i feel this way about stgs as a genre, also more and more jrpgs/srpgs fall into this category as the years go on
i have always felt this way about wrpgs, i have never found one i enjoyed enough to really sink into
been meaning to play disgaea for about 10 years now lol every time i get a chance to play it i’m not in the mood and that trend is one that will probably continue
probably will never play the shadow hearts series
will i ever play grandia?
the only jrpgs i have a burning yearning for nowadays are mainline smt games and etrian odysseys
Every score-based STG after about 2005 or so. I play them sometimes, but I don’t really.
It’s daunting because it feels like you could sink your whole life into any one of them.
On games people have mentioned because I have played almost everything not on PC.
there is also several ps1 baroques. I got them on jps+ And have not touched them and my plus runs out in a week.
i tried playing illbleed. It is a very hard game to actually play. You should definitely look up a video playthrough. You will also see why immediately it is very difficult to play. It id both very interesting (seen through a video) and the worst kind of bullshit to actually interact with.
you arent missing much with any of the grandias. Not that they arent fine games, but you arent missing much.
Personally I will never touch the wonderful full world of ps1/saturn srpgs. So many cool looking games there. I hate actually playing them though! And watching them be played is a unique monotony.
Infinity Engine RPGs (I bought all of them as aspirational videogame produce and let them rot in my GOG account.)
Old SCUMM games (I was too young for them at the time. I played Humongous Entertainment adventure games which are SCUMM games for babies by a grumpy Ron Gilbert. They’re now kind of obtuse even by 90s adventure game standards.)
I’ve played hundreds of hours of SMT but never beaten one.
as SB’s resident sort of Grandia fan, I am contractually obligated to say the that the original Grandia is worth playing anytime it comes up. and by worth playing I mean only the first half. it feels like a dragon quest game done by the lunar team, with a better version of chrono trigger’s battle system. it’s a very Lets Go On An Adventure kind of game and it feels the part. its not the best RPG of that era, but it feels like as good a distillation of that time frame as any.
I don’t even get that far. Matador in Nocturne, Void Quest in P4, October in P3, Infernal Tokyo in SMT4, somewhere I don’t recall in Soul Hackers… After 60ish hours I just peter out. With the exception of Matador it’s not so much that it’s difficult as I see the road ahead and don’t feel into it.
I think fighting games are on this list for me. I always told myself that at some point I’d get a stick and find someone who wants to get better with me.
The problem with that approach to any competitive game, I’ve found, is that one of us will inevitably get better than the other, but not in ways they can articulate. Then we burn out because it’s boring winning or losing all the time without ways to learn how to improve. It’s like a newbie trying to teach a slightly worse newbie what he’s doing wrong.
Maybe I need a mentor or something so that dynamic would change.
I played Rising Thunder for a bit; it was a fighting game by Seth Killian that used single buttons for special moves (instead of motions). It was a nice because it brought down the barrier of entry for me; the inputs were less complicated and I could play on a keyboard. I guess the game is defunct now, though. Riot (the League of Legends people) bought his company.
For me, these are basically all JRPGs and most CRPGs. I want to play them; I fully realize that at this point in time, I just will never have the time to play through games that require hours and hours to do so.
(This is a contradiction in that I do spend hundreds and hundreds of hours playing Football Manager; however, most of these hours are spent idling while I read Twitter, talk to my wife, get the kid(s) back to bed or make posts on gaming websites. And the time that I actually spent playing is pretty much reptilian brain as I’ve been playing the series for 15 years now and it’s pretty much just second nature at this point.)