After this week, Vinny can sit in a big recliner and relax for a while. Maybe get one of those little foot spas so he can heal the feet, heal the feet, heal the feet.
Star Ocean 3: I wouldn't have expected you to reach the part I gave up at, since it's something like twenty hours in, but I recall there being a juncture where healing was prohibitively expensive for some reason and a recent story twist had significantly boosted the local enemy difficulty. There was also some crafting mini-game thing involving creating new inventions for prizes that other NPCs always seemed to get to first, and all those alerts got annoying in a FOMO sense, and then of course the constant hugging the contours of every map to get the 100% exploration bonus. It all started to grate after a while. I probably should've stuck with it to see that wild ending, but I suppose I had better things to do.
Anvil of Dawn: Oof, yeah, that game was just a lot to deal with. They built RPGs to last back then for sure, but those dungeons burn through most of their ideas early and then it's just hours spent running around in circles filling in the map (though maybe not in the literal Star Ocean 3 sense) and abandoning half of everything you find because there's no room in the inventory. I agree it could've done with a party system, or something like Lands of Lore's "revolving chair" of companions for a bit of tactical variation.
Arcana: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura: Have fun. As you no doubt recall from a couple years back, it really wasn't my cup of tea. Someday I'll figure out what other CRPG nuts see in it.
Those are certainly two games from those two franchises. I guess when you call your series "The Wheel of the Dubious" you gotta go for the black sheep. This entry (and the PS3 store closure) did inspire me to finally get started on Graces F though, so a tentative "thanks" for that one - we'll see once I've played more of it. (Speaking of old Sony console games and the digital shutdown, I have to see about picking up some US PSN codes somewhere and grabbing all the PS1/PS2 Classics worth getting before they vanish...)
Good luck with Star Ocean 3. I don't bounce from RPGs I'm midway through too often, but that really started to get unplayable at some point. I'm guessing you won't get far enough in to reach where I stopped though, luckily for you. Just remember to hug those borders.
I warned you about the Enchanted Arms prologue, bro. Makoto more or less vanishes from the rest of the game after that intro (or at least that version of him) even if the other characters you get don't quite have the same level of, uh, "personality." I recall the combat really picking up too once you're out into the world. Maybe one of my first 1000 Gamerscore playthroughs? (I'm actually playing DQ11 right now and Sylvando does indeed rock. Glad to see a thoroughly positive gay character in a JRPG finally. I like where the story arc with his estranged father went.)
The KF games are super deliberate and reminded me quite a bit of Ultima Underworld, especially those slow turning circles. KF4 and Shadow Tower saw From getting real good at establishing an eerie and desolate atmosphere, which is an underrated quality behind what made Dark Souls so engrossing. I think I told you about Eternal Ring already, but that has a similar format too (and, like Enchanted Arms, feels very much like a tech demo for the fledgling console it appeared on).
Since completing the game, I've a few more observations:
I didn't bring up my favorite thing about the game in the review: you have a little hub base you can warp to from any save point, and there's places to craft new gear and potions, gardening for consumables, and decipher maps and tablets for new recipes and treasure locations. The library area even starts filling up with mementos of completed side-quests and bosses, which is one of my favorite things RPGs sometimes do (it's also in The Outer Worlds and Bully, among precious few others).
I did mention in the review how the game doesn't really take advantage of the backstory of the world, but there's some geographical business that gets into that. The large desert you encounter midway through the game may indeed be the border of what's liveable, while you also get to see what the icy dark side is like later on. Far as I know, Earthlock is the only game that has a planet like this (besides Metroid Prime 3).
The game has some weird camera hiccups, and I'm not sure if it has something to do with the PS4's standard resolution or what. The overworld zooms ridiculously far in to keep focus if you walk behind a mountain, whereas the fixed camera in dungeons will let you wander around obfuscated behind walls all you want in the off-chance there's a chest back there. When fighting many enemies at once or some of the larger enemies, a few of them will disappear off the edge of the screen. You can still target them, but you can't see their HP bars.
Towards the mid- to late-game Earthlock encourages you to try mixing up your party: half the development points come from levelling up, while the other half come from bonuses earned from increasing bonds between pairs. You can get three TP (Talent Points) per union once maxed, and with six characters that's potentially fifteen TP per character locked away in the bond system. Of course, all the passive boosts you get for increasing bonds are another incentive.
Characters don't level outside of the immediate party, and many characters join several levels behind. Makes it harder to want to include them or learn how to use them. Since you're mixing the party up for those bonds, it's not too deleterious a factor, but it's rough when you get a new character you want to try out and they're three or four levels behind everyone else - you don't get a good sense of how they'll fit into strategies until they're at a comparable level, because before then they'll just mostly suck and die.
Boss fights continue to be these tough puzzles where you have to figure out the trick, and with a few late-game bosses the trick is really hard to determine and requires a very specific strategy with the right character(s) involved. The game throws you a bone by letting an NPC give you advice if you've wiped out once already.
Since completing the game my opinion on it hasn't shifted much. I think there's room for improvement, and some streamlining with regards to the combat, but the core is sound: the difficulty curve felt just right and I'm impressed with how much side-stuff they squeezed into a relatively compact RPG. Earthlock 2 seems to be coming along well, if still a year or so off, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
Great list, and I wish you ran out with a folding chair when GB went through the entire Best Music category without mentioning Paradise Killer. (I don't know how that would work on Google Hangouts, but today's wrestling all-stars are an inventive bunch.)
All ready to go "pfft anime" and then Bofuri was the first on the list and I was like oh yeah I did watch that. That was a real cute show. Might watch some of these other ones then. (Eizouken got too irritating to follow, but that art style sure is something else.)
Yeah, my PoE review disappeared into the ether also. My pet theory is that it has something to do with a page's releases and whether or not any existed before the review was written, but nothing concrete. (They're still in the CMS somewhere though; you can read the first few lines if you check your reviews tab.)
Plus one from me for Grimrock 2. Still my favorite of the nu-blobbers, though Vaporum was close (and Operencia would be too if it could just chill for half a damn second). Bloodstained's cool too. Might have to get around to that Classic Mode sometime.
Immediately after posting this I ran into a new enemy type that can endlessly spawn copies of itself. I'd recommend playing on normal battle difficulty if only to counter some of this game's sheer bullshit.
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