RPG Cast – Episode 779: “Samus Dot Link, the Perfect URL”
Kelley thinks she hears Aerosmith while searching for her cat. Chris wishes he was in a montage. Josh is drenched in 90s anime. And Ryan skips everything and goes straight to the hot spring.
Question of the Week
Can you tolerate a game where one thing is terrible, if everything else is excellent?
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Oh for sure, I can overlook a terrible trait is everything else in a game is excellent. One example I can think of is the Wii RPG Arc Rise Fantasia. It has a fantastic battle system with challenging, but fair boss fights, wonderful music, some great characters, an anime art style that stands out, and looks pretty good for a Wii game. It’s infamous for its atrocious English voice acting, though. This game was released in 2010 in North America, but you’d think it was from the mid 90s with how terrible the voice work is. This, plus the somewhat weak localized script does impact the story, but it is somewhat saved by doing some interesting things. I love Arc Rise Fantasia in spite of its localization.
I misread last week’s Question of the Week (the mechanic that makes you cringe) and thought it referred to elements of a game in general, though I suppose I could say locking a lot of quest progress behind a gacha system is also a cringeworthy mechanic in Xenoblade 2. (The “Not Like Us” reference is specifically to the lyric “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A Minor” specifically referring to the highly creepy relationship between Torah and Poppi.)
Current Question of the Week: I can forgive a game having one bad mechanic if the rest is good: Earthbound is my favorite RPG of all time and its inventory system is straight out of the original Dragon Quest.
And if Chris is still looking into ROM hacks: Unbound is a good example of a “total conversion” Pokemon ROM hack, and if you’re looking for a more difficult experience with more variety the hacks from the creator Drayano still hold up a decade and a half after they came out in some cases.