This game seems to stick to old conventions a little too much for my taste. If you're looking for a JRPG that recalls the best of the SNES era, but smartly streamlined and modernised, may I suggest Bravely Second: End Layer?
The fact that this game focuses almost exclusively on humanoid, physical-attacking Pokémon is kind of a bummer, but it's nice that they at least put in some more interesting Pokémon like Suicune (pronounced swee-coon by the way) and Chandelure to make things more interesting.
That said I think the whole idea of a Pokémon fighting game would work better if it were something closer to Gundam EXVS / Virtual-On in execution. That style of arena combat where both ranged and up-close attacks are equally important seems like it'd just fit the franchise a lot better.
Edit: oh and the human / Pokémon fusion stuff is thankfully only in some barely canon manga. I'm a long-time fan of the series, but if they put that shit in Sun / Moon I'm pretty much out. The thing that happened with Blaziken was its mega evolution, which is a thing they added in X and Y for god knows what reason.
I actually watched all of Naruto minus the filler over the past year or so after a friend who really digs it encouraged me to, and I'm happy to call myself a fan of it. I wouldn't call it smart or challenging, but behind all the absurdity and excessive melodrama lies a cast of genuinely endearing characters, some really fantastically choreographed action, and a plot that's just coherent enough to keep me invested.
As far as shonen anime goes I don't think I'd recommend it over something like Hunter x Hunter or… uhh… well I don't watch much shonen anime, but I'm glad I finally got around to watching Naruto and can understand what all the fuss is about.
Onto this game, the cutscenes are unfortunate, but once you get the fundamentals down, fights are fast-paced and visually spectacular. The combat system isn't particularly deep, but when playing it with friends that tends to mean people can pick it up quicker. There's a ton of issues with it: lack of content, the lacklustre story and adventure modes, and the lack of any major improvements over the earlier games, but I've still had a lot of fun with it.
(also this is the first time I've heard the english VA for Naruto and oh boy it sure is something)
@romination: I played Chibi-Robo! for the first time pretty recently and absolutely adored it. Definitely a huge shame that they've lost the original spirit of that series in modern spinoffs.
One game I think is at risk of being forgotten is Noctis IV, which is this weird little freeware space sim that came out in the early 2000s. The game was pure exploration, with no real objectives outside of collecting fuel so you could keep exploring, and it's kind of the progenitor of something like No Man's Sky in terms of content generation. The graphics were super primitive, but you could visit millions of enormous, procedurally generated planets with their own flora and fauna to discover. It even had a way for players to name newly discovered planets / systems and record those names in a central repository that other players were also contributing to.
It also does this thing I love where all the game's UI is presented in-world. Navigating your ship involves interacting with a computer display projected onto the ship's main window, and there's various other terminals around the ship that have other uses.
@agentmaine:Holy shit Zineth is one of my favourite indie games of recent years, and the game that firmly established me as a huge fan of everything Arcane Kids does. Everything about the movement in that game feels so smooth and tight, and the right thumbstick driven phone UI is something I wish other games would steal because it works so well. I also love that its idea of an OST is opening a Soundcloud playlist behind the game.
@stiknork: I have so many great memories of playing Infiniminer with people on the TIGSource server, I think Notch even dropped in a few times. It's so primitive compared to what Minecraft ended up doing, but at the time it was kind of mind blowing to me.
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