FF6 is mine. That moment when they turn the corner and the world map music changes. Beyond cathartic. The 3-4 hour tension and release they set up in that part of the game is an incredible design triumph.
I did okay with the delays in FF7 but it was absolutely unbearable by FF9. On the plus side, that drove me to discover Suikoden merely because it had instant transitions.
Jeffrey Combs was also in DOTA: Dragon's Blood, and that series's cast was a fun synthesis of video game voice actor luminaries plus Star Trek alumni (Michael Dorn, John de Lancie, Anson Mount, Andrew Robinson and more).
But yeah, really that whole late 90's/early 2000's gaming era had some genuinely great performances from actors of different media. I still think about David Warner in Baldur's Gate 2 from time to time.
Irdeto's been on a PR push lately. If they actually had robust studies backing their product, we would have seen them. Considering how they've got their hooks into the major Japanese PC port publishers (Sega, Capcom, and Square Enix), part of a segment of the industry that has long had specific stereotypes and prejudice surrounding PC gaming, I highly doubt the sales pitch for Denuvo amounts to much more than FUD and snake oil.
And this is why I use the LTSC version and disable updates. Yes, my system isn't as secure, but considering the usual attack vectors have moved more towards social engineering lately, being free of Microsoft's nonsense outweighs the outdated security in my view.
If you're willing to give Daybreak 1 a shot, you can jump right into it; almost all of it traces back to Sky 3rd and Crossbell, not so much Cold Steel. It's a very different flavor. No promises for not being lost in the rest of the Calvard arc, but if you really like the vibe, depending on where you stopped in CS, you might just be able to catch up with summaries.
With Sky SC's remake already announced I may just end up waiting for that myself. What I'd really like to see is Sky 3rd though. I liked that game so, so much more. No guarantees of that one coming, I suppose. It's the one that probably makes the most sense for them to remake, being exiled on PC only at this point.
Nothing last month for me, been playing a lot of not-JRPGs lately. Quite busy!
This month I'm most likely to pick up Breath of Fire IV again, or Dohna Dohna if that counts (NSFW warning if you google that one). Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles are on my playlist, but I likely won't be picking them up until they are on sale (although on FFT, if I start hearing a lot of interesting buzz about the new changes or the difficulty I might be tempted).
The best turn-based gameplay I've enjoyed recently (maybe ever) is Honkai: Star Rail. If you want something similar to that without the gacha, try the Trails series. It's a continuous story, but they just released a remake of the first game this month.
Baldur's Gate 3, Civilization V, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre are all turn-based games I've put hundreds of hours into. Since you enjoyed 13 Sentinels, a story-heavy game, I'd steer you away from Fire Emblem Engage for now and more towards FFT or TO if you want stronger story.
I have a lot of these, but The Right Way Around, by Daughter, for Life is Strange: Before the Storm grabbed me the second I launched the game.
A more traditional main menu theme that I love is Ecce valde generous ale from Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's a brilliant introduction to the game, drawing the player into a mysterious world in a post-apocalyptic setting.
I mean, if y'all really insist, I can specify "not AAA games." That's the point I was making; this year's game of the year nominee lists are going to look quite different than usual.
I've got 1,000 hours in this one over the years and the PC port is the main reason I'm getting it (eventually). Hoping it's not too locked-down for mods, FFT's mod community has been a vibrant one.
In a world where game budgets balloon to over $300m, Hades 2 fits comfortably into the "smaller game" category. As do Blue Prince, Expedition 33, Silksong, and Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, among other top-rated games this year.
Some of these scores haven't been updated from early access yet, so this number's probably going to go higher. Might be the top-rated game of the year. I'm sure it's well-deserved, too. I played the crap out of the EA version when it first dropped.
Yeah, I suspect when it first appeared it was a short form of 尾羽. I'm not sure the exact kana limits they had, but I could see the extra two in おばね being too far.
クロトリ getting the literal "Blackbird" treatment is a good example of how impossible direct localization is. It's why I appreciate--and support--injecting similar vibes elsewhere in scripts that may not have literal connections to the original Japanese. I think Woolsey got there in this particular case with Flea, Slash, and Ozzie. Not so much with the gurus.
I think, though, the answer to "why did we end up with this Woolsey-ism?" is no more complicated than him sitting bleary-eyed with a spreadsheet at 2am because of insanely short deadlines, and getting zero feedback. I've always figured that's how we ended up with phoenix down.
Again, Sky 3rd is the third game in a continuous series. This is not Ys, which is an entirely different narrative format following a hero in stories specifically designed to be standalone. Ys isn't even told in chronological order. Ys can absolutely be played in any order without losing anything (other than the second game, which is a direct sequel of the first).
You didn't make it to the Cold Steel games, so you don't know what I'm talking about here. Most of Sky 3rd's throughlines continued in Cold Steel, not the Crossbell games (they even continue into the Daybreak arc). Falcom pivoted during Sky's development; they initially weren't going to do games in Crossbell.
Trails is Mass Effect writ large. It's Game of Thrones. It's Harry Potter. Yes, one can jump into those properties at any point, but they will be lost at some point--if not immediately--or otherwise missing context critical to their enjoyment of the property. That's basic fictional media literacy. It's just highly unusual in video games, so people assume it's like other series. It's not. It's closer to long-running manga, television or novels.
There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail's combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it's going to look like Meucci's contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.
Even the impact of Trails's hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it's never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur's Gate 3's story design won't be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII's impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP's neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.
Sky 3rd is simply the third game in this continuous series. It's not a "die-hard fan" thing. It's the third work, just as much the third season of a TV series or a third novel in a novel series is. Whether or not it's a good work is a matter of taste. But whether it's a necessary part of it is not up for debate.
It wraps up the first arc of a major throughline in the series and starts many more.
FF6 is mine. That moment when they turn the corner and the world map music changes. Beyond cathartic. The 3-4 hour tension and release they set up in that part of the game is an incredible design triumph.
I did okay with the delays in FF7 but it was absolutely unbearable by FF9. On the plus side, that drove me to discover Suikoden merely because it had instant transitions.
Jeffrey Combs was also in DOTA: Dragon's Blood, and that series's cast was a fun synthesis of video game voice actor luminaries plus Star Trek alumni (Michael Dorn, John de Lancie, Anson Mount, Andrew Robinson and more).
But yeah, really that whole late 90's/early 2000's gaming era had some genuinely great performances from actors of different media. I still think about David Warner in Baldur's Gate 2 from time to time.
Irdeto's been on a PR push lately. If they actually had robust studies backing their product, we would have seen them. Considering how they've got their hooks into the major Japanese PC port publishers (Sega, Capcom, and Square Enix), part of a segment of the industry that has long had specific stereotypes and prejudice surrounding PC gaming, I highly doubt the sales pitch for Denuvo amounts to much more than FUD and snake oil.
And this is why I use the LTSC version and disable updates. Yes, my system isn't as secure, but considering the usual attack vectors have moved more towards social engineering lately, being free of Microsoft's nonsense outweighs the outdated security in my view.
If you're willing to give Daybreak 1 a shot, you can jump right into it; almost all of it traces back to Sky 3rd and Crossbell, not so much Cold Steel. It's a very different flavor. No promises for not being lost in the rest of the Calvard arc, but if you really like the vibe, depending on where you stopped in CS, you might just be able to catch up with summaries.
With Sky SC's remake already announced I may just end up waiting for that myself. What I'd really like to see is Sky 3rd though. I liked that game so, so much more. No guarantees of that one coming, I suppose. It's the one that probably makes the most sense for them to remake, being exiled on PC only at this point.
they really do suffer 😭
Nothing last month for me, been playing a lot of not-JRPGs lately. Quite busy!
This month I'm most likely to pick up Breath of Fire IV again, or Dohna Dohna if that counts (NSFW warning if you google that one). Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles are on my playlist, but I likely won't be picking them up until they are on sale (although on FFT, if I start hearing a lot of interesting buzz about the new changes or the difficulty I might be tempted).
Reverie was definitely a "one last time" kind of game for its cast but I mostly ended up loving it because I'm such a huge Crossbell fan.
The best turn-based gameplay I've enjoyed recently (maybe ever) is Honkai: Star Rail. If you want something similar to that without the gacha, try the Trails series. It's a continuous story, but they just released a remake of the first game this month.
Baldur's Gate 3, Civilization V, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre are all turn-based games I've put hundreds of hours into. Since you enjoyed 13 Sentinels, a story-heavy game, I'd steer you away from Fire Emblem Engage for now and more towards FFT or TO if you want stronger story.
I have a lot of these, but The Right Way Around, by Daughter, for Life is Strange: Before the Storm grabbed me the second I launched the game.
A more traditional main menu theme that I love is Ecce valde generous ale from Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's a brilliant introduction to the game, drawing the player into a mysterious world in a post-apocalyptic setting.
I mean, if y'all really insist, I can specify "not AAA games." That's the point I was making; this year's game of the year nominee lists are going to look quite different than usual.
I've got 1,000 hours in this one over the years and the PC port is the main reason I'm getting it (eventually). Hoping it's not too locked-down for mods, FFT's mod community has been a vibrant one.
In a world where game budgets balloon to over $300m, Hades 2 fits comfortably into the "smaller game" category. As do Blue Prince, Expedition 33, Silksong, and Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, among other top-rated games this year.
Some of these scores haven't been updated from early access yet, so this number's probably going to go higher. Might be the top-rated game of the year. I'm sure it's well-deserved, too. I played the crap out of the EA version when it first dropped.
What a year for smaller game projects.
Yeah, I suspect when it first appeared it was a short form of 尾羽. I'm not sure the exact kana limits they had, but I could see the extra two in おばね being too far.
クロトリ getting the literal "Blackbird" treatment is a good example of how impossible direct localization is. It's why I appreciate--and support--injecting similar vibes elsewhere in scripts that may not have literal connections to the original Japanese. I think Woolsey got there in this particular case with Flea, Slash, and Ozzie. Not so much with the gurus.
I think, though, the answer to "why did we end up with this Woolsey-ism?" is no more complicated than him sitting bleary-eyed with a spreadsheet at 2am because of insanely short deadlines, and getting zero feedback. I've always figured that's how we ended up with phoenix down.
Again, Sky 3rd is the third game in a continuous series. This is not Ys, which is an entirely different narrative format following a hero in stories specifically designed to be standalone. Ys isn't even told in chronological order. Ys can absolutely be played in any order without losing anything (other than the second game, which is a direct sequel of the first).
You didn't make it to the Cold Steel games, so you don't know what I'm talking about here. Most of Sky 3rd's throughlines continued in Cold Steel, not the Crossbell games (they even continue into the Daybreak arc). Falcom pivoted during Sky's development; they initially weren't going to do games in Crossbell.
Trails is Mass Effect writ large. It's Game of Thrones. It's Harry Potter. Yes, one can jump into those properties at any point, but they will be lost at some point--if not immediately--or otherwise missing context critical to their enjoyment of the property. That's basic fictional media literacy. It's just highly unusual in video games, so people assume it's like other series. It's not. It's closer to long-running manga, television or novels.
There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail's combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it's going to look like Meucci's contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.
Even the impact of Trails's hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it's never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur's Gate 3's story design won't be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII's impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP's neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.
Sky 3rd is simply the third game in this continuous series. It's not a "die-hard fan" thing. It's the third work, just as much the third season of a TV series or a third novel in a novel series is. Whether or not it's a good work is a matter of taste. But whether it's a necessary part of it is not up for debate.
It wraps up the first arc of a major throughline in the series and starts many more.