For all the good things about Trails there’s a lot of flaws as well. There’s a lot of weak plot lines, reused assets (lack of npc variety being one) and there’s quite a few logical leaps happening as the series has progressed. The games are ambitious for sure, but let’s not pretend that hasn’t had its own shortcomings.

For me Trails as a series is very much a case of being better than the sum of its individual parts, and that’s great, but you’re vastly overselling the importance of this series. I enjoy both Trails and Final Fantasy, but it’s wild to put them on the same field like this. Square Enix has more than 4000 employees. Falcom has about 80, I think. The scale is so wastly different.

It’s 98% turn based. 100% if you don’t want to spend a few seconds building stagger.

It was kind of easy for me, as I already used Plex for video, but Plexamp has been such an amazing experience for rediscovering my own music. The radios, sonic matching and DJ algorithms are fantastic. I’m sure there’s other similar solutions, but it’s really worth investing in, imho. There’s currently a lot to be desired with the library management, but the player experience is worth the downsides for me.

Almost no one can, or have equipment that can make the difference. That being said, the difference between an old mp3 and a new one is sometimes noticeable at the same bitrate. The encoding algorithm has improved a quite lot since the late 90s. I bet a lot of people who say they hear the difference think about those old encodes.

I keep flacs as a master format that I make new encodes from when I want it on my phone and such though.

Nah. I don’t bother with that. I can’t listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I’d say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.

Mostly Qobuz.

Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp

Fair enough.

When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.

Well. If you’re not streaming why have such a service in the first place? If I didn’t stream remotely with Plex (and share with my friends and family) I’d just go back to running Kodi on my htpc like I did ten years ago.