Time for the boring stuff–actual good games…don’t worry, there will be an honorable mentions post later.
4-5: style savvy, rune factory 4, pokemon
I’m not really sure how these games shake out so i’m putting a bunch of games in 2 slots. The reason is…they are long! And i’m ready to finish this thread. they are good enough I think.
Style Savvy is the one I played the least. I immediately stopped because I knew I needed to save it for after this dumb thread/project is over and actually enjoy myself. Idk what I expected these games would be exactly, but I definitely thought there would be more numbers/stats. Instead it was like, the customer came in and descibed the kind of jeans they wanted. the game gave me prices, pictures, and a little description. It wasn’t matching some kind of affinity system or color coding or any shit like that. no glowing hints. I picked the jeans and I got what the customer wanted on the first try. it was a very basic task and I’m probably going to see seams poking out of the game the more I play, but I was enthralled by the mystery of it, the emphasis on nonvideogamey human intuition. there’s 3 of these for 3ds believe it or not.
rune factory 4, come to think of it, I didn’t play much either. too busy playing that forbidden magna lol. anyway if i’m trying to be interested whatever small, super famicom-era game developers are up to nowadays like I was with lord of magna, then this is like an actually worthwhile-looking Neverland game unlike magna. It seemed pretty great based on the intro/tutorial part, that late SFC game design overabundance is in full swing. also I trust in the power of a game becoming gradually and inexplicably popular through word of mouth…the people seem to really love this game.
Pokemon Y was probably the biggest upset of this whole thing. I never thought I was going to get into a pokemon game again. I learned the trick is to not play it like an actual jrpg and treat it like an entirely different form of entertainment. It’s a passive thing to barely pay attention to while you’re focused on something else. Where in a jrpg I would usually talk to every NPC and scour every location for stuff, I’m just trying to get from point A to B as fast as possible and skipping a lot. I don’t even play with the sound on or read the text boxes half the time. But the biggest change with me is that i’m dead set on filling the pokedex now. I never took “gotta catch em all” literally as a kid, I thought they were exaggerating, but now I thirst only to walk around in circles in the grass trying to find the less common wild pokemon in each area.
I was originally gonna put the etrian odyssey games in here too, but idk, I really have to be in the mood for those games lol. I have softened up to them a lot though.
3 - New Super Mario Bros 2
Here’s a real 7.5 out of 10 kind of game on paper, that I thought nothing of at the time and was pretty skeptical now, and it ended up being some of the most fun I had in this thread. Mario is awesome…2d mario is so good. I still havent finished my phd in level design criticism so I can’t really put it into words, but the level designs really speak to my sensibilities. It feels like the game is constantly trying to outdo itself like mario 3.
A lot of the publicity and resulting discussion of this game is around the coin colllecting. there are new items/switches/powerups that, one way or another, cause lots more coins to appear. One review excerpt on Wikipedia refers to an “obsessive focus on coin collecting”. that might be true if the coins had any actual role in the game design/progression other than just giving you more lives. You have a huge coin counter on the map screen, I think it’s like 8 digits, that shows the cumulative total of all the coins you collected. While you play, it’s fun to make coins appear, chase them around and hear the jingling sound. and it’s interesting to see that huge number keep growing. Is that really “obsessive”? I think it’s pretty chill actually. That pinball-like excitement of the coins…plus it creates a little unique aesthetic touch, there is a lot of yellow/gold on the packaging and onscreen.
Speaking of how the game looks. this game does something with 3d that kind of blew my mind. instead of the background depth changing when you turn up the slider, it just gets progressively blurrier. The correct way to play this is with the depth slider maxxed out. The backgrounds aren’t so great looking in focus, but blurred out the game looks so good…it looks like an lcd game background.
So anyway yeah that’s all I want from life is a 2d mario game in my pocket that I can casually pull out & clear some levels. the game is pretty challenging too if you really try to go for the 3 big coins. I am totally getting the wii u/switch one someday and I gotta get mario maker too…
2 - the alliance alive
I love seeing a developer take a game that didn’t do so well one way or another & make a sequel/successor that keeps a lot of the same stuff but knocks it out of the park. This game is exponentially better than legend of legacy, but they used all the same staff, except–critically–masato kato. Instead we got Yoshitaka “Suikoden” Murayama writing alliance alive. Instead of a slow burn about exploring an empty island full of sacred elements and spirits or whatever, we’ve got cat people gods who live in the sky, beast people overseers, and a human underground resistance. people get killed, ambushed, imprisoned, go blind…this game doesn’t fuck around. it’s using all of the 90’s jrpg scenario writer’s toolkit.
This game was also designed by and for people who specifically love the world map screens in the ps1 final fantasies. Seriously it looks exactly like that. And you spend more time on the world map here than you would in those games. on top of that there’s this “tower system” while you’re on the world map. you’ll see a big tower off in the distance. The tower is run by helpful wizard operators! the operator will send you a chat message on the bottom screen like “roger…commencing support.” and you will start getting some kind of big buff from the tower during battles. It’s like…what the hell? what kind of gameplay system is that. But I like it actually…you can go to the tower and it’s full of people hanging out! you can rest in the tower. It’s like a truck stop.
there is one part where you play as one of the wealthy cat people rulers but you’re in a junkyard. The people loitering around the junkyard offer to solve each of the block pushing puzzles for you for a fee. If you decline…you have to do the block puzzle. If you talk to each one after, they don’t have anything positive to say about your self-motivation or whatever…they each say stuff like “was that really worth the time & effort?” I love stuff like that…
I’m pretty early in the game I think. Hopefully it doesn’t shit the bed and my reputation is tarnished for naming it the #2 greatest 3ds game of all time. It lets you speed up battles 4x so it deserves the highest jrpg slot on this list for that reason alone. Also the game is very liberal with unlocking skills (it uses the Saga system again), it feels like you’re constantly winning prizes while you fight. Saga for dummies… Also the music by Hamauzu is great, when I got to the fire world and heard these 2 songs back to back I was like oh yeah, I’m gonna like this game aren’t I
None of the other games on this list are really good enough that I would recommend obtaining or even emulating a 3ds to try and play them lol…but this one is on switch and pc! It’s probably a bad port! but whatever! give the game a shot if it sounds interesting.