miracleorange

miracleorange, 21 dni temu

Godzilla: Domination! Developed by WayForward, which is probably why it’s so good.

miracleorange, 11 miesięcy temu

Charmed did the reverse in that Hell is basically a bureaucracy.

miracleorange, 11 miesięcy temu

I would actually highly recommend the [World, Star, Citie]s Without Number systems. They’ve been going for about ten years, and while the individual systems themselves are genre-centric (fantasy, sci-fi, and cyberpunk respectively), they’re all inter-compatible and offer a good midpoint between crunchy systems and rules-light.

Also, I think Savage Worlds is setting agnostic and a little bit crunchier than most rules-light systems, but I have little experience with it.

miracleorange, rok temu

No one said the legends were good.

miracleorange, rok temu

Okay, but isn’t that game just one big bug?

miracleorange, rok temu

From the moment it was announced, I could not contain my excitement for Octopath Traveler from the art style to the graphics to the music. I was even into the name. I was so enamored that I bought the collector’s edition.

Then it finally came out and never have I regretted a game purchase so much; not because it was awful, but it was so mediocre. Honestly, if it were awful, I might have been more okay with it, rationalizing how a game could turn out so bad with everything going for it, mourning what could have been, etc. It did everything it promised it would, I just realized that it didn’t really promise much beyond an art style and being a turn based RPG with 8 main characters. The package was delivered, but it turned out to be Game Gear, not Gameboy.

I think buying that game put me off collector’s editions. The package for it was very impressive, but I think I finally saw the man behind the curtain and realized that what I was buying was just a bunch of plastic and art books that I was never really going to touch anyway. The only physical bonus I cared about from that point on was Steelbooks, but I don’t even buy physical games all that much anymore thanks to my Steam Deck.

Honestly, Octopath Traveler put me off blindly preordering games in general. Now I just blindly buy old games, so if they’re bad, I have no one to blame but myself for not doing the research LOL

miracleorange, rok temu

I think it’s likely that they meant 4e was the change that made it not D&D. That said, time has dulled the shock, and honestly, 4e had a lot of great shit in it.

miracleorange, rok temu

It’s very accessible compared to other cRPGs. D&D 5e was already designed to be beginner-friendly, and Larian just made it more beginner-friendly while also making one of the most open-ended games I can think of.

miracleorange, rok temu

Could be doing this in preparation for the Switch 2.

miracleorange, rok temu

Literally all of Candlekeep is a tutorial with the quests and the guys in green robes everywhere. It’s kinda great, actually. Allowed you to skip it if you wanted, but there if you need it.

miracleorange, rok temu

In Xenoblade, the entire story is the tutorial. Hunting uniques in the postgame is the real game.

miracleorange, rok temu

The only repacks I trust are FitGirl’s, mostly because they’re compressed to all hell and she’s always just… kept her head down.

miracleorange, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I somewhat agree with the sentiment behind the article, but…

And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.

Games like Tales and NieR (both long-running franchises) have never tried to be anything but action RPGs—not to mention NieR, which I’d honestly just call a straight up Platinum action game. I’d actually call NieR closer to Elden Ring than it is to Tales, and yet the author isn’t out here calling Elden Ring a JRPG. What more does NieR have in common with Tales or Ys than it does with Elden Ring besides country of origin? Does JRPG mean “game with anime-ish art style”? Maybe it’s the art style, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to me.

Which I think strikes at the heart of the matter: what defines a JRPG? Is it the country it came from? Obviously not. There’s a very specific style of game that “JRPG” refers to, and it’s a style that was very popular in the 90s and 00s. Obviously games are still made in that style: I could just as easily show a JRPG renaissance by namedropping Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Persona 5, all the Trails games, etc. But the author is basing his notions of what a JRPG is solely on trends from 20+ years ago. Trends change. People change. Maybe in 20 years, people will be whining about whatever Japan is putting out then and saying “WHY CAN’T JAPAN GO BACK TO WHAT THEY DID RIGHT AND MAKE ANOTHER TALES GAME LIKE TALES OF ARISE?”.

Yes, I think developers, studios, and even industries should take pride in where they’ve been creatively, and that’s where I agree with the author. That said, why can’t we let new games be new games? People are still making plenty of traditional JRPGs whether they’re made in Japan or not (hi chained echoes and edge of eternity), so why bother the developers who don’t wanna make those games and essentially tell them “you need to get over your internalized xenophobia”? It’s possible they don’t have internalized xenophobia like this article is suggesting, maybe they’re just tired of people putting them in a box.