming from Disney). I feel like a majority of the main non-DLC roster will remain, albeit maybe getting a few cuts.

I do expect it to be a long time before we hear anything on Sonic 4. I still think it’ll be a year before we hear anything about it, but it’s still so far away…I just wonder what other plans they have for the live-action Sonic films since a bunch of people have been suggesting spin-off films or more spin-off shows like Knuckles. They could be good expansions to the universe, but I wonder how many more characters they’ll introduce in the films since there are a ton of characters from the games that could work for the films, but of course they have to avoid making the cast of Sonic characters too big and loaded with characters, since I think it’ll cause issues with screen-time and stuff.

It is cool that I’m realizing some of the Sonic characters have a kind of yokai and mythological aspect to them while still not quite being mythological creatures. I think the film versions of the characters have that otherworldly element to them be way more prominent than the games, mainly coming from how the real-world is the setting for the films rather than a fictitious planet and only a few of the Sonic characters appear in the films and aren’t widespread. I recall seeing some of this Instagram reel saying the film version of Sonic wasn’t actually a hedgehog (probably because his species is sometimes called or listed as “alien hedgehog” instead of simply “hedgehog” like the game version), but I can’t remember most of the video and a majority of the comments disagreed with the guy’s explanation. He is still a hedgehog, but the alien part mainly comes from how he originated from a different planet and came to Earth like an actual alien.

I just wish DRM was done way better, and I find it so annoying and stupid that sometimes the Xbox has to be online for games to work, even games that are offline and don’t have any sort of online functionality. Sometimes it doesn’t even recognize that you own the game and won’t load it if you are offline.

I hope it goes fine and well. Again, I hope you feel better and get through the situation.