ArbitraryWater

I fully support this endeavor given how many games in the N64 library are absolute clonkers, especially once you get into the stranger Japan-only stuff. How will Doshin the Giant fare in 64 minutes? How about Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber? (I played like seven hours of that yesterday, it's alright)

Anyway, by the time you go mad to the likes of Chameleon Twist and Bomberman Hero feel free to give me a ring because boy I sure do have weird repressed memories of my times renting games for this system.

What's this? I see someone is stealing my brand over here.

I sure did buy my own copy of The First Templar a couple steam sales ago for *Season 3* purposes, and it sounds like from your write up that I've come across a banger. The 360/PS3 era is, in some ways, kind of a golden age of questionable-to-bad eurojank action RPGs. Anything traditional or turn-based was still considered too risky pre-Wasteland 2, so you have a lot of devs who are clearly trying, with limited budget and scale, to make the kinds of games that the market simply wasn't allowing for at the time. Shoutouts to my boi Arcania: Gothic IV.

There are still noble champions out there (probably at Spiders or Cyanide) making mid-budget clunk, but it's not nearly as ubiquitous as it used to be. I mean, shit, Larian went from making Divinity II: Ego Draconis in 2009 to being the studio behind motherfucking Baldur's Gate III. CD Projekt Red went from The Witcher 1 running on a duct-taped version of the Neverwinter Nights 1 engine to The Witcher 3 being of the biggest games of the previous console generation. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, we need to ensure Eurojank is preserved for future generations.

Doing a little bit of digging, it seems this game was from the same Bulgarian studio responsible for Victor Vran, Surviving Mars, and several of the modern Tropico games (but not the most recent Tropico 6) so it's not like they haven't put out decent video games before. This is going to make for a quality stream, I can tell.

Where's Xenosaga you monster

@chaser324: See, I appreciate that they’ve just put the raw insanity of Pathfinder character building on full display here. It’s a Russian-ass CRPG with actual production values and a pretty marked improvement over its predecessor, which was already excessive. To be clear it will be a cold day in hell before I ever try to run another tabletop campaign with PF1e, but simulated in a video game it’s a lot more palatable.

That also said I think the ruleset and the demands of the combat are simply too much for RTwP half the time, and I spent the last 2/3rds pretty much exclusively in turn-based. Also, uh, the crusade management stuff somehow fails to correct the problems of the Kingdom building stuff and adds an extra layer of bad Heroes of Might and Magic on top. Respect the audacity, but until they patch it into competence I would just suggest anyone skip it.

@rorie Thanks for turning my semi-goof of a question into an actual talk about planning for quick looks and stuff. Pathfinder is real good, definitely better than Kingmaker, but it's fucking LONG even by the lengthy standards of CRPGs. Would not besmirch anyone for wanting to feel prepared to cover it.

(also yeah, the crusade management stuff isn't great. It might eventually get better with patches, but if you want a cut-rate Heroes of Might and Magic combat system awkwardly laid on top then do I have a thing for you)

Gonna miss your write ups on here, obviously, but I can understand the sentiment. I'm not quite there yet, but obviously my posting habits here have basically fallen off drastically as I've retreated to Discord for more of that community aspect. For whatever it's worth, I still keep posting my nonsense here, mostly because I'm not entirely sure people would follow me if I made my own website or blog or something. Still have pretty much everything from the last couple years saved on Google Docs should I need to back up anything, but at this point I acknowledge that my dumb writing exercises for GB are *for me* and if anyone else wants to follow along that's just icing. Unlike my burgeoning streaming and podcasting career, which will doubtless rake in up to tens of dollars.

always feel free to contact me on Steam or Discord or during aforementioned high profile dubious streams. You're good people, Sparky. Let me know what you think of Phoenix Point.

Extremely tempted to nominate Wario World, as far as strange one-off games that are interesting and novel but maybe not powerhouses are concerned. Treasure made that game! It's like 3 hours long! It has a weird GBA -> GCN connectivity thing with WarioWare. One of those things spawned a franchise! The other is the one that I'm inevitably going to play on stream.

Putting this 'un on my list. I think it might be time for me to read another VN at some point soon, and weird death loop werewolf sounds alright, even if I bet it doesn't quite nail the landing.

Oh I've had a good time with it, but I'd deeply, deeply hesitate to call it anything more than "okay" but on the Soulslike Scale of Competence it's at least better than Lords of the Fallen. It gives me what I need, which is to say it has anime titties, deeply self-serious melodrama, and surprisingly solid character building mechanics. (that said, Scarlet Nexus also has those things and is actually a pretty solid-ass action RPG on top of that)

I'm not gonna go super hard on disagreeing, because what I played was entirely fine, but outside of timed button presses (which games like the Mario RPGs and Shadow Hearts series do a lot better) and the awful translation not a lot sticks out?

Right place + Right Time + High production values + Marketing, I imagine. I swear at some point Suikoden will be played and we'll finally get some Good Fucking PS1 JRPGs on ArbitraryWater content. But for now I, uh, know what my next game for the podcast is gonna be and it's definitely gonna be Wheel of Dubious RPGs adjacent. Might even do a write up.

Very into the premise of this series and down to see more!