On the whole, I probably write more about JRPGs than CRPGs. That's not to play favoritism, but until fairly recently JRPGs were more frequently released and more convenient for someone who largely sticks to console gaming rather than chance anything halfway modern on this basic bitch laptop. CRPGs are having a big resurgence of late, however, beyond the occasional Todd Howard wanderlust sim and whatever throwbacks Obsidian, InXile and Spiderweb are working on.

Making CRPGs more relevant to my current interests is the fact that one of my favorite long-form blogs - The CRPG Addict, which is deeply entrenched in the long history of the genre - recently completed every CRPG that was released in 1991, and will soon be posting the requisite rundown of that year's most notable entries for the genre, as well as his personal favorites. It only took him two years and nine months, starting with Eye of the Beholder in May 2015 and finishing with - appropriately enough - Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon just last week, and the RPGs will only continue to get longer from here on out. (It doesn't help that he's been alternating between 1991 games and older RPGs that he missed the first time around, having since rescinded his DOS-only policy since starting.) It's a remarkable achievement, both for the longevity and scale of this project and also because of his efforts to archive and memoralize many forgotten games to the best of his ability, and it got me thinking of my own recent history - and future - with the genre that has been with me the longest. (1987's Dungeon Master was the first computer game I ever played, for clarification.)

2017 had a bumper crop of CRPGs, as it did with almost every genre I hold dear - 3D platformers, JRPGs, open-world games, adventure games - and I've yet to get around to most of them. The biggest white whale on that list is the highly-acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin II, which - after playing the new Zelda, Mario and Persona this month and last - is now my #1 most wanted game from last year. I still have a soft spot for South Park, though I've yet to watch the most recent season, and I'd like to see what they've done with superheroics and grid-based mechanics in South Park: The Fractured But Whole when it drops to a tempting price. I've also been sufficiently sold on West of Loathing despite its rudimentary visuals - not that I'm in much of a place to complain about amusing stickpeople - and I'm even curious about ELEX, the newest game from the Risen devs Piranha Bytes/Pluto13. Of a lower priority but still in my peripheral vision are Supergiant's Pyre, Deck13's The Surge, Airship Syndicate's Battle Chasers: Nightwar, and Trinket's Battle Chef Brigade. Heck, I might even try Mass Effect Andromeda if I really run out of options this year.

For as comparatively subdued as 2018 is looking, there's still some major names on the horizon as far as CRPGs go. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, which looks to take the same route Risen did by adding pirates and seafaring to its sequel, will be out pretty soon in April. The release date of InXile Entertainment's The Bard's Tale IV is a little more fluid right now, but as a Kickstarter-funded project that I backed I'm looking forward to digging into it as soon as it magically appears in my Steam library. There's some spookiness on the horizon with DONTNOD's Vampyr and Cyanide's Call of Cthulhu, both of which look like action-RPGs in the modern BioWare mold. Hopefully, 2018 will also see the releases of Klei's curious-looking Griftlands, the promising spacewhipper/RPG hybrid Indivisible from Skullgirls devs Lab Zero, the return of the chaotic medieval skirmisher Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the attractive top-down Recettear-like Moonlighter, and, finally, whatever the hell's going on with Underworld Ascendant, the Ultima Underworld spiritual successor. Last I heard, Fullbright was lending some of its design staff to the project to get it finished, so I'm hoping we'll at least see a release date before the year is over.

Speaking of games, computer role-playing or otherwise, let's dig into the week's bloggering (phrasing!):

• The Indie Game of the Week was Poncho, a cute spin - so to speak - on Polytron's Fez combined with Mutant Mudds's background/foreground switching mechanic. It's a wholesome little game, if perhaps a little derivative and buggy, and I particularly liked its various frustration-alleviating systems, including an instant respawn and being able to leave levels whenever you wish with all collectibles found thus far. There's a pervasive sense that the game's development bit off more than it could chew when initially planning out the game, however, with multiple pieces of evidence to suggest that it was meant to be a lot bigger and a lot more elaborate with the barest flirtations with spacewhipper mechanics that remain. Still, a recommended Indie game, if not wholeheartedly so. I believe that's why the three-star rating exists.
• We're back in HOPA land for the third entry in my descent into hidden object madness with Rainy Days and Mundis: Episode 3, which covered Brave Giant's Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest. I'm definitely seeing more and more overt points of comparison as I move forward with this series, which seems very suspect given that I keep switching developers. Surely someone has a different take on this particular sub-genre of "point-and-click adventure game with the occasional hidden object scene to peruse"? That they're all so functionally similar is perplexing, but maybe the factory-line assembly nature is part of the genre's charm, similar to how Monster Hunter or Dynasty Warriors operate (or, hell, a million sports franchises) by slowly iterating with new mechanics but generally just giving a small audience of fans exactly what they're anticipating year after year. Some more research is warranted, though perhaps not too much more.

Addenda

Movie: MacGruber (2010)

Well, it had to happen eventually. There have been a number of games and movies that have come my way courtesy of Giant Bomb, and MacGruber - based on an SNL skit, so that's usually a good sign - gets referenced enough by Dan Ryckert (and Abby, to a lesser extent) that I figured I might as well get caught up. The phrase I would use to describe MacGruber is "fitfully funny": a term that, until recently, I thought meant "was so funny that you'd have frequent fits of laughter", when really it means "only occasionally amusing". MacGruber has a scattershot approach to its humor that generally works in a sort of "cast a broad net to catch the most fish" approach, but often comes off as very hit and miss.

In particular, the movie's jokes have a certain intellectual disparity to them, which is to say that half of them are the dumbest scatological humor I've seen outside of a Seltzer and Friedberg joint. The rest of the time, it's making some amusing observations about how useless gadgeteer and decorated war vet MacGruber - played with a cocksure manic energy by Will Forte, who is excellent - is at his job and at life in general, and some great comedic backing by a pre-stardom Kristen Wiig and Val Kilmer's infinitely more competent villain Dieter von Cunth. Kilmer's like Channing Tatum, in that he's one of those actors that got pigeonholed early on for handsome leading man roles when his true calling is comedy: I've liked every comedy movie I've seen that featured Kilmer, in part because he has great deadpan delivery. I'd highly recommend people watch Top Secret! and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang if they haven't before. Ryan Phillippe's straight-man spook is a more thankless role, but he does fine with it. I was also heartened, if a little sad given his recent passing, to see Powers Boothe in the Colonel Trautman role - another straight-man who doesn't get much to do besides recreate a well-established role for the sake of parody.

I think, like Anchorman, the key to MacGruber's lasting cult appeal is that its funnier sequences and quotes stick out more than its flubs, with highlights like the incredibly uncomfortable sex scenes, the regular humiliation that Wiig's character is put through, and the bizarre running gags like (I'd better spoiler-tag these, since running gags work best when you don't know they're coming) MacGruber's insistence on taking his car radio everywhere ("It's a Blaupunkt!"), his penchant for grisly Roadhouse throat rips, and an almost psychopathic vendetta against a random drive-by trash-talker. There are definitely jokes that either too coarse or too dumb for my liking - a whole lot of peeing and pooping - but overall it wasn't the unmitigated disaster to the comedy world that I was dreading, though neither is it a movie I'm planning on watching again any time soon. (However, I would watch it again if there was a Film & 40s on it, provided at least one GBEaster hadn't seen it yet and was responding to some of its jokes for the first time.)

Game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out where I should even start talking about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, partly because it's all such well-worn territory at this point. It perhaps goes without saying that it's the most impressive Zelda game Nintendo's ever created, in terms of its sheer number of moving parts, systems, ideas, mechanics, geography, and scope. It is the game I think Skyward Sword was supposed to be: one that tries to recreate in 3D that sense of wanderlust and open exploration that the original The Legend of Zelda created, in which you have the barest inkling of where to go but had so much to find off the beaten path to make all the aimless peregrination worth it.

I thought I'd just list off some of my favorite aspects of Breath of the Wild, in the micro and the macro, in lieu of anything more elaborate and unifying as an appraisal, given I'm still a fair distance away from completing the game.

1. The Shrines are definitely my favorite part of the game: a series of environmental puzzles, combat trials, and quest-solving that are scattered far and wide across Hyrule. The game mercifully gives you a way to detect the presence of Shrines from a fair distance after its tutorial section, but not all of them are out in the open. Some require the assistance of Kass, a friendly Rito (The Wind Waker's bird people, who were supposed to derive from the Zora but appear to co-exist with them here) bard who provides hints by the way of "ancient songs" that reveal the way to open up new Shrine locations. Others are behind waterfalls, or breakable walls, and you kind of have to circle around the area a while to find the entrance. Finding them and reaching them is almost as fun as solving them, and while they're not strictly the crux of the game - you're intended to make a beeline to the Divine Beasts and free them from Ganon's influence - the Spirit Orbs they provide are instrumental in growing stronger, not to mention the great weapons and armor you can acquire as spoils.
2. Meanwhile, the Korok seeds - provided by those little guys with leaves for faces, another Wind Waker introduction - almost feel like a joke at the expense of obsessive-compulsive completionists. There's almost a thousand of them, way more than the shrines, and they all involve completing a little puzzle that - by their nature - prey on obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Walking along and seeing a circle of rocks with a gap, you're inclined to find another rock from outside to complete the pattern, which in turn nets you a Korok seed. Likewise, finding three trees with an uneven amount of fruit, or two mirrored stacks of blocks with one block missing, or a ring of flowers in a body of water with a nearby diving point - these would all be tasks you might be tempted to complete even if you didn't know there was a reward attached to them. I'd praise the designers for this sort of intuitive incidental puzzle-solving if I didn't feel like I was on blast...
3. The random weather patterns can be a pain in the ass if you're halfway up a mountainside when it starts raining, or running around with half a ton of metal when a lightning storm threatens to melt you where you stand, but for the most part they're really cool to observe. Whether it's running through the aforementioned lightning storm as it blasts the ground around you and causes small forest fires to ignite, or the way the pitter-patter of rain sounds on your paraglider as you float across to your next destination, they provide this tangible, visceral extra layer of realism that is hard to expatiate with words alone.
4. One of my favorite idiosyncrasies in open-world design is scattering unexplained phenomena around for players to stumble onto. In particular, and I think this is one of those touches that Monolith Soft's involvement with the game produced, I really like that there are these enormous Chinese myth dragons flying around in certain parts of Hyrule. These colossal creatures can't be damaged, though you can get resources from them if they're low enough to be in bow range, so their only purpose is to just sort of serenely float around for you to gawk at. Running around in Xenoblade Chronicles or on Final Fantasy XIII's Gran Pulse was often a joy just because you'd see some amazingly huge creature in your path that you'd suddenly be inclined to detour around, and that really gave the world an almost paradoxical feeling of the fantastical and the real - that is, of a real ecosystem that you're intruding upon with your adventuring. It's something I think No Man's Sky was striving to produce, but botched by having its species randomizer produce so many ridiculous abominations to nature and God.
5. I've only tackled one of the Divine Beasts so far - the aquatic one in Zora's Domain, which I believe is also the easiest to get to because it doesn't require equipment/food to regulate your temperature - but I really like the approach for the closest thing this game has to traditional "dungeons". The Divine Beasts, like the deadly Guardians scattered around Hyrule, are ancient machines - far more ancient than the hundred years of the game's timeline - created by the Sheikah that the player can control to some extent with his Sheikah Slate tablet. For this Divine Beast in particular, Vah Ruto, you can control the height of his water-spouting trunk to modify various puzzles within the dungeon - it's a super impressive bit of dungeon design, and I'm hoping the other Divine Beasts have something similar when I finally reach them.
6. The weapon durability stuff I can take or leave - it's less of a problem when you realize how frequently the game tosses decent weapons and shields your way - but at least your armor stays with you forever. You can upgrade it too, at Great Fairy Fountains, though this often means farming for resources. I commend the game for trying its hardest to find reasons to give you gear to use beyond Link's usual green tunic, fairy bow and the Master Sword, even if there's not a whole lot to distinguish the vast amount of melee and bow weapons from one another besides some damage numbers and the occasional elemental bonus. Still, there are times when you specifically could use blunt weapons (mining), spear weapons (taking out weak but fast enemies like Keese at a distance), heavy but powerful weapons (great for sneak attacks on sleeping Hinoxes, oddly enough), or the standard sword and shield combo (when defence is paramount).
7. The game's runes are a masterstroke in efficient all-purpose design, not unlike The Witcher's own rune set. While you only receive a handful at the start, and won't find any more, the number of applications and the capacity for experimentation they possess is mindboggling. You can do some really wild stuff with the various powers of stasis alone, which freezes objects in place but also allows you to apply a huge amount of kinetic force which instantaneously acts upon the object as soon as the stasis wears off. Cryosis has so many uses whenever you need to deal with water, from creating footholds in waterfalls to raising objects floating on the water's surface. Magnesis is usually just for shifting metallic objects around to solve puzzles, but can be a pretty effective weapon if you swing heavy objects around with it or drop them from great heights. Bombs don't do much damage to anything but breakable barriers, but are still a great last resort if you need to whittle down a tough enemy from a vantage point. The optional photography mode is, of course, my favorite: it's used for a lot of side-quests, as well as letting you enter a lot of animals, monsters, gear, and flora into a massive compendium. This even has a useful purpose: anything entered into the compendium can also be plugged into the slate's detection program instead of Shrines, making farming specific resources or finding treasure chests or valuable ore deposits that much easier.

Anyway, I'm still discovering new things about Breath of the Wild even though I'm over 50 hours in, and it's perhaps the most mechanically-rich game of its genre I've ever seen. There's so much packed into an already impressively huge kingdom, and I doubt I'm going to get tired of finding Shrines, Korok seeds, new gear, new side-quests, and new photo opportunities for the compendium any time soon, especially if they keep tossing curveballs my way. When I get around to re-evaluating my top ten for 2017, I'm going to have to make some difficult decisions. It's really only dawning on me now, at the outset of 2018, how great last year was for gaming.

It took me until my early college years to realize what fitful sleeping meant, so I'm right there with you in spirit on that term. I still occasionally catch writers misusing mollified and bemused, even pros, though the latter's kind of sketchily defined as far as words go.

Gonna play some Anvil of Dawn this year? That's definitely one o'them Eye of the Beholder/Dungeon Master-like games that I've always had the inclination to seriously try and play, but, uh, never got around to. It's a subgenre that strongly appeals to me in concept, even if my experiences carrying around roughly a million rocks to throw on pressure plates are a little more mixed. Looking forward to whatever your dark hole of choice is this year.

In regards to this year's releases, The Ultima Underworld people have actually been putting out updates with stuff resembling "actual gameplay footage" instead of meaningless filler, which is certainly an improvement in their kickstarter update game. Same goes for Bard's Tale IV, with some of my expectations tempered by my weird, complicated feelings on Tides of Numenera. Well, it's not exactly like that first-person turn-based style has all that much in the way of competition (I think Might and Magic X might've been the most recent "notable" one of those) so if it can hit a basic bar of competence I think I'll be okay.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah, the big three old CRPGs for this May are Anvil, M&M IV/V and UU2 if all goes as planned. No idea how far I'll get with any of them, but I have a few back-ups if things go awry. I guess I've just been on a nostalgic blobber kick of late. I forgot to mention Vaporum in that 2017 round-up; @fisk0 told me about that one and I'm curious to try it out.

@mento: I should mention that Vaporum is both "real-time" and single character, so not a turn-based blobber. Though a recent update added a pause mode, allowing you to play it a bit more like it was turn-based.