missingno

Doormaker is the best thing that happened to Act 3. Right now Act 3 suffers from being too much of a victory lap, there's not much you have to do to prepare for the other bosses. The most fun runs I've had were when I had to scramble through the Act looking for solutions to get ready for Doormaker, picking cards and Ancient boons I rarely took before.

Unfortunately, we can't have nice things because too many players want a power fantasy rather than a difficult strategy game. I've even heard people whine that A10 is too hard, not that the game as a whole is too hard, but that hard mode specifically is too hard and it would hurt their ego to just play a difficulty they're more comfortable with.

Most people are.

Netflix and Crunchyroll have both released data confirming that more viewers watch dubs than subs. Even on Crunchyroll, which only serious anime fans are gonna subscribe to, sub viewers are still in the minority.

If the goal is to pick something you can convince your non-anime watching friends to try out, there's gotta be as little friction as possible. Subs will be a turn-off for a lot of people, that's for nerds.

That's probably a good reason not to have a new viewer start with anything that's still ongoing, pick something they can watch start to finish.

It can't be anything long, has to be something they can reasonably finish. No One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z. Ideally one season, no longer than two.

It also shouldn't be anything that's still ongoing, has to be something they can literally finish. I'd really like to say Frieren, I think it hits a lot of the right beats to appeal to someone who has never watched anime before, but I wouldn't want to leave them hanging. And we don't even know how long it's going to be in the end, I already said no longer than two seasons anyway.

Has to have a dub. Someone who does not watch anime is not going to read subs. I'm so close to wanting to recommend Apocalypse Hotel as a short and sweet 12 episode masterpiece, but the lack of a dub will be a dealbreaker to your non-weeb friends.

With how much I'm emphasizing that it has to be short, movies would be better than television shows. Which leads us to the extremely obvious answer of Ghibli, anything Ghibli. But maybe Ghibli is too obvious an answer, I know plenty of people who watch Ghibli but have never seen anything else, so maybe we'll say Ghibli doesn't count.

So then I'd say my next answer would be A Silent Voice. Not just because it's my favorite movie, but it's a good example to show that there's so much more to anime than just battle shonen. I imagine most people who don't watch anime may have only ever heard of popular shonen and might not know what else is out there.

Then it sounds like the real issue here isn't that the narrative-driven games you talk about in the OP don't exist at all, but that these games just aren't being laser-targeted at whatever specific and narrow set of tastes you have.

And honestly, to an extent I do get where this kind of frustration comes from. I've felt like my tastes have narrowed with age too, and I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about certain genres that have completely faded from relevance. But I've had to come to terms with the fact that this isn't an industry problem, it's a me problem. Just because my kind of specific niche favorites don't get catered to doesn't mean that good games don't exist at all.

My argument is there are fewer and fewer year in and year out.

When there are far more games being made in the first place, good and bad, I do not think you are correct at all. There are still tons of great games coming out, but you don't seem to want to look for them as you've already shot down previous comments bringing up critically acclaimed modern hits.

I think nostalgia has you remembering the best games of the past, forgetting about all the slop that used to come out back then too, and losing perspective of the actual time scale in between those hits. If you compare the very best games from a full decade to just the average game that came out last year, that comparison will be very misleading.

If that's enough of a narrative for you, most of the games you're complaining about also have narratives with at least that much depth to them.

How do you feel about the narrative and worldbuilding in Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc?

What a weird thing to be mad about.

They've posted full episodes officially on Youtube

Yup, and I'd even say that the best FF is the one that SE was too afraid to put the FF name on. I just wish it wasn't relegated to being a lower budget B-list project, imagine if SE put the same kinds of full AAA resources behind this that they put on the FF7 'remake'.