... and it's no wonder I threw in the towel about a quarter of the way through. This game is repulsively bad, and it was a harbinger of how much worse the second half of the year was going to be for my streaming.

Add in absurd game mechanics (you literally can't see huge castles or villages that are five feet in front of your face unless you search for them first), and some of the worst PS1 controls I've ever experienced (and think about how much ground THAT covers) ...

Ridiculous and nonsensical melodrama abounds, as do beats stolen from popular media that lack the setup which made the originals so effective, and one-dimensional characters with no development (and they brought back the tired "women love to eat" trope for the female character they used in WA1).

This was a game that had to have started development after FF7's Japanese release, so its developers would have known that there was now a provable market for JRPGs with three-dimensional characters, layered storytelling, and quality writing. This game literally goes in the opposite direction.

9. Wild Arms 2 (PS1): Did not finish. I played the first Wild Arms game last year in the wake of forcing myself through Afterbirth, and was disappointed that it felt like a 16-bit JRPG that was just dressed up graphically, but at least it wasn't horrible. Wild Arms 2 was nightmarishly bad.

Add in frustrating controls (I lost count of how many times my main character would just circle around enemies three or four times instead of actually attacking them), and I wound up finishing the game with no desire to play anything else from the franchise.

The only exception is the same excruciating eighth-grade-level "BUT WHAT IF RELIGION BAD" talk between characters that plagues so many JRPGs. These scenes are literally interchangeable between so many of these games, and a telltale sign that not enough attention was paid to the writing.

The first hours of the game led me to think that maybe this would be a science fiction story that actually pays attention to the human emotions as much as the "cool science stuff," but then they just stop developing the characters or even trying to do much with the story besides basic beats.

8. Star Ocean First Departure R (PS4): This was my first time playing any Star Ocean game, and I wanted to like it because Elly talks so highly about the franchise, but ... I just couldn't get into it.

Add in a bunch of cheap game overs because I kept losing games of rock-paper-scissors that were barely disguised as being more than that, and this felt like yet another misfire that at least had the excuse of being the first in a franchise. I'm not really looking forward to playing the sequel.

Instead, having over a hundred barely-developed characters, and all but one primary character be more than a one-dimensional archetype, makes the game feel like it's putting up an illusion of being big by sheer size, instead of building the structure to actually be epic in scope.

The worst part is that everything surrounding the character Gremio was actually done well -- establishing backstory and motivation, internal conflict, reinforcing his importance -- and if the whole game had been written like that, I would have liked it a lot.

When your ending goes, "Remember that guy you played dice with in that one town? He went back to that town to play more dice," and that part has nearly as much narrative weight as what happened to the protagonist, it can't help shining a light on this structural weakness.

It has a few interesting gameplay and graphical ideas about what JRPGs might look like after the 16-bit era, but the story is excruciatingly basic, and the mechanic with all the different party characters is obvious "Gotta Catch 'Em All" piffle that actually takes away from the game.

7. Suikoden I HD Remaster (PS5): Another of those games I bought on PS1 back in the day and never played, then bought a digital copy on my PS3 and never played, and am now finally getting around to playing after buying a third copy. Worth the wait? Not really.

(Please call it that as well. Please play it. Please. I feel so alone when seemingly everyone else wants to laugh the game off because of its name or do the "eww furries" thing.)

All the major game studios today just want to put out spectacle and style, and only a handful of indie developers care about substance any longer. At least we have SLARPG, which I'll be replaying again starting on the 20th for the anniversary of its release, or as I like to call it, #SLARPGDay.

When I say that I'm sorely tempted to turn my Twitch channel into all-SLARPG all-the-time, I'm only half-joking. This is the kind of game that one company put out in the nineties that elevated the video game to its full potential as a form of art, and now ... really ... REALLY doesn't.

I'll say it again: There is not a single bad, or even weak, moment in the game's writing. No video game in history has handled the balance between comedy and seriousness better, knowing when to use each without diminishing the other in any way, and keeping the story cohesive and whole all the while.