What to look forward to in 2020

Here it is folks, the very last post I'll ever make for 2019. I've been going off and on about JRPGs and quite frankly, is that all I ever wanted to do with this blog now? I've been in the Doom community since 2013 and I've played so many custom maps for the game, why not talk about them more in depth? I've created a few maps, analyzed just what each map I played has, and I've rewritten several reviews to make them concise and trustable to many who wish to play just about anything I've already played. So for crying out loud why don't I make this blog feature some Doom in it!

Now before anyone says it, no I'm not giving up my RPG musings either. That was the primary focus of the blog and I'm keeping it that way. All my Doom stuff will be kept solely in the Doom WAD Musings label, so if you want to look at how I look at them, that's the label to look at. Elsewhere will be what I've written elsewhere.

Another notable change is the removal of the RPG Cliches tag. While I love pissing on the cliches and all, it's gonna be relegated to just RPGs in general instead of its own tag. Plus I will reword all the items that were currently under that tag. The rest of the tags will remain (the Miscellaneous tag for the record covers posts like this as well as RPGs that aren't developed by any big name companies or what not). Also I will be adding pictures to almost all of my lookbacks and a few other things too.

So here's to 2020. And wow, this is my 200th blog post (although I had to delete some outdated stuff too.

My RPG Timeline: 2017-2019

Continued from that last post I made just minutes ago.

2017

Live-A-Live (#49) was started pretty much after Christmas of 2016, and went on into this year: 2017. Around this time I was contemplating a plan for what games I want to try out afterwards, formulating a schedule that only I am familiar with, while leaving people who viewed my TheTopTens profile just wondering what game I played next. I knew #50 had to be a special game, so I went with the revered Final Fantasy VII. Apart from FF1 (#2) and FF4 (#4) and all the FFLs (which are SaGa games) this was the only Final Fantasy game that didn't go by my mantra of playing a FF game on a multiple of 5, but I could care less about that.

From there, I went all the way to The Legend of Dragoon (#60) during my spring semester in 2017. I do have to admit, my grades were dropping at this point, and that was NOT a good thing. I should have spent less time gaming all the time, but there was so much to play and I focused on it quite often. Of course, I spent a lot of time studying too, I had five courses to juggle around, and unfortunatly I had that one professor who never helped students or answered questions via email. But I will say that I did beat Hydlide (#53) in a single day (well two days, but I took a break during half of one day and finished the other half another day so it still counts).

At the time I was playing the long game The Legend of Dragoon, I also got a new summer job, albeit a crummy hotel one where I was overworked and underpaid. During the times I was home I finished The Legend of Dragoon, played Romancing SaGa (#61) until I got through the intros, then revisited Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (#62), a game I played in my childhood that took me only two days to beat. Heh, I remember doing that when I was in 5th grade. Afterwards were Kartia (#63), Paper Mario (#64) and Final Fantasy V (#65) before I decided to quit that horrible job that did not treat me well. You can tell I wanted Paper Mario to be my 64th RPG.

By the time I played Suikoden IV (#66) I was starting a fall semester at college. And I did a little better even though the classes were harder and there was an intensive group project I was off and on about. I remember beating Vagrant Story's (#70) main story on my birthday in November, and did some postgame stuff afterwards, the December portion of my semester was spent on Phantasy Star III (#71), and I started Soul Nomad & The World Eaters (#72) near the tail end of that semester. I managed to somehow beat it before the year's end, but since I was so vexed by how amazing it was, the next year I played bits and pieces of the game in between other RPGs playing it for some new game stuff before deciding to stop playing for now.

So I went from #49 to #72, which was quite a number of reviews done in 2017, that number being a total of 24 games done. That was somehow more than the last year by about four RPGs. Nice!

2018

The snow outside caused much of my last semester at the four-year university to have closing, and it gave me a lot of time to just play some more games. While I replayed parts of Soul Nomad this year, I played Langrisser II (#73), Growlanser III (#74), and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (#75) before deciding to just strictly play one game again. I had some pretty hard classes for my last semester, and I did something insanely risky during some of the games, notably 7th Saga (#77) and Romancing SaGa 2 (#78). Because I'm aware of how much grinding I did, I would play the game while simultaneously doing my schoolwork on my tablet. Miraculously the class I did the extensive work on I actually got an A in, and I did decently enough to keep my GPA above 3.0 right as I graduated. I ended up finishing Suikoden Tactics (#81) by the time I officially graduated from the four-year university.

Around this time there was a major shift in what I had to do, as I got accepted into a position that had me moving up north to a more corporate location to do some coding training for a new position. I knew I had to finish up Suikoden Tactics, because I won't be seeing my computer for a long time afterwards, if even at all. Basically I brought along an HP laptop, one that was capable of playing most emulators EXCEPT the PS2 ones, and had to formulate which games I will play over there.

Needless to say I only ever played one (Shining in the Darkness, #82), while living in the apartment there. The training was extremely intensive and required all of my concentration and it STILL kicks my ass. I ended up having to tell them this really wasn't the path I wanted after all through the experience I had, and I ended up going home. Before I went home though, I should mention, I actually started this blog in June of this year. I had intended to hopefully get some money out of it, but I don't care if I do or not to be honest. I just like to write now.

So in June of 2018 I was jobless, trying to find the thing I wanted most, all the while playing Romancing SaGa 3 (#83), Rhapsody (#84), and starting Final Fantasy VIII (#85). Around that time I got a retail job that payed very little but at least treated me properly, and I also somehow landed a housekeeping position at the same time. I tried my luck tackling both positions and doing well in both, ending up finishing FF8 and starting Dual Orb 2 (#86) at that time.

My retail position was only temporary and it ended up being finished in just a month. But I did land the position that I still have to this day, a really nice position where I tutor students in the public schools, getting to know what problems they have and helping them solve the problems. Around this time, for the rest of 2018, I had the housekeeping position and this one that I currently have now. I played Treasure of the Rudras (#87) in October, Earthbound ZERO (#88) for the rest of October to the beginning of November, Dragon Quest III (#89) for much of November through my birthday, and Skies of Arcadia (#90) in most of December. I formulated a plan to play the MOTHER games for my 88th, 99th, and 111th games, just because I want to follow weird patterns.

So the summary for 2018 in terms of RPGs played goes from #73 to #90. This was only 18 games played, which was definitely a small number. But I had so much going on, people expecting me to do so much. Thank god I found a good path to switch to.

2019

In the latter half of 2018 I started Phantom Brave (#91), and that went through January of 2019. I started Phantasy Star IV (#92) at the tail end of that month, through the start of February. Tenchi Muyo (#93) was short, and I got through Dragon Quest IV (#94) quickly around the time March came by. Much of March was taken up by me playing Final Fantasy Tactics (#95). I then played up to Earthbound (#99), before my current position ended. It was a school year position after all, and it ended in June, but I asked if I can come again for the next school year with more hours and that's exactly what I've been doing by then.

I had to contemplate what my 100th RPG would be. It had to be quite well-revered, and it obviously wasn't Earthbound which I was currently playing as my 99th. So I went with The World Ends With You, a game I hear about while looking up numerous tropes and wondering just how good it was. Well, it was good! I ended up beating it just before US Independence Day, and it took up quite a lot of time in June. Around the time I finished it I was also investing in Pokemon ROM hacks out of curiosity, and I have since stopped that for a bit since I'm not interested in it at the moment, but from Robotrek (#101) to Secret of the Stars (#107) I played some ROM hacks during times I didn't feel like playing the RPGs I was playing.

That stopped once I started Suikoden V (#108). I knew it was a long game, so I refrained from playing Pokemon ROM hacks and invested a lot of time into Suikoden V, playing it for much of September and October, then went to Star Ocean: Blue Sphere (#109) or at least as much as I could before I got annoyed with the unfinished translation. Then the unthinkable happened. My virus scanner effectively killed the usage of all applications on my computer (including itself) and I was completely screwed from doing anything. It took a few days in October to fix it up, and now my operating system is Windows 10 and it runs a lot smoother (though I think my dad may have overclocked my machine, as it has some crashing at times). I basically am thankful I had a flash drive with almost all of my important files, my backup of RPGs, my music files, my emulators, and the games I wanted to keep.

And things got better as I finally got back into the job that I loved for the last school year, this time getting more hours and more travel, and it certainly feels wonderful. I played Secret of Mana (#110), beat it before November, beat MOTHER 3 (#111) during the first half of November, the Deep Dungeon games (#112, #113, and #114) during the rest of November, and December was the month where I took all my time to invest in Final Fantasy IX (#115). It is definitely the last game I played this year, as while my 116th RPG will be Dragon Quest VI, I certainly won't be able to finish it within the two days we have before the next year!

So there you have it, my 2019 RPG record goes from #91 to #115, which is 25 games done. A prolific year! And yes, we've reached the end of this two-part autobiographical look back at all the stuff I did during the 2010s as far as RPGs go.

My RPG Timeline: 2014-2016

So it's almost 2020, things have happened, and I often neglect to look back on exactly what has been going on in the past few years. Luckily for me, my memory of everything is excellent. I remember all the embarassing stuff I did in elementary school, my ability to avoid trouble in middle school despite people hating me for things I no longer care about, and being a generally good and ambitious high school student. Wait a minute, isn't this an RPG-centric blog? What am I even talking about? It's obvious isn't it? I'm reminiscing when I played certain games and what I was also doing around those times.

2014

I started going to community college around this time, starting in fall of 2013, eventually ending at fall of 2015, graduating in December of that year. In 2014 I created an account on TheTopTens, a site I've been lurking on. There was so much to do during this time and I basically went in and started putting up music lists. At the same time I also went ahead with getting a seasonal summer job, one that was okay at best but nowhere close to worthwhile. I think it was around this time I was also playing JRPGs, but I wasn't actually keeping track of any of the games I played. I don't even recall which games I played in 2014 but I do know for certain when I started reviewing them.

2015

It may have been sometime 2015 when I played the game I made the first review on TheTopTens for Threads of Fate (#1), which was during a rather difficult semester where calculus actually kicked my butt for once (I did excellent for the first half). That review I did for Threads of Fate is amazingly outdated now. When I started these reviews, I called them "old RPG reviews" and well they are old, especially when we are going into 2020. The Playstation, SNES, GB, NES, Genesis, all those systems will be 20 years old, with the Playstation 2 and even the Nintendo DS not being far behind. The reviews I made were clunky, following a formula of rating them by gameplay, characters, plot, and music. I spoil a lot of the plot, and describe many different gameplay mechanics and talk only a bit about the music. Bits and pieces of that formula still apply to all my reviews, and I keep a backup of all the reviews I've got.

After the Threads of Fate review I began reminiscing about the JRPGs I played at the time, usually because writing about this stuff is a fun pasttime and that I wanted to be well-known on TheTopTens. From the first to the twenty-first review, I basically reminisced all the stuff I remembered for the games I played during the 2014 and 2015 years. I got my summer job back this year, and I played Wild Arms (#22) at this time. This was important because I basically decided to write a review after playing through each and every game I complete or get close to completing. During those times I was at my seasonal job I played Lufia II (#23), and was playing Wild Arms 2 (#24) before I left to continue my final semester at community college. I beat Lunar 2 (#26) on Halloween, Suikoden (#27) on my birthday, and the last RPG I remember playing was Breath of Fire 4 (#28) before the end of the year came. Also this year, I had attempted to play Warsong (#57) and Secret of the Stars (#107), but quit due to frustration and boredom, respectively. I eventually revisited both games though.

So in 2015 I made 28 reviews, though not all of the games I played were played this year.

2016

I played Wild Arms: Alter Code F (#29) during the tail ends of December going into January. This review marked the change of name to "RPG Review" for a brief moment, because at the time I did not consider the Playstation 2 to be an old system. Also during this time I was transferring from my associates degree to a bachelors by going to a four-year university, thankfully I lived relatively close by, so I didn't have to move at all. During my first semester at the four-year, I spent less time actually playing RPGs, only managing to get from Xenogears (#30) to Suikoden II (#33). I had to focus immensely on the classes I was in of course, but I had quite some time to do some gaming. Xenogears (#30) and Grandia (#32) in particular were very long and grinding games to do.

I ended my first semester around the time I finished Suikoden II (#33) and my parents and I planned a vacation to Universal Studios in Florida (my mother really wanted to experience the Harry Potter attractions if you wanna know) I played no RPGs when I was in Florida, but I did play the GBC Zelda games both before and during the trip as a leisurely pasttime in between the amusement.

Going home I eventually decided to play Odin Sphere (#34). I also started Lufia: The Legend Returns (#36) at the tail end of my playthrough there, playing one game by day and another by night. After finishing Odin Sphere, Wild Arms 3 (#35) became my day game, and amazingly enough, I took even longer with Lufia: The Legend Returns than I did with WA3, so it became #35 and the Lufia 3 became #36. I tried the same formula for the next two RPGs, playing Suikoden III (#38) by night and Sailor Moon: Another Story (#37) by day. I ended up beating the latter game in about a week, and the former in two months. Yeah, it went for that long, plus by the time I started it I started my next semester as well, so that ate a lot of time up. I had to abandon the "play two RPGs" gimmick and just play one game at a time by then.

I did pick up the pace though and beat it, then moved on to the other games. I think I beat Chrono Cross (#40) during the Halloween times, or was it Grandia II (#41)? I don't remember. Once I reached Soul Blazer (#42) I abandoned the "old" moniker for the ones that weren't Playstation 2 titles and just generalized it to "RPG Review" from then on. I then played that game and a lot of smaller ones, with Final Fantasy VI (#45) setting a new benchmark. From FF6, I went ahead and played a Final Fantasy game every time I reach a multiple of 5. Also, I would play a mostly revered RPG on every multiple of 10. This actually started last year when I played Chrono Trigger (#20), then continued with Xenogears, then Chrono Cross.

So Final Fantasy VI was slated to be played late November to December, and it took awhile. However, I sped through several more RPGs, and the last one was the Magic Knight Rayearth RPG (#48) which took only three days to play. This basically closed out 2016 in terms of RPGs for me, I finished #29 and ended with #48, which was a total of 20 games finished that year.

Continued in another post.

A look back at: Final Fantasy IX

Well well, look who hasn't made a post in nearly a month. That's what happens when you play lots of stuff over the month, as well as get involved in a big Final Fantasy game with lots of sidequests and such. In many ways, IX is the underrated gem of the Final Fantasies, everyone knows it exists, but take it to the side to continue talking about VII or VI or what not. It's the kind of Final Fantasy game with loads of imperfections but lots of charming stuff to outweigh them. Trying to return to the roots of the original Final Fantasies but also keeping to the tune of modern stuff. Lots of FMVs were really well done (other than a noticable sound issue I had to deal with) and the ability system I sort of was okay with for the most part.

Those sidequests compared to others took quite a while, especially having to do Chocobo Hot and Cold. I neglected some things, like the jump rope and racing minigames, because the rewards are just little titles no one cares about. I decided not to fight Ozma because of ending fatigue, but got basically every other sidequest here. Thankfully the balance is decent enough that I managed to beat the game with under level 50 for all characters. Synthesizing weapons was a supposedly neat idea but not entirely original, the idea of hoarding your inventory instead of actually selling old equipment made it so that synthesizing was actually useful.

There were quite a few things about IX that bothered me. Zidane's steal rate, even with the Master Thief ability, isn't good at all. I can spend 4 consecutive turns of Zidane stealing while everyone else attacks, and yet he won't steal anything. There's a number of abilities for status protection, but they sadly lack it for all statuses, and particular virus and instant death protection aren't present (unless you count Auto-Life, but this applies to all KOs and not necessarily insta-kill, plus it can be set with Amarant or Quina's own abilities anyways). Necron of course I hate, just a random "here's a new bad guy without a single inch of backstory when you got used to the awesome Kuja for the entire game" not to mention him taking up to three turns which is so unfair. Sure, a challenge is a challenge though. Above all else, my biggest complaint with IX is the awful encounter rate, probably the worst in the whole series so far, you can barely get anywhere and bam, another encounter. And the pacing of battles is really slow. It made the Nero Brothers sidequest in particular (have to go back and forth between the endgame dungeon after "checkpoints" are reached) so annoying.

As I said though, IX does do the good parts good. Kuja is so much more interesting than Ultimecia, Sephiroth, Kefka, Exdeath, etc. Zidane's backstory came out of nowhere but it actually is a pretty memorable moment, plus his character as a whole is great. Cid in this game is quirky good. Steiner is definitely devoted. Zorn and Thorn are appropriately annoying comic relief. Dagger and Eiko do their parts well, and so on. The storyline of course gets apocalyptic and suspenseful in multiple parts, sadness reigns, and the heroes still prevail. It's an appropriate Final Fantasy story and it's enriched in goodness all around (well aside from Necron's stupid reveal).

A look back at: Deep Dungeon 3

I haven't been frustrated at a game since Golvellius. It really does take a special kind of unfair to throw me over the age.

What the third Deep Dungeon game is compared to its previous iterations is what Dragon Quest II is to the first. It adds the multiples of party members and monsters, and it tries to combine it with the Deep Dungeon gameplay style. Not to mention more towns and dungeons to deal with! Good, right? Well let's get to the gameplay issues. "But it wasn't very useful" GREAT JOB NOT HAVING A MAGIC STAT and making spells act like the ones from Dragon Quest where they randomly don't work. But it's WORSE than Dragon Quest because usually they apply to just the damaging spells. Here, they apply to buffs and debuffs. Holy crap. So for a boss strategy I would get my priest and wizard to use attack and defense buffs on my main character, except it will never work ever. I literally set every character to infinite HP, had my main be the only one attacking, and everyone else attempt to buff the main guy, and it took a boatload of turns and not a single one of those turns did any buffs work! It gets way worse when you factor in the spells that remove poison and paralysis only work outside of battle, never inside. WHY? At least the Acid debuff spell actually works. Even stupider is that the enemy buff spells always work, even though their own offensive spells for some reason always fail.

And then you get into what you're fighting against. Some enemies have evasion rates that literally have you hoping for a deathblow, because you can spend a turn of four people attacking and failing and the lone enemy with high evasion seems completely impervious, all the while kicking your ass all the same. I can spend nine turns attempting to hit a Vampire enemy and never do it. Even his weaksauce weakness Sunshine (which would normally instakill because he's undead) doesn't want to work. And he can paralyze with his hits and such. Enemies after him have abnormally high defense, I mean actually abnormally high defense, because I can buy and equip the best weaponry prior to fighting them and my swordsman only does single digit damage. The fact that I am required to use the debuffing Acid spell until it works is more than enough to piss me off.

Perhaps the explanation behind all this utter unfairness (and I loathe having to use that word, cause it elicits a "git gud" attitude from some other players, but honestly just know that this borders to unplayable) is the fact that the fan translation of this game ended up being a straight up ROM hack. Some coding changes were made that really tweaked certain "bugs", although it made things way more impossible to deal with. This is likely either my worst RPG so far, or second worst. You have to know that it must frustrate me greatly to actually put it at a worst category, and only Golvellius has done that so far.

A look back at: Deep Dungeon 2

Deep Dungeon 2 is a basic sequel game, with the emperor somehow still being alive in the underground and making a few marginal improvements that don't really mean all that much. I appreciate the sentiments though, especially with picking bonus points upon leveling up, something that is very rarely seen especially for a FDS RPG.

It's so easy to forget to equip the first items you buy, meaning that when you encounter your first enemy, you're dead. You'll be missing, and should you actually hit you'll do mere scratch damage, but it hits home when you're always hit. Now that's of course assuming the character is unarmed. With a weapon and armor, survivability is now possible. For leveling up, my strategies were to up the hell out of agility so that enemies always miss and I always hit and give a few points to luck too (for critical hits I'm pretty sure). Then just sort of sit in a place, hit the turbo button and speed the emulator up and watch the HP as my guy just sort of steamrolls through things. It's already boring enough to grind, but standing in place and having enemies come to me at least alleviates the need to run around like an idiot until an encounter appears.

The ending of Deep Dungeon 2 from a gameplay standpoint makes me angry. I can get all the six items needed to get to the fourth dungeon floor (which in itself is actually a problem, again they take up inventory slots), but the map I followed is somehow different than the one I was given. I was forced to do the standard D+D navigation to even understand where I was really going, and then once I find nothing of interest, the only way out is to use the Pegasus Wing, oh wait, it has a random chance of just killing you! That's just a huge headache to get through. Also how come none of the guides mention how to get the Jewel item? I'll make it easy for the viewers, once you have the Crest, go back to town and attempt to sell it. You won't lose the Crest, but will gain the Jewel. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and it seems that the only uses for these items are to instantly end battles against fake demon kings or in the case of the Demon King Ruu, the Crest makes him confess something. It's weird. It really doesn't make sense that MY game had a screwed-up fourth floor, even after I do all that stuff well before I even step foot in that floor.

A look back at: Deep Dungeon

(Player attacks!)
(But the enemy dodged!)
(The enemy attacks!)
(But Player dodged!)
(Player attacks!)
(But the enemy dodged!)
(The enemy attacks!)
(But Player dodged!)

Just repeat that over and over and you have the gist of Deep Dungeon: Madō Senki. With Phantasy Star dungeon navigation and Dragon Quest gameplay AND plot, there's next to nothing here that is interesting. Well other than standing still and an enemy shows up, which is better than making paces all over the place. But then the combat is basically the sentences above and it is b-o-r-i-n-g. Throwing a few bones helps, enemies in trash, enemies that escape since you can be overleveled, traps on the grounds, the invulnerable fake princess, numerous empty rooms. Does it all save the game? Not really. Heck, the final boss does exactly what the Dragonlord from Dragon Quest does, offer the player a choice, except you'll just fight the guy because the bad ending isn't interesting at all.

The other shortcomings are the inventory spaces, especially when key items are concerned. Cool, lemme throw away a key item, it stays where I threw it away right? Well then I need to backtrack, ah crap, gotta find it again. It would also help to have more than 9 of Bread or Holy Water, but I'm guessing due to limitations it ain't feasible. Man, I can see loads of potential with this dungeon crawler, especially considering it's so similar to the PC Wizardry games and such, but the modern gamer sure as hell won't be pleased with this stuff at all. When your game requires more luck than ever just to hit something, there's a huge problem.