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
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
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?
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!
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.)