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silveradeptElectric Challenge #4 has a lot it would like us to do: declare our favored genre, select the three best examples of the genre, select our favorite character from each of those three games, and then make recommendations for fanworks that involve at least one of those three favorite characters. Bit of a Puzzle Boss, that one.
If I am going to talk about the genre that I've played the most of and enjoyed quite a bit of, It's going to be the RPG, since those genres often don't require as much twitch-reaction skill as they do turn-based strategies, although that's not actually true, really, either, as there are plenty of RPGs with elements or minigames that require either more twitch-type skills or the ability to think tactically because there's some amount of Active Time Battle idea going on, or they're really a stylish action game with RPG elements, or they're a first-person shooter with RPG elements, and so forth.
RPGs are not the first games I played, partially because I did a lot on arcade games (simple loops are easier to understand), but in the big adventure game blitzes of earlier, and as part of my beginning console work when I was young, the RPGs were the things that stood out the most, or at least, the things that I wanted to replay and have a lot of time invested in were the RPGs.
I started on PC with the Quest For Glory series, as best as I remember, on the remade version of the first game, and branched out from there into Square's RPGs, starting with the original Final Fantasy. But just about all of my major genres are ones I started in early, and I've been playing them for decades now. And I've seen the genre branch our into various specialized forms and to have other game styles adopt "RPG elements" when what they want to have is a progression system andor a set of elemental weaknesses, special powers, and other things that are elements derived from tabletop and RPG kinds of games.
So, in the RPG department, there are a lot of different styles of RPG, and so I thought I would grab a couple of different styles and talk about the ones that I think are the best of their style.
Console RPGs have, for a significant amount of time, been the province of the Eastern RPG (sometimes referred to as JRPGs, given that a lot of them come from companies headquartered in Japan and are marketed to Japanese audiences, with some of them then getting international releases and coming across to the United States or other markets. For a significant amount of time, the companies Square and Enix had differing flagship series that took theRPG genre and worked it in different ways. Square's RPGs generally were third-person and featured some pretty flashy battle sequences and effects associated with the characters and their skills. Enix's RPGs shifted to a first-person type battle sequence, with a rolling readout of what happened in each combat round, much more like a tabletop RPG might do. The two companies merged later on in their lives to form Square-Enix, and most RPGs that want to work in the Eastern RPG style of genre have to contend with Square-Enix's dominance and large audience reach. And the fact that one company has both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest under the same roof.
This will sound unoriginal, I'm sure, but one of the finest-designed RPGs of the Square / Squaresoft era was Chrono Trigger. It's a time-spanning story that starts with the everyperson who turns out to step up to the challenge and gather a lot of allies along the way. Well, okay, it actually starts with a princess ditching her handlers and going to the fair to have fun, where she runs into one of the locals, drafts him as her traveling companion for the fair, and then goes to watch the local technologist's daughter demonstrate a working short-range teleporter. Unbenownskt to everyone, including the princess, her family heirloom pendant is actually supercharged with magic and interferes with the teleporter, turning it into a time gate that dumps the princess, her companion, and the one who built the teleporter several hundred years into the past, where they accidentally change the past through a useful coincidence. And from there, the time only gets twistier.
It's difficult to have a favorite character from this particular story, as the ensemble itself has a feel to it where all of them have specific stories that occasionally interact, and that occasionally, those characters need help from someone else to complete the tasks they want to achieve. There's a playable character from eachof the eras the time team meets, with the exception of the Day of Lavos, which is prety nice.
Since so much of the game is about teamwork and working together (even if I do like that all of the women on the cast are able to be powerful and to exercise the power they have), the fanwork I want to highlight is Chrono Jigga, which takes the soundtrack of the game and mashes it up with Jay-Z's Black Album vocal tracks. Which sounds like the sort of thing that shoud go completely wrong, but instead turns out quite well. (And all of thosetracks are fanworks, thanks, so that covers the "three or more" bit.)
To go in a completely different direction, the strategy-RPGs from Nippon Ichi might sometimes be called "stat-RPGs" in that they often have ridiculously large caps for levels, statistical categories, and the other numerical elements of the characters under the player's control and the enemies those characters will face. Often times, because of the vast swaths of post-narrative content are locked behind some one of the most important parts of figuring out a NIS game is how to power-level effectively so that a character can jump from creation to being an effective fighter as fast as possible. You can sink an awful lot of time into those games in between unlocking bits and pieces of the content that's available.
While I've done a lot of those games, and one of them, Phantom Brave, is the only one I've actually made it all the way through the post-game content for, the original Disgaea is the one that I've liked the best, and it's pint-sized powerhouse of a demon overlord, Laharl, is absolutely hilarious in his ambitions and…lack of loyalty among his underlings in the scramble as to who will become the next supreme Overlord of their partcular underworld. It's not Laharl, with his supreme aversion to sexy bodies (Laharl identifies as male, and so "sexy bodies" in this particular case means "women characters with larger chests") who is my favorite character in this series, but his most loyal vassal, Etna. Etna is absolutely looking for whatever opportunity she can to stick with the winners, whomever that may be, and she has spent a significant amount of time trying to kill Laharl or otherwise usurp his authority and become Supreme Overlord herself. Because Laharl is supremely tough (and because he has a few other people looking out for him), Etna's attempts do not succeed, but her cheery willingness to look out for herself makes her the best demon that she can be.
Have some Etna fanart, with her preferred weapon type from the game, a spear. Then, several of the main cast reimagined as Prinnies, the lovable but expendable explosive penguins of the underworld, d00d, and one more of Etna in her full Beauty Queen self.
Finally, yet another different style of game, the "action-RPG," where RPG-style progression, elemental counters, and other elements usually present in the tabletop-derived games are layered on top of a stylish action kind of game, where combo attacks, timing blocks and dodges take on additional importance for success. I'm not actually all that fond of the trend of many games to move in this direction, as a large amount of the reason that I got into RPGs was because they had great story and they didn't require a significant amount (or any) twitch-action skills to be good. (And that I could eventuall achieve numerical superiority so that even the RNG would have difficulty keeping me from my goals.)
I will still play a lot of those games, though, if their stories look interesting, and "interesting" is one of the kinder adjectives used to describe the overarching and twisty plotline of Kingdom Hearts. The current lines, so far, have been about children on Destiny Islands proving their island's name is quite true, and they go forth and interact with worlds based mostly on Disney films and properties. Then they introduce the villain, and the Organization that is looking to assist the villain, and they spend a lot of time on those things, in such a way that you have to have played or watched the cutscenes of all of the games for everything to make sense.
And that's before the other plot that's weaving in continues lurking in the background, about how the current Keyblade War is only the latest Keyblade War, and there are Foretellers and the Master of Masters and, as of the most recent DLC, a particular character who was only hinted at might be much more important than we had originally determined. And possibly an attempt to resurrect something that had been previously changed.
Who's my favorite from Kingdom Hearts? Well, there are a lot of possibilities, but I have a particular soft spot for Naminé, Kairi's Nobody, who has the power to manipulate memories. And who eventually ends up working with the heroes instead of with the Organization that holds her prisoner. Unlike the other aspects of Kairi, Naminé gets to make progress, on-screen, and has more than a few biting remarks involved as well. Her storyline is the developed one, and she doesn't, at any point, end up being fridged or dismissed by the narrative. So it's pretty good.
Here's a nice bit of fanart with her and Roxas, Sora's Nobody. And before he began work on RWBY (and then passed well before his time), the sixth installment of Monty Oum's Dead Fantasy series, pitting Team Ninja's Dead or Alive against Square-Enix's Final Fantasy cast has Naminé as Kairi's Super Mode, putting her abilities with Keyblades to some significant use. This is the sort of thing that helped get Monty into Rooster Teeth in the first place. Finally,![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
serie11 made me a very nice gift of Kairi and Naminé helping each other with expressing their feelings to their someones special.
Wow. That's a lot to have gotten done for a single challenge. But now it's finished.
If I am going to talk about the genre that I've played the most of and enjoyed quite a bit of, It's going to be the RPG, since those genres often don't require as much twitch-reaction skill as they do turn-based strategies, although that's not actually true, really, either, as there are plenty of RPGs with elements or minigames that require either more twitch-type skills or the ability to think tactically because there's some amount of Active Time Battle idea going on, or they're really a stylish action game with RPG elements, or they're a first-person shooter with RPG elements, and so forth.
RPGs are not the first games I played, partially because I did a lot on arcade games (simple loops are easier to understand), but in the big adventure game blitzes of earlier, and as part of my beginning console work when I was young, the RPGs were the things that stood out the most, or at least, the things that I wanted to replay and have a lot of time invested in were the RPGs.
I started on PC with the Quest For Glory series, as best as I remember, on the remade version of the first game, and branched out from there into Square's RPGs, starting with the original Final Fantasy. But just about all of my major genres are ones I started in early, and I've been playing them for decades now. And I've seen the genre branch our into various specialized forms and to have other game styles adopt "RPG elements" when what they want to have is a progression system andor a set of elemental weaknesses, special powers, and other things that are elements derived from tabletop and RPG kinds of games.
So, in the RPG department, there are a lot of different styles of RPG, and so I thought I would grab a couple of different styles and talk about the ones that I think are the best of their style.
Console RPGs have, for a significant amount of time, been the province of the Eastern RPG (sometimes referred to as JRPGs, given that a lot of them come from companies headquartered in Japan and are marketed to Japanese audiences, with some of them then getting international releases and coming across to the United States or other markets. For a significant amount of time, the companies Square and Enix had differing flagship series that took theRPG genre and worked it in different ways. Square's RPGs generally were third-person and featured some pretty flashy battle sequences and effects associated with the characters and their skills. Enix's RPGs shifted to a first-person type battle sequence, with a rolling readout of what happened in each combat round, much more like a tabletop RPG might do. The two companies merged later on in their lives to form Square-Enix, and most RPGs that want to work in the Eastern RPG style of genre have to contend with Square-Enix's dominance and large audience reach. And the fact that one company has both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest under the same roof.
This will sound unoriginal, I'm sure, but one of the finest-designed RPGs of the Square / Squaresoft era was Chrono Trigger. It's a time-spanning story that starts with the everyperson who turns out to step up to the challenge and gather a lot of allies along the way. Well, okay, it actually starts with a princess ditching her handlers and going to the fair to have fun, where she runs into one of the locals, drafts him as her traveling companion for the fair, and then goes to watch the local technologist's daughter demonstrate a working short-range teleporter. Unbenownskt to everyone, including the princess, her family heirloom pendant is actually supercharged with magic and interferes with the teleporter, turning it into a time gate that dumps the princess, her companion, and the one who built the teleporter several hundred years into the past, where they accidentally change the past through a useful coincidence. And from there, the time only gets twistier.
It's difficult to have a favorite character from this particular story, as the ensemble itself has a feel to it where all of them have specific stories that occasionally interact, and that occasionally, those characters need help from someone else to complete the tasks they want to achieve. There's a playable character from eachof the eras the time team meets, with the exception of the Day of Lavos, which is prety nice.
Since so much of the game is about teamwork and working together (even if I do like that all of the women on the cast are able to be powerful and to exercise the power they have), the fanwork I want to highlight is Chrono Jigga, which takes the soundtrack of the game and mashes it up with Jay-Z's Black Album vocal tracks. Which sounds like the sort of thing that shoud go completely wrong, but instead turns out quite well. (And all of thosetracks are fanworks, thanks, so that covers the "three or more" bit.)
To go in a completely different direction, the strategy-RPGs from Nippon Ichi might sometimes be called "stat-RPGs" in that they often have ridiculously large caps for levels, statistical categories, and the other numerical elements of the characters under the player's control and the enemies those characters will face. Often times, because of the vast swaths of post-narrative content are locked behind some one of the most important parts of figuring out a NIS game is how to power-level effectively so that a character can jump from creation to being an effective fighter as fast as possible. You can sink an awful lot of time into those games in between unlocking bits and pieces of the content that's available.
While I've done a lot of those games, and one of them, Phantom Brave, is the only one I've actually made it all the way through the post-game content for, the original Disgaea is the one that I've liked the best, and it's pint-sized powerhouse of a demon overlord, Laharl, is absolutely hilarious in his ambitions and…lack of loyalty among his underlings in the scramble as to who will become the next supreme Overlord of their partcular underworld. It's not Laharl, with his supreme aversion to sexy bodies (Laharl identifies as male, and so "sexy bodies" in this particular case means "women characters with larger chests") who is my favorite character in this series, but his most loyal vassal, Etna. Etna is absolutely looking for whatever opportunity she can to stick with the winners, whomever that may be, and she has spent a significant amount of time trying to kill Laharl or otherwise usurp his authority and become Supreme Overlord herself. Because Laharl is supremely tough (and because he has a few other people looking out for him), Etna's attempts do not succeed, but her cheery willingness to look out for herself makes her the best demon that she can be.
Have some Etna fanart, with her preferred weapon type from the game, a spear. Then, several of the main cast reimagined as Prinnies, the lovable but expendable explosive penguins of the underworld, d00d, and one more of Etna in her full Beauty Queen self.
Finally, yet another different style of game, the "action-RPG," where RPG-style progression, elemental counters, and other elements usually present in the tabletop-derived games are layered on top of a stylish action kind of game, where combo attacks, timing blocks and dodges take on additional importance for success. I'm not actually all that fond of the trend of many games to move in this direction, as a large amount of the reason that I got into RPGs was because they had great story and they didn't require a significant amount (or any) twitch-action skills to be good. (And that I could eventuall achieve numerical superiority so that even the RNG would have difficulty keeping me from my goals.)
I will still play a lot of those games, though, if their stories look interesting, and "interesting" is one of the kinder adjectives used to describe the overarching and twisty plotline of Kingdom Hearts. The current lines, so far, have been about children on Destiny Islands proving their island's name is quite true, and they go forth and interact with worlds based mostly on Disney films and properties. Then they introduce the villain, and the Organization that is looking to assist the villain, and they spend a lot of time on those things, in such a way that you have to have played or watched the cutscenes of all of the games for everything to make sense.
And that's before the other plot that's weaving in continues lurking in the background, about how the current Keyblade War is only the latest Keyblade War, and there are Foretellers and the Master of Masters and, as of the most recent DLC, a particular character who was only hinted at might be much more important than we had originally determined. And possibly an attempt to resurrect something that had been previously changed.
Who's my favorite from Kingdom Hearts? Well, there are a lot of possibilities, but I have a particular soft spot for Naminé, Kairi's Nobody, who has the power to manipulate memories. And who eventually ends up working with the heroes instead of with the Organization that holds her prisoner. Unlike the other aspects of Kairi, Naminé gets to make progress, on-screen, and has more than a few biting remarks involved as well. Her storyline is the developed one, and she doesn't, at any point, end up being fridged or dismissed by the narrative. So it's pretty good.
Here's a nice bit of fanart with her and Roxas, Sora's Nobody. And before he began work on RWBY (and then passed well before his time), the sixth installment of Monty Oum's Dead Fantasy series, pitting Team Ninja's Dead or Alive against Square-Enix's Final Fantasy cast has Naminé as Kairi's Super Mode, putting her abilities with Keyblades to some significant use. This is the sort of thing that helped get Monty into Rooster Teeth in the first place. Finally,
Wow. That's a lot to have gotten done for a single challenge. But now it's finished.
