Dunkum

is it really a double post if its a week apart? i dunno, that seems reasonable to me, especially in this thread

That would likely take some work, but I imagine it could be done. though I'm not sure what kind of power it would take to jump offworld like that. you might only be able to actually use the oathgate to jump offworld in a highstorm or something where there is ample investiture available. hard to say though, since we don't have a lot of detail on the power needs for them.

the oathgates we have seen are moderated by spren, and it is apparently very hard to take spren offworld. that said Selish magics are obscenely versatile, so Elatrians could probably make something equivalent to an oathgate using the AonDor.

Short version is yes. Longer version is that Harmony could do the same things that Ruin was doing, but generally chooses not to. Though there are some scenes in era 2 where you see Harmony communicating though hemalurgic spikes.

finished most of the DLC content from Breath of the Wild (mostly skipping the trials of the sword for right now, since you cant save during them, and i don't think i have time to sit through the whole thing, btu i gave it a quick test run). now moving onto Skyward sword, and it makes for a strange transition to go from one of the lightest tutorials in the series to one of the heavier ones.

yea, i don't read the MTG books anyway. the handful I did read didn't do all that much for me. i'd rather Brandon focus on writing hsi own stuff which i'll actually read.

hard to say. You might be able to make nightwatcher more coherent, but a spren can't really go against its nature, and i think the boon/curse setup is part of her nature. I doubt she even could grant a boon without a curse.

335a: though there is at least a 40% chance the authorities are already in on it, and another 30% that they won't believe you without exceptional evidence

would it be? they'd presumably both make you a bondsmith, and while Stormfather might grant some extra abilities, becuase Honor is gone, I doubt the Nightwatcher would do the same. i don't think you would necessarily be any different than if you just bonded the Stormfather.

does there have to be one? Nightwatcher is presuably bound to that boon/curse format, but Cultivation definitely isn't.

I'll add that Taravangian's diagram probably doesn't come from some kind of foresight at all. the best parallel I have for it is if someone were compunding zinc for mental speed. it isn't that he could see the future, but that he could think so fast and see connections that others missed to the point that he could pretty reliably predict, from the current state of the world, what the future might look like.

possibly, but when we've seen Shallan do it, the trips have been very brief. still with practice you could possibly prolong that. the question is how much she can actually move away from her body's location in the physical realm. I don't think we've seen her actually try to do that before, so it's not clear that she actually can. even if she can do it, there would be dangers to leaving your physical body alone for the length of time it would take to do that, and possibly additional dangers to the cognitive self that is doing the trip that might not apply to someone there physically (not sure on that, but I assume there would be some differences).

he is a Dysian Aimian, and yes, he is made up of cremlings.

The most common way to move form one world to another is to physically go to the Cognitive Realm and travel there. the space between worlds is constricted a lot in the CR so there is less distance to travel between say Sel and Nalthis if you want to make the trip. A Perpendicularity is caused by a large concentration of a Shard's investiture, usually a shardpool, and can be used to travel between the physcal and cognitive realms, since most people are not Elsecallers and can't manage it on their own. You can actually see this happen in Oathbringer:

That makes sense. BotW is definitely not a linear story type of game. I loved the exploration aspect of it, and I think they absolutely nailed that, but you're right that the dungeons and the story suffered for it. I liked the shrines, and the divine beasts were interesting, but they were all so much shorter than the dungeons in most Zelda games.

I'm curious why? Because to me, BotW feel a lot like WW, but better. I mean you aren't sailing, but the exploration aspect is very much at the heart of both, and Wind Waker's world feels a lot more barren than BotW's to me. In Wind Waker you can sail around all day without finding anything interesting (and even some of the islands are pretty boring, honestly), while BotW feels like there is something around every corner.

Seconded. i bought it when it first came out and it was absolutely worth it. just getting back into it now, after a bit of a break, because i wanted to play the DLC, and ive found that there are still some little things that i hadn't managed to discover on my first, rather exhaustive playthrough.

but the second completes the story of the first. it also makes improvements in at least some areas (I really like the unlockable summons, for instance). as to the third that you dont wish to acknowledge...i like some of what it did mechanic wise, but story wise and continuity wise it is a complete mess.

I'll second the golden sun recommendation. the third golden sun game (for the ds or 3ds, i forget which) you can give a pass, but the first 2 are great.

my original Malazan read, and my reread both started to stall around book 7. i got through all 10 both times, but the last few take a lot more effort than the first ones.

to add on a bit - it is defintiely possible to bond 2 dead shardblades, we've seen it happen. as far as swearng oaths for multiple orders, it may be possible, but some combinations would probably be easier than others. For instance the Edgedancer oaths we have seen so far relate to helping the downtrodden and forgotten members of society, while the skybreaker oaths are about keeping the law. it is pretty easy to imagine these ideals clashing, for instance in the case of someone stealing to feed their family. however these oaths seem pretty compatible with the protection based windrunner oaths we have seen, so it would probably be easier (but still pretty difficult) to become a windrunner/edgedancer than it would be to be a skybreaker/edgedancer.

there isn't as much of one in the older Gens. In Gen 1, at least as I always saw it, the plot is that you want to go wander aorund the world catching/training pokemon and Team Rocket keeps getting in the way of that, so you trounce them a few times in the process. Gen 2 it is a little bit more well defined, but even then, Team rocket isn't really your main antagonists, they are just an obstacle that keeps gtting in your way. I think I prefer it that way too. my, admittedly foggy, recollection of the more plot hevay later entries was that the plot really didn't add all that much to them. To be honest, I think Pokemon is well set up for a more open-world, plot-light type adventure where your explicit goal is to become champion, by beating the 8 gym leaders (the specific 8 or just any 8 out of however many they feel like including, could be interesting either way) and then the elite 4, but they don't force you to do it in any specific order.

i don't recall most of that from my playthrough of plaitnum years ago. ultimately like I said I have a problem with the supposedly godlike legendaries that start popping up in Ruby/Sapphire. I prefer the hidden away legendaries of the gen 1 games, where they are actually spoken of as myths and legends by NPCs when they are mentioned at all. I guess i think it feels more special, and more appropriate to the legendary status, to maneuver your way through seafoam islands, delving deeper and deeper, instead of just leaving, until you are finally standing in front of Articuno as opposed to playing through the game until you inevitably encounter Giratina/Groudon/Zekrom/Xerneas/etc. And to me Platinum may have been the worst in that regard, since it pulls what 6 legendaries into the plot?

the fact that you can catch and command pokemon that created the iniverse, and the fact that they don't just auto-win battles against all other pokemon, is actually a problem to me. if you are going to claim that arceus is this nigh-omnipotent godlike being then for the love of god, dont let a human trainer cram him into a tiny ball and order him around like a ratatta. It smacks of the writers trying to one up each and rather than make him impressive, it makes him pathetic.

I will say a disproportionate part of my like/dislike for the games is the starters, largely in terms of the design, and to a lesser extent type. gen 3 had, I think, the worst batch of starters, whle gen 4 at least goes 2/3 (infernape is kind of terrible, I think, but Empoleon and Torterra are great). if you have a 3ds (or maybe a wii u/switch, not sure) then you should be able to get the early games for virtual console. i highly recommend trying out gens 1 and 2. they have some issues that get addressed in later games, but overall i like the simplicity of them compared to the later ones. and to my mind, the gen 1 legendary birds are probably the best legendaries, in terms of where they are and how you get to them.