Oh, for a non native speaker: what would “middle of the road” mean in this context?
A straightforward, classic example. Classic character archetypes, classic battle system, classic blue skies.
It’s very well made and if it’s the first time you run into some of those ideas you’ll fall in love.
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Yeah, indeed something like that did happen to me when I was around 15 and played Chrono Trigger (or Planescape Torment, for a wrpg parallel)
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It’s funny how the same “classic” things that would conquer you when you are younger, can keep you away when you are more experienced… e.g. classic archetypes, we are fed up of them.
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People have always been too overly enthusiastic about just-ok JRPGs on JRPG-starved consoles - Lunar, Phantasy Stars, Skies of Arcadia, Tales of Symphonia. Lost Odyssey?
Skies doesn’t have much interesting going on in 2021 beyond impeccable Dreamcast graphics
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Yeah… it makes me think about how I’m a huge fan in theory of the Phantasy Star series which I did not grow up with. However, the nature of this fandom is a bit questionable given that the only Phantasy Star I’ve actually grinded through till the end is the Sega Ages easytype
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phantasy star also has very sound use of archetypes (sega is good at this in general, they typically reached a few years further back from the anime du jour to create something that felt more timeless) which you can appreciate perfectly well from a distance without having to have an opinion on how it feels to play through phantasy star 2 (bad)
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honestly I think phantasy star 2 might be some kind of record in terms of the concept art on its own being vastly more interesting than the game itself save for maybe three lines of dialogue
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Yeah I understand why the IC conventional wisdom was that Phantasy Star 2 is the most notable one, but I have to say 1 and 4 are also very notable while being more even in terms of strength of concept vs strength of execution. My series ranking is 1, 4, 2, 3 (to the extent a ranking based on watching lots of speedruns on twitch rather than playing it is worth anything)
Some of what people fall in love with is parts of the premise and artwork inspired by the legendary 70s manga To Terra. This is one of those things where I wish it was the convention for homages to explicitly namecheck their inspirations in interviews/footnotes in the manual instead of keeping mum perhaps for fear of attracting tendentious copyright lawsuits. When I found out about To Terra it wasn’t from the US Phantasy Star community for whom this manga remains obscure, it was from a random twitter account that mostly posts about horror manga.
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And, Skies of Arcadia is another Rieko Kodama joint, and it has a similar cozy-but-adventurous tone
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i remember To Terra. I tried to read it, but eventually the tone put me off and I didn’t finish it.
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Yeah a lot of 60s/70s manga has a heart-on-sleeve tone that in the wrong light can come across as mawkish/half-baked. There must’ve been a reaction against it in the 80s because it’s much rarer now (or rather it’s still usually there but almost always guarded by irony). I have that reaction to a lot of manga from that era but To Terra clicked with me. It “goes big” on the sentimentality so it’s not in an uncanny valley
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You can watch it happen to individual IPs and destroy them; Space Adventure Cobra (late '70s, early '80s) works despite itself as Barbarella X Lupin III and Cobra manages to evade sex pest through a very careful dopey charm. He gets a layer of cynicism after passing through the '80s and suddenly he’s terrifying and can’t come across as anything but a dirty creep.
a world of difference from this:
to this:
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oh yeah, the characters, world, and feel of skies of arcadia, as well as the ship-to-ship battles, are all great.
it’s just the constant boring on-foot battle that ruin it, to be honest.
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honestly being a rieko kodama stan is like 50% of my fondness for that game
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Echoing Meauxdal the sound compression on gamecube is horrible. It’s honestly not great on dreamcast either and last I checked not a way to play it big and boistorous.
There’s one part where they take the encounter rate over the top because it is a dangerous area so that is neat but the base random battle rate is way too high for the whole game.
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Skies of Arcadia delivers on its promises. It has a cast of characters it builds on over the course of the game, and has a light Suikoden aspect to building up your pirate crew. The game also entwines the side activity of discovering lost ruins on the map and the main plot which leads you towards discovering new lands.
And I just realized the main plot is almost literally Star Wars.
Unfortunately the RPG combat is joyless.
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The classic archetypes tend to solve problems as well, which is one of the reasons why they keep recurring and keep appealing to an extent even when they’re tired
I heard early Valheim prototypes were in a deliberately weird Dune-inspired world but switched to a classic nordic landscape later. I’m not sure but I think this was probably because carrying players through a crafting tech tree without an already familiar metaphor is really difficult
Similarly fire/ice/lightning in RPG battles. You could use all kinds of metaphors for elemental weaknesses (as indeed Pokemon and Etrian Odyssey do) but the player being able to guess or remember that fire melts ice and lightning zaps robots is invaluable
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Your #1 source for watermarked Kingdom Hearts II cutscenes
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I read once that after writing the whole game, they had to go back and insert some of that stuff into KH2’s script, because despite what anyone might think, there is no Pepe Silvia bulletin board for the plot of these games. Nomura at al. just see shit they like and roll with it. This is really the exact level of care needed for the grand plot of the Disney FF crossover game that is actually about neither of those.
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