… did they really put dodonpachi dai-ou-jou on a general audience top 100 list?! in the top 20!!! mind blown

Elementary school ystael spent a lot of time on Pinball Construction Set on the C64. I think I always turned the physics up to max speed minimum friction, so scoring on my tables was more about flailing and blind luck.

My favorite C64 game, though, was one I didn’t get to play often because I had to borrow it from a friend. (Didn’t know about cracking yet.) That was Ultimate Wizard. The platform physics were kind of terrible compared to Mario, but I loved the way each level was a tiny puzzle-maze, with different treasures moving different blocks when you grabbed them, and one magic spell - just one on each level, out of ten or so - to help you deal with the enemies. And my favorite thing in every game: a level editor! No, my levels weren’t good, they were awful. But I loved laying out the little bricks and skulls and fires anyway.

Put a shocking amount of time into Unicorn Overlord last week.

I think they executed the cross between Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle very well. Squad composition makes up for the lack of individual customization that is typical of the FE lineage of strategy RPGs (as opposed to the FFT/Tactics Ogre line). The overworld management is a fun exploration side activity that isn’t as time-consuming as Three Houses’s social stuff. Basiscape brought its usual excellent soundtrack, and Vanillaware their usual impressively detailed art. Plot is whatever, I don’t play these games for the plot, I play them to make anime sprites stab each other so numbers go up. So, yeah, it’s fun.

(No, I don’t actually like Disgaea that much, mostly because “figuring out how to break the game is the game” doesn’t appeal to me.)

If the head needs to be empty, I find that droney Japanese noise is the best way to get that. Example: Aube - Flare

Lots of great sf/fantasy authors mentioned already, including some I’d argue for as great writers regardless of genre (Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, N. K. Jemisin).

I have three more to suggest in this genre and from this period:

• C. J. Cherryh (Cyteen, Foreigner series, lots more) uses the lens of alien societies – just different enough from ours – to make us look critically at the structure of our own;

• Sheri S. Tepper (Grass, Raising the Stones, The Gate to Women’s Country) carries one or another of the dark currents underlying our culture to its horrifying conclusion, and shows us what we get;

• Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan saga) gives us a hilarious and improbable hero who utterly transcends his disabilities, in the end perfectly embodying what it seems he could never hope to be.

Was hoping someone would mention Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms! The PS2 truly was the janky AA JRPG console of all time. Also don’t forget

• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Digital Devil Saga 1-2
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
• Stella Deus
• Magna Carta: Tears of Blood On second thought do forget this one

Baba Is You is fantastic, and I think its difficulty curve is much, much more reasonable in the beginning than Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t utterly bounce off it either.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).

But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.

Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.

Old, but I think at least inspired or adjacent: Apparat Organ Quartet - Romantika

Swans - Song for Dead Time

So bury your trust beneath the ground with me, dear

And lay your loneliness down for the sun to burn

To sand…

Various groups are running fan servers for Monster Hunter Frontier since it shut down in 2019. There is a translated client that mostly works. Search for “rain frontier server” for more info.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of this myself and I don’t know whether the client they distribute will give your computer encephalitis.

OK, that’s what I had kind of feared. Thank you!

Not like it will be such a hardship to finally finish it - just have to resist the temptation to play Monster Hunter instead :)

I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game’s plot?

This is all going to be “great gameplay” rather than “great story”.

If you have a way to play 3DS games and a tolerance for punishment in your JRPG dungeon crawlers, the Etrian Odyssey series has some of Yuzo Koshiro’s best work.

• This is the first random battle theme in Etrian Odyssey IV. Your first battle of the game, against a couple of grasshoppers, to this.

• When you hit something more serious for the first time, you get this instead.

• Now you’re in trouble.

• And, uh, there’s this memorable remix of the wandering-boss theme from the first game.

You already have Persona games in your list, but let’s add some more Shin Megami Tensei:

• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne random battle theme

• Shin Megami Tensei V random battle theme

• Digital Devil Saga I last boss, first phase (the second phase is sadly less original)

Finally … Monster Hunter is an incredibly fun and addictive game series, and though it doesn’t center the music quite as much as a typical JRPG does, it’s got some great stuff. I particularly like the soundtrack of MH: World – although the newer game MH: Rise tried something new with its mostly choral arrangements, I think they are not quite as memorable overall.

• Desert zone battle from Monster Hunter: World

• Arena battle from Monster Hunter: World (it’s particularly impressive the way this theme, the small-monsters arena battle theme, and several of the town themes reuse the same melodies in different arrangements)

• Ice zone battle from Iceborne expansion

• Zinogre, everybody’s favorite thunder puppy, World version

Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.

• bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)

• climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset

• share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach

They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while you’re not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)

Are you older? My parents moved near Traverse City to retire, since my family has done summer vacations up there for 70+ years. The year-round population in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties now skews heavily older due to all the retirees, and also due to gentrification pricing a lot of families out.

This has mixed effects on health care in particular. On one side, a higher proportion of medical professionals work every day with the specific problems of an older population, and there are lots of relevant specialists. On the other side, availability of primary care can be difficult.

There’s always Super Hexagon!

I’m surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that’s because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.

I don’t know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: “Rulers of the Wildspire”, “Dancer in the Coral Highlands”, “Roars across the Hinterlands”. You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you’re fighting something in that zone that doesn’t have its own theme - so they’d better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!

This is a story skip. Many forms of character progress in FFXIV are gated by that individual character completing the main storyline quests.

A story skip boosts the character to the beginning of the current expansion tier, so it is not possible to use this mechanic to compete with standard players on current content. I think the intended use case is alt characters (which are less necessary in FFXIV because you can play all jobs on one character, but many players still have them).

If you are looking for “learn fight, get better, epic win” without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?

It’s not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.

And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all you’ve lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you haven’t even lost that.)