re: Bravely Default 2, glad to hear some not great responses to it. i’ve been so burned by every game that team has made, i’ve made a point of not even playing the demo.
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I played the training mission of XCOM Chimera squad. I am bad at these games and am interested to see how it goes for me from now on.
A someone who adores this game and gets reabsorbed into it in a big way once every two or three years but has also been told that it’s too awkward and clunky a game to have any appeal in this century, this post did my heart good.
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Also, yes, my understanding of the story is that that’s the same Link, but a different Zelda who’s actually been under a sleep curse for generations. It’s wacky!
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it might be my delusion speaking, but zelda 2 feels distinctly… maybe too arcane to be “modern” but at least strongly compatible with certain contemporary trends of the past decade or so, and if the critical videogame canon wasn’t mostly based on a mixture of market-manufactured received wisdom and childhood nostalgia i think it would be taken much more seriously as a game with something to say to the present (it’s my favorite zelda too)
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yeah i thought everybody loved zelda 2 tbh
damn i’ve never played all the way through actually
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Zelda 2 and the US Super Mario Bros 2 aren’t experienced by enough people.
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i feel like that has to be generational? almost everyone i grew up with who had an NES had or knew those games (anecdotal, sure, but…)
I dunno, I’ve seen a lot of homes with SMB and SMB3 but very few with SMB2. Childhood friends (fwiw I was born in 91) didn’t really become aware of SMB2 until Super Mario Advance because of how uncommon it was. I still haven’t seen a hard copy of Zelda 2 outside of Akihabara.
Makes sense. I didn’t grow up with a NES and people I know irl have played or tried SMB’s 1 & 3 as well as the original LoZ but never those sequels
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my impression is definitely that all normies know mario 2 (usa) and none of them know zelda 2
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right, like, i’m kind of old (1983)
one of my earliest memories is being at my mom’s friend’s house and playing SMB2 with the kids in the basement (i kept calling Luigi “the green mario” because i didn’t know his name and i got owned).
my older neighbor down the street (he was a teenager) lent me his copy of Zelda II! he was a sort of casual game player, but he had it. i was like 5 or 6 and i accidentally deleted all of his save files because i didn’t know what the delete function would do! lol
anyway, yeah, these were the games i think most people associated with those series at that time. same with Castlevania 2; most people i knew had that game, but definitely not Castlevania 1.
so again, i think there’s a very-specific group of people (tiny generation gap) who know these games pretty intimately. that’s why it used to strike me as weird when people would talk about them as “obscurities.”
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i’ll even make a crazy hypothesis that it could have been regional, as well. pre internet and widespread game rentals, how would you know what games to buy? you tried them at your friends’ homes, first, usually.
too bad regional-game-sales data probably doesn’t exist for the late 80s in an easily-accessible way?
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im way too young to have known anyone with a nes and was mostly talking in terms of contemporary reputation but my anecdotal first exposure was that there were so many 00s newgrounds porn games that used the zelda 2 sprites
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i always tell people that Dark Souls is the best Zelda game, but what I really mean is that Dark Souls is the only sequel to Zelda 2.
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My dad was in love with Zelda 2. I’ve never beaten it but I got
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this close. I basically gave up at the final dungeon because it was Too Much
I also could never quite complete the final dungeon in Zelda 2. But I once watched a friend play through the entire game in one night.
I’m terrible at Super Mario Bros. 2 [JP], though I could beat Super Mario Bros. 1 with ease. I think the last time I played 2, years ago, I reached a jump not too far in that I could not clear with either character. I always have it in the back of my mind that I need to beat that game one day, though.
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I beat Super Mario Bros 2*
*in the All-Stars version **
**and using save states
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nintendo was fringe nerd shit back in the day over here so all my nes experience is emulation even though i’m old
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