Just looking for interesting and meaningful game-related content to add to my Mastodon feed. It can be accounts from individuals or from orgs.

I'm new at both PeerTube and at Piped/NewPipe frontends. I've always wanted to support PeerTube but every time I browse instances I see very little content and it's especially barren for the type of stuff I like. Not really a tech guy, even though I'm learning some programming my background is that of a Literature teacher that likes gaming (especially indie gaming, but some AAA RPG/JRPG/narrative/strategy gaming is cool too) and video essays about anything that have at least a bit of humanities bend.

I've started using Piped to watch YT videos (I don't use NewPipe since I rarely use my phone, more of a desktop guy). I've heard you can watch both YT and PeerTube videos on NewPipe. Can you do the same at Piped? And if so, what would be the best way to find channels with the aforementioned characteristics?

Stuff in Spanish is fine too since that's my actual language but I assume there's not much stuff in Spanish in PeerTube and therefore even less quality content and even less quality content that caters to my specific likes. So I foresee it'll mostly be in English like in YouTube.

There's a lot to writing in JRPGs (story, plot, pacing, characters, narration, worldbuilding, etc.) and some games excel at some of those aspects and not so much at others. It's also a subjective topic.

So, I'd like to know. How do you rank JRPGs looking foremost at writing over other aspects like gameplay, visuals, music and so on? You can talk about your top JRPGs, or maybe highlight some high and low points writing-wise or hell if you want to rank every single JRPG you have played in regards to its writing I'll read ya! I did find this massive JRPG Tiermaker for those of you that want to rank a couple (or hundreds) of JRPGs in a more graphic form.

Or if you don't care about ranking but want to share some insights about this topic I'm all ears.

The way I used Twitter was by aggresively muting, blocking & managing the interests functionality through the years until I pruned my home page to mostly show me meaningful discussion about videogames (and a bit of other media), some relevant news, including a good balance of AAA and indie stuff as well as a a balance of mainstream (mostly from US and Japan videogame industries) and diverse stuff (ie from other countries). I had industry people, interesting youtubers (more essay-types than gameplay-types), socially progressive viewpoints, diversity, a bit of art, a bit of lore, etc.

Are there good instances focused on that? I know I can see stuff from any instance but AFAIK some are better to set up camp because of their admins, their defederations and also because it's a bit easier to find new interesting accounts to follow from within the instance.

Which do you recommend?

EDIT: I do know there's no algorithm in Mastodon like in Twitter so I'll only see whoever I follow. Just wanted to clarify before someone took the work to explain all that. I just want to replicate the kind of feed I had on Twitter, just that this time it'll be 100% from following accounts rather than a mix.

I was reading how Dragon Quest III's release in Japan in 1988 led to almost 300 arrests for truancy among students absent from school to purchase the game.

I also vaguely remember reading about Western games that had very big queues at physical stores during their release. I assume these can only be heavily anticipated old games before online distribution took off. I checked up the wiki articles of Super Mario Bros 3., Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Mortal Kombat II but saw no direct mention of queues or otherwise remarkable physical activity at stores on release.

What do y'all know about this?

What I mean is... sometimes people are very loyal to a videogame franchise or a company because they loved a game they released years ago (Silent Hill/Konami with Silent Hill 2, Blizzard/Bethesda with their respective golden eras, some could argue this happens too with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, etc). Ethical/consumer reasons aside to stop supporting certain companies, sometimes some franchises/companies aren't necessarily creating the best examples of games of those specific genres anymore, yet many fans are loyal to them (and a chunk of them also seem to suffer/complain with every new release).

Meanwhile some people that explore less known titles and different niches occasionally pop-up and say stuff like "the last Pokémon games are formulaic and uninspired, there's actually this and that incredible examples of somewhat recent monster collecting games" or "the last FF wasn't actually bad but if you want turn-based RPGs that'll remind you of your old favorite FFs then check Chained Echoes or whatever" or "don't look for something like Silent Hill 2 with Konami, instead I recommend these survival horror games".

So the idea of this thread is for people to recommend alternatives to franchises. Especially if they're standalone instead of other alternative franchises and especially if they're indie (since most of my enjoyment these last few years has been from indies like Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper, Darkest Dungeon, Celeste, Slay the Spire, Tacoma, Hellblade).

In my life I've seen interesting discussions about which JRPGs have the best protagonists and which ones have the best non-protagonist party members but I don't think I've seen this one.

Since "best" can mean anything subjective let us know what it means in your case! i.e some might choose a party based on the writing+design of the characters, others might focus on their character arcs and themes, or on the overall diversity of the party (full human teens party vs diverse ages or diverse species vs whatever Chrono Cross has going on, etc).

Hey! I'm new to LibreOffice and I was wondering if this is possible. I have a big spreadsheet where each line refers to an object for which I actually have a corresponding .webp image, and it would really help me for visual reference if such a hover tooltip (or click tooltip) would be possible in LibreOffice. Does anyone know?

Writing can refer to story, worldbuilding, character writing, etc.

I was watching some of Gaming Broductions' videos about JRPG history and although I appreciate the production values and the love the brothers seem to have for old JRPGs, there's something in the writing of their scripts that just rubs me the wrong way. It's two-pronged:

1. Vocabulary and sentence construction: Reusing the same crutches (words and phrases) again and again: "Anyways...", "Moving on", "unique", "which I always thought was pretty X", "that's pretty cool", "it's pretty much X", "awesome", "literally and figuratively" (but one of the two adverbs makes no sense in context), "interestingly enough", "it's just not X", "yeah... this is just X", "yeah... pretty X you could say", "I've come to appreciate X", etc.

2. Insight: This is the most important one. They usually don't have anything that interesting to say about the games or the tropes they cover, they just describe them. Maybe I'm spoiled by channels like TBSkyen, ErrantSignal, Pop Culture Detective, New Frame Plus but I wish to find a JRPG channel that engages with them critically and explores their themes beyond just (sometimes) naming them.