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Comments
It seems to be the first game in the series developed by Katauri/published by 1C. The progression of the series is detailed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Bounty#Successors
I actually bought King's Bounty: Crossworlds some time ago but walked in totally blind as to what I was getting myself into and was somewhat confused by the gameplay lol. I'll revisit it sometime.
(i know *of* these techniques but i have not learned how to perform them myself)
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/w19t7v/things_ive_been_wondering_about_wrpg_and_its/
I am starting to get the feeling this just occasionally happens to any genre.
In other stuff:
Got no idea what the hell is this, didn't care, but it's free and on GOG so have a link, guys.
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edit: Oh, assuredly. Genres rise and fall in popularity. I can say nothing about JRPGs save for the fact that GOG seems to suggest me a lot of vaguely erotic Japanese stuff... you know what, I'm not trying to cover for myself or something, but it's not the kind of stuff that I enter the website for, so it's probably not tailored specifically to me... but one of the dudes in the comments kind of brings up Elex. Like, it's a good place to start because it's not the kind of AAA game that gets spoken of in normie spaces, it's like a weirder Gothic for Gothic fans who want a new Gothic every few years. So I guess it kind of registers as "not AAA", even if it's not the half-amateur RPGMaker kind of produce which I think is implied by "low-cost JRPG".
Thanks for the heads-up.
Funny thing is that GOG has relatively weak JRPG coverage but that happens to include the (modern) oeuvre of the most standout companies, Nihon Falcom. I'm referring to the Legend of Heroes: Trails games, the Ys games, and a handful of other titles (Zwei 1 and 2, Gurumin, Xanadu Next, and Tokyo Xanadu).
The traditionally big Japanese RPG companies, like Square-Enix (Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, etc.), Bandai-Namco (Tales, etc.), Koei Tecmo (Atelier, etc.), Atlus (Disgaea, Megami Tensei/SMT/Persona, etc.), Sega (Shining series, etc.), and others, have largely avoided GOG for whatever reason. The conventional wisdom is that they're worried about piracy. I dunno how true this still is, but their releases on PC don't just tend to stay on Steam (probably because it's just the biggest store, period) but may even have DRM beyond requiring a Steam login.
Falcom is actually something of a second-tier developer in terms of size, but it's just that they produce very good work and have a dedicated fan following given their decades of legacy in the industry -- they're one of the earliest players, and may even have invented the action RPG genre. While well-known in Japan, they're just lesser known in the west, due in part to a lack of localizations back in the heyday of SNES/PS1/PS2 JRPGs.
Beyond them there's Compile Heart / Idea Factory, whose most famous product line is the Neptunia franchise, which to be fair is actually pretty dang famous. Their stuff does tend to be more fanservicey (and/or more "weebish" in other ways), in comparison to your usual fantasy RPG adventure fare.
Beyond that, I feel like I used to remember a third one but I seem to have forgotten. Anyhow, the offerings are more scattered. You do get some number of visual novels and eroges (the "ge" is pronounced "gay" because it is short for "games"), which ends up overlapping the JRPG genre to some extent. I think GOG started courting these market sectors when Steam kept on making missteps and arousing controversy with it. And now there's this one publisher, Kagura Games, with a pile of eroge on GOG (they're not the only one but probably the most noticeable). For visual novels, I think the biggest publisher might be the localizer/publisher Sekai Project.
Then there are the indie projects. These are a pretty varied lot, with westerner devs, Japanese devs, and even some devs that are neither. (I remember finding Chinese and Indonesian indie works, among the JRPGs and VNs on GOG.) Some of these have that more traditional pixel-art-on-a-top-down-grid look to them, though not all are necessarily RPG Maker games.
If you mention some I can potentially tell you more about them.
I tried playing Dragon Age: Origins again and I'm a very silly person because I stopped when I had to decide whether I want to romance the female or male NPC, despite my knowing full well that they're going to die pretty soon in the prologue no matter which one I pick.
More seriously though, I'm genuinely curious how hard it is to screw up a WRPG character build. Wondering to what extent I should just "wing it" and pick whatever options seem best/useful or if I should try to follow some guide.
My guess is that builds probably matter more in Neverwinter Nights 2 which I know uses D&D 3.5e, compared to DAO which has its own custom character advancement system made expressly for the game.
Meanwhile, given my poking around Pathfinder 2e lately, I was wondering whether there's a PF2e game yet, but I found out that both Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous uses PF1e. Not necessarily a big deal, since I've played PF1e before.
Alternatively, I could stop buying games and play the games I already have...
If you fear screwing up your build, avoid anything on any sort of D&D ruleset (that includes Pathfinder) past the 2nd Edition. Specialize, unless you can figure out how to balance having a strong side with spreading out all over the skill set. If the game is an action RPG or in first person, then chances are you can supplement your character's skills with your skills as a player. Or play on Easy. I'm old enough not to feel compelled to play on high difficulty. Pathfinder: Kingmaker was enough of a bother for me that I switched to the easiest setting and ran through the plot.
But then again, it's not like you don't know it already.
(Also, you know what I hate in WRPGs? That you can't just go with the flow of conversation, because a single mis-step and now I have to deal with some silly-ass romance subplot.)
I was like, *I'm in this picture and I don't like it*, but then I figured I don't buy them so much, so, good for me? I'm rather like I've got a significant backlog that had gathered over time.
But yeah, people often talk about having lots of character build options as a good thing but I see it as a double-edged sword, and probably more viable on average for a tabletop game since that grants much more flexibility to the player and the GM, and something of a game-stopping annoyance for someone who may be a bit too genre-savvy and might end up looking up everything then getting stuck deciding (such as myself, sadly).
So I think there is definitely some value to having the game just take care of stuff. And the same could be said of dialogue options too, as you noted, lol, though the flipside also goes both ways.
Yeah, well, I was mostly fine when I had to create a character for Kingmaker, because I kind of had that vision of a character that I wanted to play and there luckily was just the right kind of class/subclass to acommodate it. But when I tried out Wrath of the Righteous, lacking that same kind of vision and not willing to play the same character twice, I was at a loss.
When playing Pillars of Eternity 2 I decided on a character class quickly, but the other problem reared its ugly head and I made a character which synergized badly with my intended playstyle. It got better late-game, but not having much experience with character optimization I don't know if the problem was that my character was badly designed, or simply that on lower levels you're weak by definition.
And they are among the random JRPGs on GOG.
Then again I think that could be said of various other games/genres, such as strategy games or puzzle games.
Also, yeah, there's this tendency to design games for pros, so that the pros would feel appreciated for calculating the best damage-per-second ratio or some other shit like that. Since somebody finally caught up to the fact the normies are sidelined, the easiest difficulty setting became renamed as "Story Mode" or some such.
TL;DR I was told (by the buddy who borrowed me the CD) to raise Agility to a high level and not bother with Strength for my first take on Fallout (also F2). I followed this advice to as much as I could for a beginner, and it could have been a much better setup, but it wasn't a bad one, at least in a strict sense.
Apparently a point-and-click adventure game.
I'm not sure I fully agree with this analysis.
For starters, this video is about JRPGs involving killing gods, and as a result I was expecting it to be about killing, well, actual gods. I've actually heard some discourse about this before -- and the general sense was that there are a handful of JRPGs, mainly from around the PS1 and PS2 eras, that happen to involve killing a god, or the God (of some sort), and/or more generally just using such a figure as the story's villain. And these were particularly iconic and seminal in the development of the genre, which is why they're sorta over-represented in the consciousness, especially of western gamers many of whom first experienced JRPGs through these games. While I'm not personally familiar with all of the examples (I think they include stuff like at least one Tales game (maybe Phantasia with the conspicuously-named "Dhaos"?) and at least a few of the PS1/PS2 FF games), I've seen some, like how Final Fantasy VI has Kefka. Though even in that case it's sorta arguable whether he is a god -- I mean, he obviously tries to be one and thinks of himself as one and probably wants to portray himself as one, but he's obviously presented as a false god and his reign is both seen as an anomaly to nature and rendered quite short by the end of the story (canonically he has about a year of sitting at the top of the world before getting his comeuppance). But there's also some...more questionable cases. Lavos (from Chrono Trigger) for example, I don't really feel counts as a "god" -- a false god that some people (in-game) revere as a god, but obviously not meant to actually be a god. (Am I interpreting this too much from a western understanding of deity status? Feel free to debate this.) Meanwhile, there are various other JRPGs that don't involve gods or God as an antagonist. Pokémon is an easy example.
But the video is actually about gods in a broader, more metaphorical sense. It leans this interpretation on drawing an analogy with Japanese history and its place in Japanese culture -- a history of rises to power and established regimes interrupted by their cyclically-inevitable downfall. (Oddly, the Chinese mythological figures the video cites near the beginning don't seem to be part of this cycle.) The video draws its main analogy between this boom-and-bust cycle of political power and...a somewhat confusing combination of the naturally-ordained replacement of gods as well as the antagonist role of false gods. In this broader sense, I...guess it has a point. That aspect of history is definitely something that can influence and obviously has influenced art to varying extents.
But I feel there's also a broader observation to be made with videogames, storytelling, fantasy, and conflict. It's sometimes said that every story needs some sort of "conflict" (somewhat loosely defined). I don't fully agree with this notion, but I think it's definitely applicable to the story a fantasy game tries to tell. (And of course, JRPGs are generally fantasy, or something close it its narrative ilk (e.g. urban fantasy, sci-fi/sci-fantasy).) For any story that means to tell an epic fantasy tale, you pretty much always have a conflict, but not only that, you have a conflict against an extremely powerful antagonist, who threatens the land, or the world, or whatever, in some way or other. In this sense, such a powerful antagonist -- likely armed with powerful magic and also some grand scheme for world domination and/or destruction -- basically takes the role of a deity-level figure, at least in the sense of being present enough to both exert that power (directly or indirectly) and also to be...well, fightable. So, if you're writing an epic fantasy story, chances are you will end up with someone with godlike power as an antagonistic entity.
And this isn't restricted to Japanese media. Western fantasy has its own share of evil/false gods that serve as antagonists -- Beyond basically every story involving an almighty dragon or Satan/Lucifer/The Devil who serves as an evil foil to the Abrahamic God, other examples include both Sauron (from Lord of the Rings) and Cthulhu (from Lovecraftian mythos). And false gods as a narrative idea have been a thing since at least the Old Testament of the Bible, if not even earlier.
The alternative, I guess, is for something that's more "mundanely political", something that might involve factions fighting each other, involve political intrigue among people of status, or something like that. But while there are games about such things, they don't share the same appeal via spectacle (unless of course you make everyone god-tier I guess). You could also have even lower-power stories, either lower fantasy or characters who navigate conflicts of generally much lower power levels (even in higher-fantasy settings), and there are some games like this, but they're not the ones with the epic plots.
On top of this, video games are...for better or worse, often specifically about conflict. Like, their gameplay facilitates the portrayal of -- and provides a way to play out -- conflict. And specifically, combat-based conflict. This is a theme of discussion that comes up in discussions about violence in video games, but it is genuinely true that video games are a medium which allows for fantastical violence and destruction (which may very well be morally justified, e.g. Mario beating up Bowser to rescue Peach) to take place. And it's not just video games; tabletop RPGs -- which take huge influences from Dungeons & Dragons, a U.S. invention -- are commonly used to play out tales of fantasy violence. There obviously are many non-violent videogames and TTRPGs, as well as many that do involve violence but don't involve epic-level conflicts, but I think it's safe to say that combat and specifically epic-level combat are not exactly strangers to these mediums. And, at the very end...if you want the player to be able to win such a conflict, then the losing side has to be a "god" of some sort.
Overall I think the video leans too heavily on the idea that unique aspects of Japanese cultural history bring about such a narrative, and neglects the frequency of such narrative in other games and other fantasy traditions. There are some interesting points made, though, such as about how deities in east Asian traditions are seen less as all-powerful monotheistic entities but rather some sort of pervasive spiritual sense tied more to the forces of nature and the greatness of iconic persons, and false gods can be associated with when such figures bring ruin and suffering. And these things can be and likely are associated with the development of fantasy media and fantasy tropes in JRPGs. But I feel the connection is a lot more hazy than the video suggests, aside from some specific examples such as Final Fantasy VII.
(Final Fantasy VI spoilers but that ship already sailed.) Remember that he got to that point by absorbing the goddess statues and took their place as the source of all magic, I think he should count as a god in the context of that game.
I find the "anomaly to nature" part troublesome, as far as I remember the characters/game don't portray his godhood as being against the natural order of thing or something of the sort, just a terrible thing that happened. It sounds to me like you're assuming humans can't become real gods and using that assumption to discount its counterexamples. Yeah, that.
FWIW Lavos, Sephiroth, Sin, etc. etc. aren't what I'd think of as a god either, but ultimately what you or I feel about those entities isn't that relevant, but whether they fit what the target audience think of as a god, which is of course is going to differ quite a bit. Don't the more recent ones involve god-like poké I know Arceus is like that. Moreover a lot of 'mons are heavily based on real-life gods (of the less almighty kind). I don't think he should count, I know he's a magic ghost, but the denizens of Middle Earth see him as more of an evil conqueror/dictator than an evil deity, at least if I have my LotR lore straight.
(Edit: Also I wonder if those works where the heroes defeat the Devil count, in the ones I know they foil his plans through piousness or trickery, but don't beat him in some physical sense through raw human power or something the same way you can defeat non-divine entities.)
Anyhows, before that video I hadn't made the connection between "becoming a god" (which I had always found ridiculous) and wuxia/wuxia-like fiction, and suddenly the former started making sense.
But I find the latter part unconvincing, where it starts arguing what sounds like suggesting that when there's an overbearing presence, it's a god, and when there's a god, it's a metaphor for salaryman work culture. That's a lot of works about the same thing represented in roughly the same way for it not to be commonly talked about in open terms, or expressed in other ways. A conspiracy theory about it would be too large to be kept under wraps and this one is not even supposed to be a secret (and I've never found other themes in Japanese media particularly subtle).
Curiously, of the "main four" Danganronpa games, the one that makes a point out of the overburdening-kids-at-school thing is the one* (UDG) that does not involve an overbearing presence, and is on-the-nose about it.
* Unless Taka counts, but I didn't think of that before I started making this post so ehh. Even that I find doesn't fit the video's thesis that well; there's the obvious god trappings, but there's two "gods", each representing the two notions of god the video is about, and they're both very different and at odds with each other, so whatever a "Japanese god metaphor" should be like, if one fits the expected way chances are the other doesn't.
Edit: Disclaimer: I skipped the parts about Persona 5 because spoilers.
I guess you have a point regarding the kind of status Kefka attains.
That said, I recall the game calling the two worlds the World of Balance and the World of Ruin, which I think canonically supports the idea that the latter is against a natural sense of order.
I always assumed the World of Balance is called that because it's what you had while the statues were kept in balance. Nonetheless those aren't in-game terms, so I wouldn't count them unless there's some official source I'm not aware of (I've always wondered where those terms came from).
I looked it up and in Japanese the terms commonly in use are (世界)崩壊前/崩壊後(の世界) ("(world) before/after destruction (, world of)"), although just like in English, I don't know if those are official/canon terms, but I'm betting they aren't.
Furry detective mystery. Looks like point-and-click adventure, but somehow I'm not sure if I get it right.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/save_me_mr_tako_definitive_edition
action platformer.
looks vaguely Kirby-inspired, but probably with a deeper plot.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/cathedral
a gothic horror metroidvania with 8-bit-style graphics.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/blade_assault
an action game. turns out to be from the same publisher as Metal Unit, a game I've been playing recently.
https://softcolors.itch.io/aquadine
a visual novel.
the art looks quite pretty.
The channel's good so I assume the video is good. I've only watched five minutes of it and it's going to take me months to watch the rest.
Now I understand why that guy hadn't posted in ages.
https://itch.io/b/2120/games-for-gaza
Some stealth game, seems like?