I got into XIV when Endwalker was coming out, so I’ve put in some 700 hours in off and on play since then but I haven’t actually started Endwalker yet. It’s not that I’m afraid of not liking it, it’s just that I burned myself out. I intend to go back some day, but who knows.
In terms of writing, story, all the things being discussed here I don’t think there’s a JRPG that can top Shadowbringers. Even just the exposition in that expansion was incredible to watch. The Kojima diagrams thing but they made it interesting.
Shadowbringers is absolutely CS3 firing on every imaginable cylinder, yeah. Everything after it has felt like them trying to make Shadowbringers strike twice, mimicking all the forms of it without any of the substance, which has been kind of painful as someone who’d developed a pretty deep love for the game over the years since it originally re-launched
I’m crossing my fingers that Ishikawa (who wrote the Shadowbringers MSQ) has been tapped for a single player entry because I think she would absolutely excel in a world where she doesn’t have to worry about patches and other MMO stuff affecting the storytelling
I’m suddenly realising the connection between the loss of historical knowledge of FF7’s reception, and the revisionist history idea that the N64 “won”* that generation.
i kinda think VII is the best one and it’s not close. I didn’t come around on it until ten years after i played it the first time. Maybe this is a consequence of overfamiliarity and popularity, but its text is extremely rich. it is very much a story about generational and environmental trauma at its core but it has so much more to offer than that and i think despite being kind of a buggy mess as a piece of software you can tell that the people who made the thing really believed in it
the obvious take on its success is that it was well timed, well financed, and well marketed. sure, that’s all true. but i think the actual reason FFVII succeeded is because The Plot and The Art are nearly perfect even if the execution wasn’t quite there
i had to hold myself back from saying jrpg hamlet but fuckit i’ll stand by the thought
MDEF is a dead stat and the Darkness status effect has no effect on enemies because enemies do not use ‘weapon attacks.’ there’s some item duplication bugs and a decent amount of mechanics that do not behave as written. It’s not even close to modern day release date games but there’s some funky stuff doing on under the hood.
I think that’s very true, yeah (and I think they still seem to believe in it, too, based on the Remake project). I am so ready to see whether or not that holds true for the third installment
This is fascinating because each distinct “era” of Ys game has so little to do with each other. Reasons to like/dislike the first few will be totally different from the next generation’s, which will be totally different again from these recent modern ones. Do they all just keep getting unlucky and finding new ways to make you not enjoy them or is there a more consistent underlying thread that you don’t like?
I seem to be completely immune to the “hook” of the Ys series, regardless of where I throw a dart! I haven’t found any of them to be compelling at all in the first hour + of sampling. At some point I’ve decided the entire series just isn’t for me. I seem to go in with good faith and bounce right off, regardless of the generation.
I will say the bump combat (and also everything else kinda) of Ys 1 + 2 was severely underwhelming; as someone who went into them expecting to like it, the slow realization that it wasn’t going to get better was sad and also important. But I’m still holding out for the updated style of combat in OoF/Origins/etc. Having said that, I am still going to try Angeline Era because hey maybe they cracked the code there.
Whatever game I am currently enjoying is the best game ever made, until I forget it exists around 3 hours in, at which point Death Stranding returns to being the best game ever made.
I tried to explain why Ys is good and realized I don’t remember why I like Ys. And I just learned to like Ys like a year or two ago. They’re good though! Just like, trust me on this. The bump combat has a learning curve, but it’s actually the best.
I’m actually a little skeptical of Angeline Era’s take on bump combat. They seem to have significantly slowed it down, when speed is what makes bump combat exciting. I trust Analgesic to do something cool, but I’m not totally sure if I’m going to gel with the combat.
