TheWildCard

I replayed Valkyrie Profile last year, and for the most part it holds up. The overall narrative isn't super strong but the smaller character stories are pretty good, and in terms of atmosphere and mechanics it's still pretty unique even today. I tried to get into Vagrant Story a few years ago, as I remembered thinking it was pretty sweet back in the day, but I wasn't to enamored with the dungeon crawling setting ad found the game doesn't explain the battle system very well (Probably should use a guide at least at the start) . Never got around to Xenogears, but I too fear it's time has passed.

Probably Skyrim for me. Before that I never really got the appeal of open world games. I screwed around in GTAs and liked what I played of Assassin's Creed II but for the most part they never clicked for me. But Skyrim sucked me in so hard and didn't let go until well over 200 hours later. have nothing but fond memories exploring that world. Still don't play a lot of open world games but certainly understand the appeal of "sandboxes where you can do whatever the hell you want" much more viscerally now.

Well my playthrough of Dragon Quest XI carried over into 2019 and that games delightful. As far as proper new releases the new Samurai Shodown is really good. Even among the recent movement of simplifying new fighters Samsho really stands out in how severe that game is, but you also have some defensive tool at disposal too. Lots of fun, haven't touched it in couple months unfortunately, Iceborne has been owning me of late.

MH: Iceborne

Took awhile to shake the rust off and get back into the saddle but I'm fully back in now. Taking my sweet time with it.

I understand the trepidation, but the more I think about it the more potential I see in it being really cool. Yakuza's combat is simple fun but has never been great. I am worried about it making average encounters more of a slog, but I have confidence in the Yakuza team creating something with a lot of visual flair. The party system could really liven things up with crazy team attacks and so on.

Slimes are pretty good.

Dogi's looking great after whatever the heck happened to him in VIII. Adol looking a bit over designed though.

I mean there's plenty of older games that qualitfy. I've never beaten a Mega Man (which not having played in their day aren't very fun to me) or classic Castlevania (even though I do like some of them quite a bit, and return to time to time), to say nothing about the original Rayman (which is insanely hard for some reason), Ninja Gaiden or Battletoads, but usually I quit out of boredom more than frustration. But as far as recent stuff that I wanted to finish but just couldn't? Furi comes to mind. Really like that game but eventually got stuck on a boss that had so many layers and never had enough lives left to punch through the final phases.

I'm actually playing through Zero right now in prep for the CS3. Been holding off for that Geofront-edited fan patch to be completed but as it's not looking like that's happening anytime soon (and I'm not going to be able to put off playing CS3 for that long) I took the plunge with the current translation, and while it's rough in spots it isn't as bad as I'd feared. The story beats and character moments still come through pretty well. I've heard the transation for Azure is noticeably better than Zero's for some reason, so really looking forward to that.

Haven't gotten to much of the high profile stuff this year (sitting on DMC 5, will get to Sekiro when I'm in the mood) and while RE2 was pretty good, it would have to be...... (drumroll please)

....Etrian Odyssey Nexus! Same great crunchy turn-based combat, but with more variety in terms of environments and party composition options made it easier to see through to the end than the previous games I've played. Shoutouts to the new Samurai Shodown too, don't have much history with SamSho (or SNK fighters in general) but it's been a nice change of pace.