I can say that I enjoy the Final Fantasy series just for the fact that I respect they are always trying something different with each one. This has the end result of me not getting on with several of them, but critically, someone else does.
I just find it kind of beautiful that a series is willing to experiment with itself to such a degree, and that at this point there really is at least one game in it for just about everyone.
All it really means is that I have to accept that not every game has been made with me as the target.
The King of Fighters 2002: KOF fans will tell you either 98 or 02 were the absolute pinnacle. I side with 02 because it has Kula in it. Also note that 98 and 02 both have updated rereleases with an extended roster and rebalancing, but those are Windows-only.
Puyo Puyo Tsu: 20th Anniversary is the peak of the series, but if you're on hardware that can't run DS or Wii, arcade Tsu is fine. AI is a lot weaker though, and the story mode just forces five colors and high gravity on later stages to compensate.
Puzzle Bobble 1/3: You've probably played some flash game clone of this. IMO I think 1 was best for its simplicity, I'm not as fond of the garbage patterns introduced in later titles in an effort to give characters some asymmetry. But PB1 does not have AI opponents, singleplayer is only the stage clear mode, so if you don't have a human to play with try PB3 for the next best thing.
Tetris: The Grand Master 1/2/3: The only good Tetris, do not @ me. Start with TGM2's Novice Mode, then once you can clear that go back to TGM1.
Twinkle Star Sprites: A versus shmup with a very unique format. Chaining enemies on your screen sends attacks to your opponent's screen. Hard to really explain, just give this a spin and feel it out for yourself. There are a lot of moving parts, screenwatching is vital, and feels like I've barely scratched the surface of the game's depth.
Vampire Savior: Aka Darkstalkers 3. This game is fast as hell and it's a blast. Like with any classic fighter, good luck keeping up with FightCade folks who really know what they're doing, but I love it casually.
Waku Waku 7: This game's mechanics are honestly borderline kusoge, you can't even cancel normals into specials. But I love the design and atmosphere so much. Tesse is really fun to play even in spite of the system mechanics.
NES:
Fire 'n Ice: A very rad little puzzle game.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!: Just an absolute blast. I won't bother listing them seperately but also check out Super and Wii. Super's kinda the black sheep of the series, but it's still a good game, just not as good. Wii is an absolutely top-notch successor and I'm sad it didn't get any more sequels after that. The two arcade predecessors are honestly forgettable.
SNES:
Chrono Trigger: I am hesitant to recommend most JRPGs from this era if you did not grow up on them, because many of them haven't aged so gracefully. Chrono Trigger is the exception, this game is a fine wine. You may want to check out one of the rereleases though, or at least a retranslation patch, because the original translation was made on a rushed deadline and bound by heavy technical limitations.
Earthbound: A bit more of a slow burn in comparison to CT, but this game is carried by incredible writing. It's also required reading before playing Mother 3 next. You can skip Mother 1 though.
Kirby Super Star: Definitely the peak of the series, giving every copy power an entire moveset is a blast. Has an updated rerelease on DS with added extras, I do highly recommend this version, but DS can be awkward to emulate so SNES is fine.
Panel de Pon: Gamecube version is best, but if you can't run Gamecube then Super Famicom is good too. GBC is also worth checking out, in order to adapt it to the small screen the story mode has health bars instead of true CPU opponents, which makes it play rather differently.
Wario's Woods: The NES version is more well known since it was the system's last first-party title, and for whatever reason it's the only version Nintendo ever rereleases. But the SNES version is a notable upgrade, biggest thing it has is AI to play versus mode against. Versus mode is wild as hell, so if you've never seen it please check out the SNES version.
GBC:
Game & Watch Gallery 2: Holds a special place in my heart as the first game I ever owned. Has the best lineup out of all the collections, with 3 and 4 you can kinda tell they had used up all the heavy hitters.
Mario Tennis: An incredible tennis RPG. And Mario doesn't even show up until the postgame as a bonus boss, which I find hilarious. Has connectivity with the N64 version if you can get that running, lets you transfer your RPG mode character and unlock more content on both titles.
Boktai trilogy: Hideo Kojima's greatest masterpiece. First game's alright, second game is where it comes into its own. Note that you want the Solar Sensor hardware for the full experience, but emulating them is worth it over not playing them at all. And for the third game, you'd have to pick between original hardware or the translation patch anyway.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow - It's Castlevania. Also play Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but Aria is by far the best of the GBA installments.
Golden Sun 1/2: These games were way ahead of their time for how they designed a combat system that encourages you to use all of your tools and not just click basic Attack as if you gotta hoard your MP for a rainy day. Fantastic puzzles too.
Mother 3: Surely you have already heard of this game and do not need me to tell you to go play it. Have you not played it by now? Why not? Well, okay, if you haven't played Earthbound first, go do so, then play this.
Rhythm Tengoku: A wonderful game about pressing the A button. Sometimes you press the d-pad too. Translation patch.
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1/2: If you've ever played the classic 2D Tales games, these are excellent spiritual successors to those. There's a third game that's JP-only, translation patch is being worked on but it's been stuck in development hell for years...
Romhacks:
Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash (NES): SMB1 turned into a Metroidvania with Celeste mechanics ported in. I think what impresses me the most is that they got 4-directional scrolling into this engine.
Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Crossover Randomizer (SNES): It's an absolutely incredible technical feat that this even works. SM and ALttP smashed together into a single ROM, with a few doors that take you from one game to the other, then the item pools are shuffled together so you have to go back and forth to find one game's items in the other. Unfortunately because ALttP is a much bigger game with a lot more items it kinda overshadows SM, you may not find this to be as replayable as the standalone randos. But I recommend trying it once because it's just so cool the first time.
Not OP, but I’m about 8 hours in and love it so far. It definitely has a few things I’d prefer it tweak, like a lack of HDR support on PC and no custom map markers, but they’re simply annoying, not deal breakers.
Not OP, but I also just finished the game. I had a lot of fun, IMO it’s a solid 8/10. It’s not the greatest RPG but it’s got decent writing, fun choices and mostly interesting characters. The exploration is fun, but with the way gearing and loot works it gets stale (luckily for me, that only happened near the end of the game).
Hope the game does well cause it’s probably the most "finished’ an obsidian game has ever been.
Half of the early FF games weren’t released in the West until later on. FF1 was, but 2 and 3 were not. So when 4 released outside of Japan, publishers thought it would be weird to have the numbering go from 1 to 4, so 4 released internationally as FF2. And then 5 got skipped over as well, so when 6 released internationally, it was released as FF3. However, they wanted to standardize the numbering starting with FF7, because FF7 was a Big Deal™, so for players outside of Japan, the series numbering suddenly jumped from FF3 to FF7. And the skipped games were later released internationally, so the numbering is now consistent across regions, with the initial Western numbering now largely forgotten.
I wonder why… Personally, I’d rather pirate than have to deal with them. “Free games” is not enough to forgive what they have done to the PC gaming community. They’re not that epic.
We would have never gotten the likes of Alan wake 2 if not for epics money though, which also paved the way for remedy to become more independent for future releases. I’d rather have an exclusive then nothing at all.
It’s also arguable whether or not square would’ve ported kingdom hearts to pc if not for epic paying for it as well. Which in turn allowed them to put it on steam later because the game had already been made to work for pc.
Other than how they’ve handled rocket league and harmonix, epic have done nothing but good for the pc space in my opinion. Even if a launcher is shitty, a launcher is just a launcher and at least their store runs better than gog or steams.
Alan wake 2 had massive critical acclaim what you on about and they’re now in a financial situation to publish they’re own games because of it.
And their store definitely runs better than steam and gog. Gog is the worst hanging most of the time with it often losing its penis place when going back to the previous page, and the latter is often the same on steam. Even big picture mode struggles with the steam store some times.
All of this, by the Epic Games words “Based on players reviews in Epic Games ecosystem”. From where? I can’t leave any review on any game, that I own, hillarious.
Releasing your game on EGS besides Steam is NOT straightforward and is costly for small devs
I am fed up of Epic shills spreading the narrative that EGS tools for piblishing games are better than Steam and devs are just lazy if they do not release their games on EGS. I have always debated that opinion defending that is not just a matter of just uploading the same files. It is a costly process that is commonly not worth it for small devs for just a handful of sales on EGS.
I found this comment from a dev detailing his “wonderful” experience uploading their game on EGS. Enjoy.
“Oh the store release, a million little bullshit things.
Actually I released the game on Steam on 24/04. I released multiple games on Steam before, without any issues. Steam is a breeze. I love it.
Epic? Pain.
Non-sense rules. They delayed my release by more than 10 days.
On steam you can post anything in screens and trailers. Not on Epic. Even on PEGI 18 game you have to censor blood, or not include it at all. I could not believe this. But then I watched Dead Island 2 trailer on EPic - there really is no blood even in that game video. I had a trailer with blood up for 6 months. But a week before release some reviewer noticed I have 2 seconds of blood in the trailer. They made me take it down, up the PEGI from 12 to 18 so now there is a 18+ date picker warning, and had to reupload the trailer with black blood, not red.
Million confusing settings in 3 different stages. Dev, stage, live. If you get one setting wrong, your build will not pass review. Its like doing taxes - they know what you did wrong, but they don’t tell you exactly. If they tell you, and you disagree, you have no way to opose the decision with a ticket like on Steam. You have to create unrelated support ticket that NOBODY READS FOR DAYS. Response happens after a WEEK. Which is really fucked when your release date is 3 days away and they block your review package.
If one stage review fails, THEY WILL BLOCK THE WHOLE PACKAGE. So before release I wanted to update screens, trailer, release date and add some sweet gifs into description. But I uploaded ONE SCREENSHOT with dead scientist on the ground, in pool of blood. THey rejected the whole package - that means my release date did not update, my texts didnt either. BEcause of one screenshot. They bundle these changes together and it is not possible to change it specifically.
When I created the store page, I checked a checkbox that I will do achievements and will include Epic overlay. This option is NOT REVERTIBLE. YOu cannot revert it once you do this and they do not tell you. So a year or so later I had to deal with fucking achievements that I did not even want to include anymore, because of the extra work it required compared to STeam. Same with EOS overlay. THe overlay is NOT MANDATORY, yet they blocked my build for 2 days because it did not work in Live bundle. It did in Dev and Stage. They did not tell me how to fix this.
Later I found in ONE obscure forum post that Epic named one variable in config wrong, that caused this. They named “Artifact ID” with “Artifact Name”, but it is in fact ID. My game worked with overlay when run in standalone, but not via their store. Due to one checkbox. They knew what is wrong and did not bother responding. You have no way to communicate with them. Steam responds immediately. I was so annoyed with the achievements that when I had to include them, I included only a few that I had on Steam. Also you have to ensure that your achievements all add up to 1000 EXP. If it is not exactly 1000 EXP, review fails. ON FUCKING ACHIEVEMENTS. Then they forced me to add all Steam achievements, to “keep continuity among different store fronts”. On Steam, once they approve your game build, it is approved forever. Not on Epic. They have to review every build. You can get stuck on it right before release.
They wishlist rate on Epic is roughly 10% of what I get on Steam. But because they delayed my release by 10 days. I will get minimal conversion even from that, because they release week hype is over. So what they have “only” 12% comission. 88% of nothing is nothing. Epic fucked me. Never working with them again.”
Don’t get me started on their “wonderful” support if you lose your account :D
That’s hilarious haha, that has to be the best autocorrect from my swipe typing I’ve seen yet. I’ll have to figure out what was meant to actually go there now (I’ll stick it in an edit at the end though cause that is too funny to remove)
I don’t know if this is the priority for many other users, but Epic Games is 40% owned by Tencent, a Chinese corporation. That in itself is an inappropriate level of CCP influence to me - sadly, Chinese companies don’t really get to divest themselves of government influence the way American corps do.
(That said, with Google changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name, I feel less sure of that last claim)
Final Fantasy 10 was the last game that fit the ‘traditional’ turn based (active or not) gameplay. Since then there’s been less consistency between iterations.
Final Fantasy 11 and 14 are MMORPGs and are just fundamentally different games as a result. The latest is essentially Devil May Cry gameplay.
A lot of people enjoyed DMC and DMC is not inherently bad, but it may not be what people expect.
But the spinoffs using the Final Fantasy name have always been pretty damn hit or miss. (Compare Mystic Quest to Tactics.) This just now applies to the whole series.
I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.
1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:
2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.
Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.
Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.
Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.
Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.
Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.
There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.
Pomaganie moim zdaniem nie polega na domyślaniu się, tylko na rozwiązywaniu rzeczywistych problemów, dlatego zwykle pytam żeby mieć pewność. 🤷
Sam preferuję najprostsze możliwe narzędzia, więc polecam po prostu wiki, którą można zorganizować dowolnie: jak bloga, jak bazę wiedzy, albo jak hybrydę ich obu. Sam używam DokuWiki, z dość prostym interfejsem, ale też z dostępnym interfejsem WYSIWYG, czyli bez potrzeby ręcznej edycji kodu strony. Jeśli chcesz spróbować czy przypadnie Ci do gustu, to daj znać i założę Ci konto na próbę.
Innych rozwiązań nie próbowałem, ale sądzę że Wordpress wspomniany przez Petrosa da Ci więcej możliwości integracji z innymi narzędziami, np. z fedi.
Shoutout to a great top down racing game on deck: Circuit Superstars. Simple, cute, clean presentation. All racing, no fluff. Also, 4 player split screen! I will have to give art of rally a try too.
Niestety, celowa zmiana też wydaje się wiarygodna, bo ranking całości komentarzy chyba jest znacznie kosztowniejszy obliczeniowo niż ranking całości postów.
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