DocVerdant

Excellent essay! Appreciate the effort to acknowledge that tropes are just tools, and that Witch Hat Atelier isn't necessarily better than Frieren because of its emphasis on the methodology of magic, it's just a different kind of good.

Yeah, that's a very good point about the player count data potentially skewing folks into focusing less on quality and more on popularity of games. I think there's a loud and vocal minority of gamers who just like seeing games they like statistically vindicated and games they dislike be statistically reviled, and making those numbers more accessible is just going to exacerbate that toxicity