what are your favourite very specific game genres?

King of Posters
42

  • Anti-grind JRPGs. Not SRPGs; Not JRPGs where you don’t have to grind; JRPGs where you aren’t allowed to grind, and have to consider resources. Some chapters of Live A Live did this to an extent, particularly the cowboy chapter and the street fighter chapter. Dragon Quarter likely counts. Undertale probably counts, if you’re doing a pacifist run.

  • Games that are nigh impenetrable without the foresight that guides allow. Hard to explain. Not games with complexity as dense as X-COM or Dwarf Fortress so you need a wiki to start, but games with mystery accompanying their complications. Examples include Siren, Atlantis no Nazo, maybe Ephemeral Fantasia. King’s Field. Live A Live’s secrets are this well hidden. These are more interesting to me on paper than they are to play, but they’re still a favorite.

1 Like
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@CourierRice

As to your second bullet point - Valkyrie Profile!

One of my all-time favorite games, but I’m convinced there is no way that anyone could, going in blind, figure out what the game is really asking of you… and you need to understand what the game wants from you from the very beginning to get good end.

And the crazy thing about that game is that, after 30+ hours of playing, the good ending is the only one that isn’t basically a Ghouls and Ghosts-esque cut to black “game over - thanks for playing!” screen. It’s cruel.

44

Yeah!! That’s exactly what I mean. I played that once upon a time and hit a hardlock and could never continue. Loved how foreboding that game was, what with the narrative context and the mechanics working together. Did a great job of constantly making me dread my choices. Totally gonna revisit that sometime.

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I wish I could have gotten into Valkyrie Profile but there was just wayyyyy too much fucking boring dialogue in the beginning of the game and I couldn’t deal anymore

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@Mikey Totally fair. I mean, at it’s most basic the game is essentially a collection of short visual novels about people dying with an admittedly very satisfying RPG battle system attached.

There is an over-arching story, but it doesn’t make itself apparent till way later in the game, and by that time unless you’ve been using a guide you’ve probably already messed up too much to be able to get the only satisfying ending.

If the info dump at the beginning doesn’t intrigue you, it would be hard to recommend going further, as the structure of the game doesn’t change much from there!

Like @CourierRice, though, I was immediately enamored by the tone and look of the game, and played through it twice back-to-back back in the day.