All jokes aside, I would like to weigh in and say that I find the whole patenting of game mechanics to be absolutely appalling. I genuinely don’t get how this is legal, even in Japan. They filed this patent way too late for it to even make sense.
You could’ve made an argument if they patented it back in 1996, but even so… Fuck this. Imagine patenting a screen transition or something?
A friend and I literally just finished Diablo II with SlashDiablo’s servers so we avoid Blizzard. It was an awesome time