ArbitraryWater

@seventytwotransformations: FWIW I like the Beastmen in actual combat, given how much of their strategy revolves around winning in the initial rush. Malagor’s leadership debuffs make it extra fun when you win with a big stupid rout. But their campaign gameplay is booty, especially since they still have the broken, terrible version of the Waagh mechanic.

I do wonder if Creative Assembly considers a potential Beastmen rework too much of a resource sink versus the attach rate of the DLC. They’re the least played faction by a significant margin, and unlike the Wood Elves their roster is notably incomplete. Still, with WoC getting inevitably reworked as part of this third game I think it would... stick out in a really awkward way if the beasties were left untouched?

Oh boy, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Welcome back to the forums. They’re not especially active these days. Nowadays the kids use the discords and whatnot, but I’m still here posting my dubious RPG takes because I don’t know where else to put them.

I streamed all of Devil May Cry 2 for charity a few weeks ago, and that was after dealing with an hour of Mighty No. 9. I'm happy my suffering was apparently worth it.

You know, as a fellow blogger of Dubious Video Games, I've very seriously considered buying a copy of this game because I'm broken inside and it seems like it'd be funny to goof on during a stream. As a fairly big DMC/Bayonetta/Ninja Gaiden fan, the concept of "The Wheel of Dubious Character Action Games" has absolutely found some amount of space in my head. Between something like this, Ninja Blade, Garshasp... and uh, Bullet Witch? Dirge of Cerberus? there's a lot of "material" out there, especially from the late 00s/early 2010s.

But actually, given how much this game is apparently just an even edgier (and worse) God of War imitator, what if I just played actual old God of War games and rolled my eyes at those instead? Thanks for doing this. I salute you as a comrade in arms.

@chamurai: Oh if I end up playing/streaming the Suikoden games I *have* to go for all 108 stars of destiny, right? Like, that's a bad choice that's going to happen, especially in the earlier games where there are easily miss-able characters hanging out behind an invisible wall or something.

You know me. I can hardly spend my time with *beloved* installments in long-running RPG franchises. Suikoden II? PFFFT. I was tempted to do Graces F instead of Zesty, because the idea of playing through the first two hours as a bunch of snot-nosed kids seems like #dubiouscontent, but after this stream I felt like I made the right decision.

it turns out the most dubious thing about Star Ocean 3 right now is the idea that Square is asking $21 for the slightly-retouched version on PSN. Apparently it never goes on sale either, so... never say I haven't made the absolute worst choices for the sake of this blog. I made 30 cents in Twitch ad revenue for all of February.

Honestly knowing what I know about Star Ocean IV and V, those sound like they could be more "quality" candidates. I mostly just picked this one because I know the twist and it's... a lot.

@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.