Personally, I don’t care about TLOU, but I don’t think you should be leading with a massive spoiler as the thumbnail. Others might give you a lot of shit for that.
Take my opinion with a grain of salt, for the most part, I’ve mostly enjoyed games released in the third generation and didn’t touch anything past the seventh. The increasing amount of handholding turned me off and degrading mega evolutions from the once advertised evolution of the gameplay formular to a mere gimmick broke the last straw.
That being said: The Gamecube games hands down. The intro cutscene to Colosseum has more story than some generations did in their entirety and instead of you just stumbling into the plot you are actually an integral part of it. As an added bonus, both games feature final bosses that actually fight back. I think Colosseum is the only Pokemon game I ever struggled in.
Of course, taking everything Pokemon into account, Mystery Dungeon is the only true answer, but I wanted to go with an traditional RPG first.
If you insist on mainline games, you’re probably right about the fifth generation. These games have everything you would need, but the execution itself is fumbled - and it has to be, since they questioned their own franchise at its core. Logically speaking, N is right and everyone else is wrong.
There are some interesting things in other generations, but it usually feels tacked on and isn’t actually relevant for 95% of the game. Like, the sixth generation had some nice ideas - but they are mostly implied or retold, without you having any urgency in the matter. Once again why I chose the GC games, two of the few games with you being part of the plot. In the early mainline games, you mostly happen to be there when story happens, in the later games, you sometimes only get told that story happens somewhere.
I don’t think they truly understand their audience. Everything before the endgame is just a tutorial in MH. Yet, they usually ship the endgame with the DLC .
Wouldn’t have expected anything else. The two types of people I’ve mostly seen buying the Switch 2 are those who are really into Mario Kart and those who are into Pokemon, for the extra frame rate.
Neither of these groups is known for buying 3rd party games - at least not the ones I know.
You see, that’s your problem. Companies don’t make games for any other reason than money. Since there are no microtransactions or subscriptions available, they quite frankly don’t care if you ever play the game after you’ve purchased it.
They moved a lot of units already and considering it’s only a side game with reused assets, they made a profit. Therefore, the game by all means is a success for them, even if nobody would play anymore.
Concurrent players also shouldn’t influcene future sales by much, since you only need 3 people at a time
That being said, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 and 2 are awesome. They combine SRPGs with the usual SMT combat - I don’t think I’ve found something similar yet.
You move around like you would in any other SRPG, then you can attack enemies in range to enter normal turn based combat - however, at most, you can only play out 2 full turns before combat ends. Afterwards the next unit moves. Each unit represents a squad of up to three characters you will be batteling with, usually a human and two demons. Depending on your squad, you may have different movement, range and abilities.
I’ve played them all! Although, I haven’t finished all of them. I’m planning on fixing that with the FFT remaster, however, I had to drop the original release.
Personally, it goes FFTA > FFTA2 > FFT. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who likes FFTA2 the most.
People only ever talk about Final Fantasy Tactics and dismiss any of the other games. However, going by the original release, Tactics Advance is by far my favorite. It’s my favorite GBA game and at least in my Top 25 JRPGs, despite having played almost nothing else for the past 20 years. I like many of the things the game gets criticized for.
You’re missing many of the most iconic games on PC, namely stuff like League of Legends, DOTA, WoW, Overwatch, Runescape… Kerrigan is the only one you’ve included that kinda fits this group.
Now, to be honest, I haven’t touched most of these games myself, so I can’t tell you their mascots. But at least the MOBAs are bound to have one.