ArbitraryWater

@brian_: I mean, to be fair, that Superfly song is the only thing that has remotely stuck in my brain and I played that game *this week.* Well, that and my general incredulity at how they pronounced "Sorey."

Yeah, it sounds like the one Suikoden I played was the weird experimental one. The good news in that case, I guess, is that it's been almost nine years and quite frankly I don't remember most of the specifics anyway. Given its short length, I think I might push for a Suikoden 1 playthrough for the podcast sometime this year, ZP willing.

Also what if instead of starting to stream Shadow Hearts Covenant this month once I finish Xenosaga, I just picked up my Xillia save from February of 2019. I'm sure I'll be able to pick it all back up super easily. Punch doctor backstep evade go brrrr.

I will fully admit that I am no Tales of Expertia, but based on my limited experience those seem like the two to start with, yeah, especially if we're talking about modern consoles. Symphonia was fine when I played it almost three years ago (wait, three years ago? oh no) but there's no getting around how much it does feel like a PS2-era JRPG with some of its inconveniences and quirks. The PC port is also... quite bad in the "Durante had to make a fix for it" sense. Similarly, for as much as I will go to bat for Xillia in spite of its... limitations, I'm also not going to make anyone drag out a PS3 who isn't me. Not just for that game, at least.

What I know about Graces F sounds boneheaded and dumb in a way that sounds only marginally more interesting than Zestiria, but I've watched enough combo videos to go "oh I think I see why people might like this one." I was actually musing picking it over this for the wheel, but I figured Zestiria was more universally disliked.

I might eventually write something up about Xillia if I do get around to finishing it and/or playing its oft-derided sequel, but hot damn you can tell it was definitely the threshold point around where the JRPG development scene was collapsing in on itself or going to portables. I also *really* like the combat and am vaguely into their sphere grid-ass leveling system.

Good to know about Suikoden IV then, I guess. It sounds like we won't be doing Zestiria for the podcast, so that's at least one bullet dodged right there.

The range of quality in Tales really does distinguish it from something like Dragon Quest, which seems remarkably consistent for something that pioneered an entire genre and survived mid-00s Square-Enix. I definitely thought it was going to be a franchise hole for me, but I think each installment is just a little too similar to each other for me to want to play more than one every few years.

I definitely agree that a lot of older dungeon crawlers have notoriously high encounter rates, but that's often one of the reasons why I've bounced off a lot of them. Like, when I want to talk about why I like Etrian Odyssey so much, a lot of it has to do with the way it deftly balances its difficulty and power curves and also provides enough wiggle room so you're not just slogging your way through trash mob after trash mob.

PS: at some point I will play more Stranger of Sword City and I fully expect to get my ass kicked.

Star Ocean is absolutely one of those franchises I look at and go "how are there like five main series installments of this" in the same way that I've expressed incredulity about Onimusha. I've also seen enough of those games' english voice acting to know it'll probably be an entertaining stream in the same way Enchanted Arms was "entertaining."

@lapsariangiraff: Hey, I just wanna say thanks for your post. I do think Thorton being a manipulative trash-person is absolutely canon, and in general I feel like the writing is a lot more... mean spirited than I remembered it being? Like, I know [FORMER PROMINENT RPG WRITER] has been outed as a manipulative scumbag himself, but I feel like there's a lot of that energy here.

FWIW, I also think you can absolutely still find merit in the game's ideas. I just found the execution way more abysmal than I remembered. Admittedly, I've played and derived more enjoyment from broken-ass weirdo games salvaged from the corpses of cancelled MMOs, so my tastes might be a little broken in this regard.

Eh, it's fine. I think there's still... merit to this game? Like, divorced from the fact that it's bad, it has a lot of good ideas. Makes you wonder how the Aliens RPG was going if this is the one that Sega decided to keep afloat.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement to me! I'm genuinely curious what the big red flags are for the people here. For my part, I think the ones I'm most concerned about are also the ones that might require some... finagling to work properly. King's Quest VIII seems like a nightmare disaster after watching it on GDQ and realizing it was an RPG, while Konung seems... very Russian. In a way that might be fun, and might be disastrous. Oh, I guess Underworld Ascendant also exists, but I'm already aware of how much of a tire-fire that entire game's scope is.

Oh, and don't worry, if I can't get KQ8 and such to play nicely with OBS, I have... backup games.

I think it's absolutely a hindsight thing, because even I was like "you know there are things about Alpha Protocol that no other game does as well" before this playthrough, and I feel like I gaslit myself a little bit. I do think the game does reactivity super well, but... I think the general value I place on reactivity isn't what it used to be.

The game absolutely leans towards schlock in a way that doesn't endear itself to me, especially when it starts treading its toes onto actual Bush-era Geopolitical stuff. I was gonna make a comparison to Burn Notice (which, IIRC, Jeff Gerstmann also made around the time of the game's release) but I think that'd be mean to Burn Notice. At least that show was episodic and extremely light and had Bruce Campbell.

Having played NOLF recently, on stream, I think I'd rather play that than AP, despite my general sense from those first few hours that... it maybe doesn't hold up so great either? Eh, maybe I'll play some NOLF 2, see how that one compares. The Wheel of Dubious FPSes sure is a topic that has been floated around, unironically.

Tales of Xillia *did* have very good combat, and at some point I'm thinking of doing a "Load Our Last Save" sort of dealio for it and seeing how much I can remember from my 30 hours in save file.

Zestiria, for what it's worth, sounds like the combat is fine and everything else is the problem. I don't think you can link, but the main character can basically Fusion with most of the other party members? I opted for it over Graces F, partially because it sounds like we're gonna be playing it for the podcast soon, and partially because that game is notorious for having "the best combat in a Tales game and the absolute worst story"

Free on GamePass or PS+ is the most acceptable price for Greedfall, all things considered.

So uh, when was the last time you played Alpha Protocol? :))))

Oh, that Definitive Ranking already exists. It's right here, but you're right that I should've linked it directly in the blog. The list is basically how much fun I had, which I'm not sure has anything to do with actual quality.

Yeah, excited to check out some actual good stuff after spending the last 6 months playing, uh, not as good stuff. Tower of Time was definitely a real "I played like 3 hours of this game and really enjoyed it, then didn't touch it again for whatever reason." while Staglands was a lot of me being very into that game's entire deal but never getting very far.

A ringing endorsement for The Wheel of Dubious RPGs if ever I've read one. The Streaming/Blog series that plays and writes about the games BIG TWITCH is too "mainstream" and "remotely relevant" to play.

Well, you're definitely the person who was the most positive on Septerra Core when I mentioned it in the discord, so clearly the game did its job for a certain facet of people. Once you get past the obvious paralells to Final Fantasy VII, it seems like it's one of the more "well-made" games I've played for this feature, but my patience for slow JRPG battles extends only so far these days. If I'm going to invest in something like that for the long haul, it'll probably be something a little weirder.

It seems like that's the context which would make that game work. I think in terms of actual *quality* it's probably one of the better games I've played for this feature, and if not for the slow-ass battles I probably would've given it a "1" on the scale.

Something I also neglected to mention in my write-up is that it has solid voice acting for a game of its era, and it seems like there's a lot of it. sure, I played the entire thing in a tiny-ass 640x480 window, but it's got production values.

Very glad to be the test bed for "Mento's May Maybe I shouldn't play these." I've only got one game left for this current wheel, and it's Might and Magic IX. You'd better believe that is just gonna be 3-5 hours of me going "BUT IT'S ACTUALLY NOT THAT BAD GUISE" as my chat looks on in disbelief and I threaten a full playthrough. If there are any other questionable games lurking in your steam library you need someone to taste test beforehand, let me know.

One of the things I've been talking about doing to fill that void is showcasing the fun, smaller RPGs I've also managed to amass large quantities of. I want to play more Underrail and Serpent in the Staglands at some point, and also I dunno maybe this will be the excuse I need to play Shadowrun Dragonfall. Plenty of opportunities to clear through various Steam and GOG backlogs under the pretense of "streaming" "video games." Definitely can tell my brain has been at least slightly ruined by streaming because I think about games in terms of the content I can produce with them.

Of course... the immediate future is gonna be a lot of Dragon Age II. Also I'm considering getting both a capture card and a scan converter so I can stream console games on native hardware, including my PS2 with the fancy-ass $30 component cables I bought. Still need to justify buying Xenosaga, Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter, and those Shadow Hearts games six months ago.

Blackguards and its sequel are neat games, but I must needs emphasize that both are still very "European Extreme" in their difficulty and encounter design and there's zero shame in dropping to easy. Definitely worth a look though, and I might inevitably show them off on stream one of these days now that I've remembered their existence.

Yeah, to be clear I think there's probably a decent game buried somewhere in Drakensang, but I fully and willingly invoke my right to not play any more, having not been very invested in those opening hours. A lot of that patented Eurojank ambition comes from its implementation of The Dark Eye's mechanics, seemingly wholesale, and if nothing else I'd like to see the highlights of someone else's playthrough, even if I'm not sure I could manage my own.

"Western RPG devs trying to make a Final Fantasy" is really one of my favorite weird micro-trends of the genre; not just for how strange it is, but also because of how much it's the product of a specific time and place (namely the 90s anime boom and FF VII being the biggest video game.) It's not dissimilar to how a bunch of Japanese devs tried their hands at making bad cover shooters during the Xbox 360 era... but you know, more fun because the games they're trying to imitate were colorful and weird instead of brown and staid.

But yeah, I'ma say that "Japanese developers trying to make Wizardry games" were probably more successful at their job than the other way around, and the small niche of hardcore dungeon crawlers out of there is proof of that legacy.

Thanks for reading!

This is 100% going to be the high point of dubiosity for this feature, although the I think we still have a couple of bangers left. Predicting it now: Thunderscape is going to be the game to watch. Might and Magic IX is also a blatantly unfinished, ugly, janky mess, but that stream is just going to be 2-5 hours of me saying "this isn't so baaaaad, look!" before you all look on in disbelief and I finish the game in front of you. Also very interested in giving Storm of Zehir an earnest shot, because I remember it having ideas,and then executing on those ideas poorly.

I saw that, and I think Kiko's playthrough is going to be the thing that saves me from attempting to play much more Ultima IX.

To be clear I played more than the one run I did on stream and I think it's a lot of neat ideas, but doing a solo character bit with AD&D rules isn't the most thrilling thing in the world, especially with how featureless a lot of Dungeon Hack's randomly generated environments are.

I wouldn't be opposed to playing more of it, but I think it's definitely more of an *interesting novelty* than a true dubious RPG. I bet going through Dungeon Hack as a pure-class mage, bard, or thief would be an experience though. A bad experience.

Vaporum does the solo character "Side-Stepping, Rock-Dropping, Real-Time Square Dancer" well.... and that's about all I can think of.

Yeah, that seems like the thing to do. Well, at least the visual novel/politics sim part of Dragon Commander is a lot of fun, even if the overworld map and RTS stuff is genuinely sort of terrible.

I think it's less of a Hinterlands problem, as @sethmode said, and more just a problem of bad pacing. It's less "we made this introductory area too big" and more "we made the introductory act way too long." I feel like the 10-15ish hours it takes before you're doing cool Dragon shit is indicative of how Divinity II never really puts its best foot forward despite having all the component parts of a competent eurojank RPG.

I feel like Pillars of Eternity is a pretty good example of a game that takes place during the "Age of Exploration" and is actually reflective of that, technology-wise. Not just with all of the matchlock firearms, but also with how much those games are about colonialism, especially the second. You can tell Josh Sawyer is a history nerd, basically, and that's probably half of why I like those games and their worldbuilding so much.

@bladeofcreation: To clarify, Lionheart takes place in the mid-1500s and the stuff with Richard and Saladin is the instigating incident that brought magic into the world (your character is the "Scion of Lionheart" and one of the inheritors of his legacy etc etc.) It's pretty goofy with its history, but it's not *that* out of whack. Basically, think Assassin's Creed but fantasy instead of sci-fi, and without the pretension of taking itself remotely seriously.

Like, Shakespeare's quest is literally to recover his muse (who is a magical spirit) from Shylocke, the villain of The Merchant of Venice. Also at one point you encounter Miguel Cervantes acting like Don Quixote. It's that level of writing.

Boyyyyy I'm sorry. Just... woof. That game is too boring to deserve that sort of time commitment. I had more fun playing Ultima IX on stream today than I did with any of my time in Divinity II.

A lot of old MMO nostalgia always gives off some real “and we went uphill both ways IN THE SNOW” vibes. watching your streams earlier this year clarified how much that stuff does not work if you start at the ground level without a group of friends willing to make the same poor choices as you. There’s something very fascinating about that, especially with all the additional bolted-on features to circumvent the hardest part of the early game grind.

But yeah, it seems like you had a bad time. It’s cool that FF XI exists and is still going on, but let me say from experience that XIV seems like the same person’s MMO.