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I think I've already been over this topic a few times already, but sports haven't referred strictly to athletic competitions since at least 1850. Video games can be just as taxing as physical games, and in terms of entertainment value, EVO draws viewer numbers comparable to the Super Bowl (Granted the former pulls an international crowd, but still).

My only concern is at the type of games that are getting the esports exposure; mobas are great and all, but the community that forms around them is a less-than-adequate picture of sportmanship, and I just don't find many of the MLG games to be that engaging or even fun to watch. I sincerely hope that the FGC gets more exposure and more coverage as time goes on though; they've had their scandals, but they're a far cry from the other communities in the spotlight right now, and the feats those players can perform will blow your mind.

Hollow Bastion is my favorite and imo the very best in the series, but End of the World is a solid second to that. There's a really fascinating segment of that level that looks like an offshoot of the Heartless factory... The writing there is trying a little too hard to be meaningful, but the setting itself always intrigued me. Considering it comes after the fragments of previous levels, it seems the implication is it's a part of Hollow Bastion, but it never appears again as far as I know.

Might be a little too late for this but throwing in my two cents anyway BECAUSE I'M LOUD AND OPINIONATED AND I GOTTA AIR THAT #&%$ OUT.

Enemy Design • KHFM probably takes the cake here, making the best use of existing models and providing challenges far above and well beyond "Kill the thing/Don't get killed by the thing." Days is a close second for the same reason: Some people don't like the Emerald Serenades, but I thought the idea was great and the execution just a bit lacking. KH2 probably has the worst, least challenging enemies, most of them only difficult for some dumb reason like high stun resistance, attacks with wonky hitboxes/tracking, or over-reliance on Reaction Commands.

Boss Design • Another point to FM for the amazing Unknown boss fight, as well as fine-tuning the abilities of the other secret bosses. Unknown doesn't hit as hard as, say, Sephiroth, but his sheer relentlessness and variety of attacks means he can easily take on your team of three regardless. The only flaw in that fight is his chokehold move; it's just too many things working against you at once, with the initial attack being hard to predict, the release command appearing randomly, and your health draining all the way to 0 in seconds. If just one of those conditions were a little easier to deal with, it might be a nice panic-mode attack. And again I reprimand KH2 for much the same reason as above: uninspired fights that are either too gimmicky to be challenging or too repetitive to be entertaining (Notable exception being Heartless Scar).

Combat Flow • Mad ups to BbS on this one—The removal of MP combined with a wider range of skills and techniques means you're never just sitting there blindly mashing a button, but you always have an answer to whatever your opponent does. I'd like to see standard attacks become a little more useful (Still a problem with KH3D), but otherwise I like the concept. And again, the black sheep is KH2: Attacks are flashy and long-winded, most of the skills actually decrease your DPS (not to mention they whiff a lot), and the MP system is a god-awful trainwreck, especially considering how much you'll be tempted to use Reflect.

Character Abilities • Tie between FM and 3D here. I feel like FM has the most variation, where two players can get by just as well with totally different styles of play, while 3D has a lot of fun flashy things rather than annoying flashy things. And since I touched on it briefly above, you can probably guess that KH2's losing streak continues... Yeah, the skills all felt pointless to me, and at one point I had to take off several abilities that were fully and completely responsible for me losing a fight when I knew what to do to win.

Character Progression • I'm gonna say the original KH1, not FM for this one. I was tempted to side with FM, but it gives you so many cool skills right away that you start to feel a little too powerful, and then you have a lot less to look forward to. KH metes these out at a much more even pace, giving you cool stuff to work with early on but still dangling the carrot and making you wonder what you'll get next. Days actually loses out on this one; at first progression felt like a pain, then somehow it totally skipped past fun and empowering into dull and tedious. Skills are hard to get at first, but then you have so many that nothing can touch you.

Difficulty • KH1/FM is still legitimately the toughest game for me. It just tries a lot harder to kill you, with a wide range of enemies who mix and match attack patterns, and bosses who can constantly trip you up and force you to make mistakes... as opposed to KH2 enemies, whose attacks are lame and predictable but can kill you in one or two shots. Punishing you brutally for a single mistake is fake difficulty; you don't have to be a better player to overcome it, you just have to get a good round. You can cheese KH2 bosses, if you're lucky and patient; KH1 bosses make you work for it.

Integration of Magic in Combat • Honestly, all of them are pretty bad. Most of the spells suck, and MP just never seems to work out in the games that use it. If spells were stronger and could be seamlessly integrated with regular attacks (no, NOT like KH2, NOTHING like KH2), then maybe we'd have something; but as it stands, spells are clunky, costly, and inefficient.

Guarding and Dodging • When it comes to this stuff, I say keep it simple. KH1 does just that; your guard and dodge are both quick and dirty, you can learn their limits easily, and figuring out what you can and can't block is a process that is ultimately rewarding, even if it's a little trial-and-error. I think the games just get worse and worse about this as time goes on—Never could I imagine the need for a dash that goes as far as the ones in BbS and 3D, unless the programmers put the dash in and then build enemies around the dash, which is wholly transparent and pretty unsatisfying. And Squeenix, please... please stop giving us barriers. If we need barriers to win, YOUR HITBOXES ARE OUT OF CONTROL.

NPC Interactions • None of the games are really that involved with this, which I don't mind. It's just not a big part of this series in particular. I'd rather not have the flow of play interrupted by one of my old favorite Disney characters with a painfully obvious second-string voice actor telling me I've got to fetch 10 MacGuffin Tokens to advance, not in this type of game anyway. They do what they must, and that's enough.

Sidequests • I dunno... I guess I like the FM side quests the best? Depends how you define 'side quest.' If we're talking minigames, I prefer 3D's; if we're talking mob hunts, FM wins. I kinda wish farming for synthesis materials wasn't such a pain in the #$% every single game, but I guess that's one of those old traditions that's hard to break.

Arena/Colosseum • BbS, Mirage Arena. I'd be a bald-faced liar if I said anything else. Unique bosses, tight enemy configurations, CO-OP AND VERSUS... It's just the best arena experience. The only one I never got that into was KH2's, and I'm sure you can guess why at this point.

All of these. Zboy's still the best VA this series ever had.

One of my best friends becomes very despondent when Kingdom Hearts is mentioned, and when I ask him why he does everything he can to avoid the question. I can only imagine the game previously held his family for ransom at gunpoint. Other than that, no, no one I know seems to out-and-out hate the series, which kinda surprises me since there's plenty to hate.

Man I was really excited when I saw 'Soul Eater' in the title 'cause I thought we were getting that so-much-better manga ending that people are always gabbing about... but then this happened. Uhh. Cool I guess? Does this have any relevance to the original plot at all?

Oof, what a voice. Did she write all the songs in that video? If so that's pretty impressive. Either way she really seems to feel it in her bones.

...Dang. That's pretty slick, maybe I should get this.

The whole time I was watching that trailer, I couldn't help but notice the variety in settings and monsters. And the way it seems to shift in and out of nightmarish reality and gruesome dreamscape... Looks like it's gonna perform as advertised. I should seriously keep a closer eye on this.

Of the three Pokés in the Trainer set, I'm glad Charizard is the one coming back. But I wonder how they figured to go with Greninja... Maybe a popularity poll?

Choose Your Adventure

Spoiler: Wherein Nova Contributes Meaningfully to the Discourse at Hand

The whole "reverse" thing is kinda superfluous but I think the big stink that arises over it is because "racism" can be defined several ways and nobody really stops to check what somebody means when they say it. Institutional racism/sexism and everyday bigotry are both arguable subjects, but they're argued in different ways, and getting them criss-crossed tends to result in things like "the myth of reverse racism"—whether you say it to mean racism is impossible against certain groups or to mean the term itself is silly.

Spoiler: Wherein Nova Says Something Stupid that Totally Derails the Thread

BUMPACARZ

Farewell, old friend.

This kind of thing is regrettable, but there really isn't an easy answer either; support takes time and money, and constantly allotting some of that time and money to old systems gets harder and harder as they move forward. I hope that rather than lambasting Microsoft nonstop for something they'd have to do sooner or later, I hope that people will take the things they loved about XP and demand them from future products, or maybe even make their own OS—no small feat, I know, and I'm hardly tech-savvy enough for that so I guess I'm one to talk, but it beats sitting around moping at any rate.

I've been on Windows 7 for some time now, and while it did have its kinks to work out it's been a helluva lot better than Vista was. The only computer in our house that still ran XP was pretty old anyway, so I personally won't be affected. I just hope my grandparents aren't lost in a fog at this point.[/img]

I'm for that. Feel like it would fit in more with the X-Games, but I'd love to see it either way.

50,000 Unstoppable Votes

• Cstar - 1 (. : tale_wind)
• DigitalAtlas - 3 (hyuge-of-the-twilight, mystic, Cstar)
• Marushi - 1 (Jiku Neon)

omg they're huge.

I like how understated they are, the colors all seem muted but still distinct. These are my favorites:

Spoiler

Morning comes again. Knowing what's coming next doesn't make it any easier to deal with; in fact the anticipation seems to fray your nerves even more. Sure enough, as you enter the foyer the sparse light of the room falls upon the body of another victim.

Senpai has been murdered. She was Amelia Arkwright, self-proclaimed best locksmith in Salem. Lovely as the family's patronage was for her trade, she wasn't sure she'd die for them - but it seems the Mafia left her no choice. She was aligned with the Town, and had no special abilities.

With sober expressions and no fanfare, the party assembles once again and begins deliberations.

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D A Y • T H R E E​

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With 17 players alive, it takes 8 to lynch and 4 to soft-lynch. Day ends Monday, April 14th, 7:00 P.M. (GMT-5).

Wincest AYO

Of all the pins you don't own, which do you want the most, if any? And if none, which of the pins in your collection are you most proud of?

I'd take some time to look through the staff section, logs, anything relevant to figuring out what projects were ongoing, then try to get in contact with old staff about having their jobs back, and failing that send out a round of PMs to everyone I think is qualified asking if they want in. Then I would restructure the site from the ground up: Remove some of the social networking features, get rid of Premiums and extend the benefits to everyone, redo some sections and compartmentalize a bit (I've heard it said that no forum should have more sections than it has users, and we'd be starting small). I'd commission a new banner and layout, something bright but shapely and mature. I'd redo the rules to suit my administrative style, and I'd revise all of the sub-rules and stickied threads for each section. Then I'd officially re-open the site and start inviting people back, maybe going to other KH sites and advertising in my sig, on Youtube, Tumblr, anything I can. After a while I'd begin introducing games and creative projects, and commissioning people to start their own in each section. Oh, and I'd go around to a handful of banned members and ask if they'd like to appeal.

I'll take a truth, and offer another ToD for the next poster.