Giant Bombcast 738: OG Daddy

That moment where Bakalar puts on his best Carl impression 😂

I appreciate the effort put into the little pixelated finger on the thumbnail, but it creeps me out for reason.

"How do you not know about hammocks?" --Man who didn't know who Cloud Strife is or what a mimic is

I'm incredibly biased here, as it's a childhood thing for me, but it's wild to hear Chrono Trigger talked about in such a way that Jess did that was so matter of fact (while positive) when I can't think of it in anyway that doesn't couch it as one of the greatest games ever made. She's absolutely right about some of the quality of life things in comparison to a lot of 90s JRPGs that can be incredible obtuse or chock full of systems and nonsense. I need to play it again, as I stopped after a few hours in earlier this year (it's the Steam version that required some BULLSHIT to actually get to play, it's so fucked).

What if the big plane you summon also shoots the smaller planes out of it as it approaches the organ-filled giants?

I hadn't noticed it before and now it is all I can think about

What's the name/info on the 4k video scaler?

I always loved the Sledgehammer! theme, but I didn't know until a couple of years ago that Danny Elfman composed it. It's one of his earlier themes, I probably wouldn't have known his name when I watched the show as a kid, I wasn't an Oingo Boingo fan, and I don't think I knew who'd done PeeWee's Big Adventure's music, as much as I liked that, too.

Sometimes I think y'all could benefit from playing like... a Ys game or something whenever JRPGs are brought up on the pod. If you want a fast, fairly straightforward game whereupon the numbers do go up which lasts less than 20 hours, may I recommend Ys Origin or Oath in Felghana. It's not like every single example of the genre is some ponderous animation-heavy turn-based affair which lasts 80 hours.

Can Jan not use an Xbox controller? Seems weird to rebuy/download a game on steam just to use a ps5 controller on pc.

Those PS+ tiers are so underwhelming that I finally decided to buy Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which I'd been holding out on since I assumed that the Metal Gear series would be included in some form. That game rules.

If you want a JRPG with timing in the battles... Might I direct you to Legend of Dragoon. That game slaps.

@murph: I was hoping they would mention it, and Jan did, but there wasn't really a discussion about it. That game slaps hard. I absolutely loved the active battle system; Paper Mario ain't got shit on Dart and Rose. Still have my PS1 copy and have been meaning to play it again.

WRT small, fun RPG franchises, I really enjoyed the Atelier Ayesha and Atelier Eschatology games (I would avoid the rest though since they started going from 'cute' to creepy imho). They're basically really chill RPGs with light time management mechanics, where you farm and hunt enemies and use a fun puzzle-like minigame to create bombs and other weapons. You can design some wild, OP stuff and I got some real joy from spending hours crafting stuff and then trample all over any boss that would get in my way. The music is absolutely fantastic in Ayesha as well.

FF: Lightning Returns is a fem in the rough. You have control over Lightning even during fights, can dodge, do counter and stun enemies by hitting certain parts or performing counters. It's semi-open world and has a time mechanic. Only main issues is that the story is mostly nonsense (like, the most nonsense of any FF game) and the opening missions are really bad and they probably lost 30% of the players right at the start. No shame in looking up where you need to go because some of the missions are Elden Ring - levels of obtuse.

I remember Murder in Small Town X, I liked that dumb show.

I wrote this elsewhere but if you’re a Silent Hill fan in 2022 and still feel like you’re getting jerked around emotionally by Konami then that’s allllll on you. There have been no good Silent Hill games in 20 years and Konami has done nothing to make anyone have even a molecule of confidence in their ability to deliver a quality product in the gaming market, much less a proper Silent Hill follow up that fans would actually be happy with.

@moda: no idea if it was tried or mentioned yet, but no problem here with DS3 Tool and Gamepass. I am firmly in the "PS5 controller on PC" camp, especially since the Sony games but even third parties support the haptic feedback 1:1 to the way it is on PS5.

Hurrah, Vagrant Story talk! Even if it was brief.

It's funny hearing them mention not wanting to put in 30 hours for a JRPG. Whereas now so many big games shoot for 20 to 30 hours. Which sucks for me, and why I've stopped playing a bunch of those bigger games. In my mind, 20+ hours should be reserved strictly for RPG's, not for something like Uncharted 4.

Jess! My then-roommate and I were really into Murder in Small Town X. However, it is going to be difficult to find these days. After all episodes were taped, the firefighter who won the whole thing... tragically died in the Twin Towers collapse. Fox wiped it from their schedule, mid-season, and maybe destroyed the tapes.

Though I'll stick with the PS+ Premium because I technically already have it, it seems like all Sony really did was absorb and got rid of PS Now which is really unfortunate. I hope like Jeff G said, that list was small and more games will be revealed during the launch, but so far, it looks like people who've only had PS Now, gotten abandoned. I will keep this for a year to see where it goes, but if it's stays stagnant, I might let it go, or atleast downgrade to standard edition for the online play and free monthly games.

While more people should plays Ys, it's and action rpg, when people talk about jrpgs they generally don't mean any rpg made in Japan, they generally mean the classic FF/DQ style (party based/turn based/random encounters etc etc)

Thanks for bringing up Murder in Small Town X , @voidburger ! I'm another person who remembers it, like some of those above comments. I was trying to think of the title the other day as Disney+ debuted a new show - The Quest - that is another reality competition series with actors in character interacting with the contestants.

The only JRPG anyone ever needs to play apart from Persona is Resonance of Fate. That dub is special, and the trigonometry based combat along with the pipedreams weapon upgrade system is *chefs kiss*

@deer: Yeah, I just didn't know if Jan didn't like the Xbox controller or something as usually people will use it on PC. I'm glad to hear the PS5 controller works nicely on gamepass games and such

Holy Shit Murder in Small Town X! The elimination rounds scared the hell out of me in high school.

@voidburger please update us on your upscaling adventure!

I'm pretty sure Attel didn't just comment over the porn, his guests were also the star of the film in question

I might challenge that point a little but, even if you restrict it to those specific criteria, there are plenty of JRPGs that don't fit the generalization of "they're all 100 hours long and grindy and so slooooww." I mean, hell, mainline Final Fantasy hasn't been turn-based for 20 years.

This is absolutely a "me" problem, and I want to acknowledge this, but like... there's nothing interesting about rehashing the same handful of complaints people have had about Japanese RPGs since like Final Fantasy 8, especially when alternatives do exist.

Jess, rather than wrestling, you could always just be needlessly shitty about Mr. Do! whenever Gerstmann brings it up. I'm convinced Gerstmann programmed it himself piggybacking off Dig Dug and merely convinced everyone else that it was a real thing.

RE: Wisdom Teeth, I didn't get general anesthesia either, just local anesthesia for all four. I think general anesthesia for teeth stuff is very much a USA thing (and apparently not all of the USA) because evryone else I know who is not from the USA has only had local anesthesia.

I think Jess is wildly underestimating the average age of this audience. I highly doubt that half of us were born after 1995. Probably less than one quarter, if I had to guess.

@voidburger, you should recruit someone to stream Chrono Cross as a pseudo-Endurance Run after you finish(?) Chrono Trigger if you wind up liking it a lot. Even moreso, that's a game that rejects grinding and loot tables in favor of, well... @zombiepie might tell you I'm being an asshole for saying this, but experiencing the story in favor of grinding materials and upgrades. There are slight bonuses for using characters during boss battles, but otherwise every character you could choose from levels after each boss battle and the bosses are pretty much the only thing that upgrades your characters, though there is some great magic, armor and weaponry that you've gotta specifically pursue.

As a site that used to thrive on bonkers storytelling, and already has a longplay of Chrono Trigger hosted, I think that'd be a fun nod to the history of gaming, history of Giant Bomb, enthusiasm of Ben Hansen for his childhood hangups, history of RPGs, the weirdness of game design in the late-2000s compared to now and one of the most fun Giant Bomb blogs of all time! I think at the very least you, Jess, would enjoy the implied psychological horror of what it means to embed your experiences onto the megabytes of a memory card via the ethereal hieroglyphs of warring island nations...

@adamcboyd: It's from TopazLabs, Video Enhance AI.