I don’t play MMOs anymore (nothing can satisfy me like City of Heroes used to), but just wanted to chime in to say I love your vintage anime character names.
There are certain stories where a good amount of the first-time enjoyment is trying to guess the outcome/twist, like murder mysteries. IMO it really depends on the story structure.
Poor guy. I mean he’s ridiculously lucky to be as famous as he is and to have been compensated fairly for the rest of his Sonic/SEGA music but it sucks that one of his most famous works has effectively been stolen by a corporation’s sense of entitlement.
A number of the best games of all time are quite cheap:
Tetris (pretty much any version)
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (use OpenRCT2 to run it well on a modern PC)
Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic 2 (use The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod to add back in the stuff the devs had to cut for time, otherwise the ending is disappointing)
Balatro ($9.99 on mobile or $19.99 when bundled with Slay The Spire on Steam)
Slay The Spire
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source)
DOOM (the original, not the 2016 game, very cheap and there are literally millions of mods and community made maps)