Live-a-Liver is a game I'd really enjoy if I were a better person.
The correct way to play the game is to get in there and let what happens, happens. Not to try to do everything perfectly, that's a miserable way to play the game.
But with my terminal jrpg-brain, I have the compulsion to 100% it. Even if I rationally know that a perfect save file will mean nothing after I beat the game and move on.
It's a very fun little game though. I recommend it to everyone who wants something fresh.
Sengoku Strider wrote:You think so? They still rebranded SaGa & Seiken Densetsu in the West as Final Fantasy titles, indicating they felt the name had traction.
When you have one title to your name in a market.. \/(=_=)\/
Selling the SaGa games under the 3-D Worldrunner brand would have been a real head-scratcher. Even moreso than selling Seiken Densetsu as a Final Fantasy game.
An excuse could be made for the NES games, their company needed time to grow. By FF5? It's like you said, they either thought we were a bunch of big dummies (comments made in Nintendo Power and the existence of Mystic Quest are indeed evidence of that), or they didn't care and were just throwing different stuff out to see if anything stuck.
Sengoku Strider wrote:Romancing SaGa was probably (correctly) seen as too complicated and unconventional. Even when games in the series did release in the PS1 & PS2 eras into a burgeoning rpg market, they largely went over reviewers' heads and under the radar.
RS2 seems to really have a special place in people's hearts in the Japanese side of the internet. The Seven Heroes coming back from the dead for revenge or whatever was going on with that plot...
I probably would have loved it, if I had gotten to play it when I was 10. Maybe more of us would have developed differently, not into boring robots that crave linearity and perfect completions..
Just like FF1 mentioned above. I can understand their thinking though. There was no console rpg market in Japan either when DQ1 hit, but it still managed to be a sensation. When it hit North America I think the only rpg on the NES was FCI's Dragon Questy port of Ultima: Exodus, but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own. Japan didn't even have tabletop rpgs when DQ1 hit. Aside from the D&D cartoon, which hit Japan in 1985, it was released largely without wider context.
Hm. A bit of this leans perhaps a bit too much into the mechanical side of reasoning. And discards the emotional.
Dragon Quest got its start thanks to the followers of the people who made it. If not for Dragon Ball, would you say it would have taken off as it did? If not for Dragon Quest, would the jRPG's that came after it been as viable? I don't think I've ever seen a game explode to that degree, outside of Super Mario and Streetfighter II.
That seed audience is like the tritium in a nuclear bomb, you need it to set the other stuff on fire. I see hundreds of webnovels wither and die every day for a lack of those initial ~30 readers.
Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy had
nothing when they were launched. No characters, creators, or clone games anyone was connected to. All they had was Nintendo Power and little prepubescent nerds like me (like us?). Of course as those nerds grew up, they'd infect more people with their mind virus and the genre would grow.
.. urgh. Now you gave me the idea that in an alternate universe, Nintendo was happy with the performance of these two games. Which led to them actually botherin' to release Mother after they translated it 100%. Which led to them actually trying to make another RPG franchise or two.
... wait, that brings us back around to Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Nevermind.
Anyway, maybe a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or similar, jRPG could have boosted the adoption curve of these games if one had been made back then.
but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own.
The console D+D games, ugh. Pool of Radiance was good, but if you were a hardcore dedicated moody teen, you'd already played it on PC.
The Dragonlance games... Heroes of the Lance is made up of all the suffering in the world. This one might have had a seed audience, from the best selling books it's an adoption of. That it was based on one 30-minute long action sequence in the middle of the first book, was perhaps wrong, conceptually. That it was absolute dogshit...
I don't think it even deserves the title of "kusoge". Kusoge is art, things that should be remembered. The eye-melting blue on green trees of Stargazer. Takeshi's Challenge. HotL doesn't deserve to be remembered.
The silly HotL memes on GameFAQs, though. Those are gems. Nude midgets that kick you in the shins. Mountain dew-spewing dragons. Becoming invulnerable by using Michael Jordan cologne. The extreme fixation on how HEROIC Sturm's mustache was. Hah...