if it wasn't for this piece of shit rocket pack, I would have never learned of the shinespark and I think that's beautiful.

You could lock a vn fan in a room with nothing but a typewriter for all of eternity and they will never produce anything worth the cognitive effort that was required to read it in the first place.

I feel like Maridia was needed to ground me back into reality because otherwise I would have thought this game was sent to us by God herself. it humanizes the developers, it let's me know that they can make mistakes and makes my experience more intimate.

some things stay the same.

any intuition you develop is nebulous at best, hardly covers much of anything, and always has exceptions. it's a retroactive rationalization for getting lucky or obsessively searching an area because it's objectively cooler & more aggrandizing to think you 'figured it out'.

This took so long.

Even from a utilitarian perspective, NEStroid doesn't 'prepare' you for the worst of the series—it psychologically scars you with these self destructive inhibitions. Like, bc this layout was in NEStroid, I was conditioned into thinking I needed the ball bombs, wasting 3 minutes.

There's a subsect of people who think I was complaining about difficulty when that was never the case. It's like they just show up to say their prerecorded lines because they are incapable of actually engaging with what was said. I beat the game well before you sent this, moron.