Ape Escape 1/2
incredible crisis
2 Likes
keep 'em coming smart and attractive people
No One Can Stop Mr. Domino
2 Likes
I want soooo desperately to get into Stardew Valley but the progression is glacial; don’t expect to have a proper farm up and going for a long time. It’s honestly not worth it unless you like grinding for fish just to make enough cash to buy a few more seeds which net you only a paltry ROI.
unrelated but can someone make me an informal ranking of the saga series?
irritating stick?
3 Likes
Dive deep into the mines if you want faster progression. Tons of high-resale-value-items and tech tree advancement in there, and no hard gating mechanisms keeping you near the surface.
1 Like
Parappa the Rapper
imo the ones absolutely worth a look are: romancing 2, minstrel song, frontier and the ds remake of saga 2 (has a fan translation patch)
everything i’ve heard indicates scarlet grace would make it on that list
2 Likes
romancing 2 is kind of dry, it feels like the SNES equivalent of one of those 360-era deconstructed jRPGs that are all about one hub world instead of a dragon quest style adventure which I’ve never personally found to be a great use of the genre. it is however very mechanically solid and well balanced and probably the objective best example of Kawazu doing his thing of putting pleasing Squaresoft production values toward actually thoughtful combat/quest design that would at that time only have been found in PC RPGs.
frontier is by far my favourite, it’s seven 5-hour long RPG stories in the same world that overlap and have some sidequests in common so the whole thing is very breezy and yet memorable, it’s all 2D sprites on whatever-seemed-fun-at-the-time 3D effects with weird perspective changes, most of the assets look like they were assembled out of the final fantasy 7 team’s garbage bin, the overworld run speed is brokenly fast, you can win most battles by learning the combo system without having to level up much, there are tons of characters to recruit and some of them are like “sitar starfish wandering around who joined by accident when I meant to talk to the shopkeeper instead,” but because they still had squaresoft money it actually all holds together for the most part.
3 Likes
yuee. YUEEEEEEEE.
1 Like
it’s a very dreamlike deconstruction of everything likable about that era tbh, like if you ever have a jRPG itch you don’t really want to commit to scratching it has it all
5 Likes
grotesque videogame
it frustrates me that it asks for system data for Saga Frontier and not SaGa Frontier. 
2 Likes
Grostesque in the right way it seems, and not in that cheap tumblr-skinned way some games are intentionally shooting for nowadays; has a synesthetic quality I’m digging.
Both Scarlet Grace and Saga 3 are releasing this fall, is 3 less dry than 2?
Just from watching a bit of this gameplay vid you can tell they were really fucking going for it, am I right about that?
i find 2 really charming honestly, though yeah it is the kind of quest design you would find in a western pc release with a 1993 squaresoft aesthetic
3 is… not great besides a couple of kenji ito bangers and the really weird diverse cast and yeah the fan translation is a fuckin’ ghastly early machine-translated thing
playing minstrel song for ~10 hours without a guide can also be a great introduction to the wacky antics of akitoshi kawazu
1 Like
Ore no Ryouri.
2 Likes