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neongrey

@neongrey.bsky.social

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they/any. pettin cats. 🍁

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neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 6h

PSIV is undoubtedly the *best* of them, hahahaha. It's still impressive how clean and smooth it feels in play. II is a brutal one to have come in on for a first RPG, too lol, no wonder it stuck itself in so deeply to you. I was terrified of the splitting slimes for the sound effect lmao.

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 6h

just a hair too young to have heard of them except as game machines, and by the time i first heard about the Japanese ones, it was always in the context of emulating this game or that.

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 6h

ahhh thank you, yes, you're right, somehow i never put that together despite knowing all the discrete parts about the specs. Makes total sense now. I think I just never really saw some the pre-nes/sms home computers as anything other than consoles.

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 8h

i was a sega kid!!! phantasy star 1 was my first video game! i dressed up as noah for halloween in second grade!

3 is my favourite because i'm such a sucker for an ambitious failure lmao

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

oh my fucking god i love chrono trigger but in a book covering such a broad topic it should not take up over twice the space of the longest final fantasy aaauuugh

anyway get good sleep, hope the replacement book you're getting instead is better

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

this guy is just so *incurious*, which given he's supposedly writing a "definitive" book is so, so damning

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

ok but going to shining in the darkness alone is so weird if you're gonna fold in sega games because, like, sword of vermillion, going back to the master system phantasy star 1, miracle warriors, and how can you talk about early japanese first-person dungeon crawlers without ever mentioning megaten?

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

gosh this is so much more interesting if you're not arbitrarily deciding to make a memoir of the games you, personally, could potentially have experienced as a child

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

sounds like literally how it worked in megaten 1. i think by 2 you could revive demons, but the main character dying causing a game over of course stayed with the series. Arcana's release seems to predate SMT1 by about 7 months, so I think we have a rare descendant of specifically MT1/2!

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

hmm yes encounter rates like this are never seen in top-down rpgs nosiree

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

this is one of the real problems with restricting yourself to a specific console because the wizardry to dragon quest pipeline is real and you had the first-person dungeons beautifully implemented in 1987 with phantasy star and aughhhhhhhhhhhh

and that's to say nothing of ultima, either!

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

the way he completely ignores the influence of wizardry in particular (especially hilarious when considering he mentions dragon quest 1. does he think it owes nothing to wizardry???) and acts like Arcana's type of dungeon crawler is a novel curiosity from a Japanese dev when it really isn't???

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

yeah hahaha amazing

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

i remember when we still called them "console-style" RPGs but that doesn't acronym down so easily when computers have a lock on the C in CRPG...

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 9h

oh yeah, the actual game part is garbage and the overall plot's not much better but the character work there? chef's kiss. love that storyline for all of them! none of them are happy being apart! each of you has two hands!

golbez has some good stuff too, if underexplored

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

i think people overuse it for cases where characters still would have major motivational conflicts but here these boys just need to come to terms with being bi and kiss already

it's even possible to drag the after years in for supporting evidence, if one cares to count it hahahaha

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

ohhh and we're leaning on the '2 is based on 4 easytype' myth which if you actually know anything about the content of easytype (a tall ask for this clown, mind you), it becomes immediately obvious that it isn't.

if anything i think easytype may have been built off the english version

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

(this is a plot that could actually have been solved with polyamory i am just saying)

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

ok but kain was pretty much fine being both cecil and rosa's friend and and it took literal mind control pulling out the unresolved feelings and even textually he is super ashamed of having that taken advantage of by evil magic

i gotta defend my boy hahahaha

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

I'M FUCKIN SORRY EXCUSE ME WHO IS THIS RAMUH AND IFRIT IN FINAL FANTASY 2 (SNES), THAT TRANSLATION USED INDRA AND JINN RESPECTIVELY

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

ok this one i will fight you on lol

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

jesus fucking christ a final fantasy is a game released with "final fantasy" in the name and YES this does leave Seiken Densetsu and SaGa 1, 2, and 3 in a weird spot, but like, it's one where nobody insists they're in the same series but you have space to talk about that early shared dna aaaugh

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

jesus fucking christ we all got over this in the fucking 90s, like there was a *brief* period where you did use FF2j and FF3j for the famicom games but then the PSX ports started coming out and we had official releases under the real numbers and it became EXTREMELY CONFUSING SO WE ALL MOVED ON

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

in conclusion, final fantasy is a land of contrasts

neongrey @neongrey.bsky.social · 10h

jesus christ nobody has ever cared so much about CS Lewis as this guy