That’s a good way to look at it; they were always willing to push a couple boundaries but seem to have been constrained within the box of traditional JRPG mechanics, plot structure, and aesthetics. 2, 3, and 4 are all games I want to like a lot more than I do (fusion! art style!) but find them so predictable and long as to be boring.
Dragon Quarter is willing to be player-hostile and it’s such an unusual decision that it carries the entire thing
I swear to god 2 is excellent if you just play it with the retranslation.
It’s funny to me just the sheer volume of people suddenly playing BoF1 right now.
Wonder if it has anything to do with being THE ONLY RPG available between both the NES and SNES libraries 
I was; I got through the frog palace and it reminded most of a more staid Mystic Ark, which was similarly traditional in form but whose weirdness extended to a world entirely made of melon
I think if it had the faster pace of a SNES-era action RPG I’d be happier, but the real block is always the ratio of near-brainless random battle time to exploring, talking, plotting time
bof can’t fuck with terranigma
you know I’ll always roll for Quintet
I found the combat to be a satisfying challenge throughout
but,
maybe I’m a psychopath
I think I’m terrible at teaching myself to enjoy JRPG combat; while I never ‘grind’, just by not running from encounters, I feel like I’m always overleveled. Dragon Quest XI’s hard mode and XP-block-if-1-level-above optional settings were godsends.
Run from combat then. Easy fix
assassin’s creed would be so, so much better if it plagiarized this
in smt1, agility is like a god stat, and you can just put all of your points into agility at the start, and then just run from most battles. and if you put some points into intelligence, then you can probably also converse your way out of battles you can’t run from. for bosses, there are items that cast strong spells that you can use. it’s pretty fun playing it that way.
fair, but I feel like it’s really hard to be overleveled in breath of fire 2, the difficulty is really brutal and you never really have enough resources, even with a good amount of grinding
i thought about playing crusader kings 2 but i’ve never really played anything like that before and it seems intimidating so i played final fantasy 8 instead
I’m enjoying Gears 5. I don’t think it really needs these big open world segments (I’ve only found one side mission so far, which was a pretty snappy 5 minute affair), but I guess that might change later. Looks nice, though.
Glad they’re finally addressing my favorite dropped plot point from the second game, the whole nature of that lab where they did all the human/locust experiments, and the consequences of it, though their allusions so far are pretty heavy handed and obvious.
Also I guess for all the talk about games on base systems looking/running like shit, this game looks pretty great on a One S? I guess I could always free up some space on my PC and try it there.
For all the strength the game has with its moody art design, it does do the one thing I think no game can escape with big bulky characters - that thing where you see a toilet stall in a bathroom and you start thinking it out and figure that the stall door is like, a good ten feet tall and four feet wide.
Here’s the thing, you don’t really need to know everything (I posit that you actually can’t know everything) that goes into playing crusader kings 2, even if you’re playing well. Its almost impossible to get a game over and even seemingly desperate or impossible situations can turn around and be in your favor. Its one of those sandboxy ‘anecdote generator’ games where your experiences and failures are an essential component of the game design.
You’re one of the bigger SaGa fans on the forum so I think you can grapple with a game overflowing with mysterious mechanics that work in strange ways in the background.
Blasphemous is the really well animated Catholic-ass Dork Souls everyone was expecting so far, but do yourselves a favour and mute the voice track, it’s distractingly bad
Should’ve taped it in Spanish guys
argh fuck I kept forgetting to play that demo
in my experience it’s the pacing of ck2 that is more intimidating than the systems; it’s one thing to have a lot of different things to interact with, but it’s another to know you could potentially be doing all of them at once and deciding not to. it is absolutely worth pushing past this uncertainty though!