Annie D

What's a genre or subgenre of game you feel like you feel like absolutely should be your jam but most entries you've played just don't do it for you?

(for me it's Tycoon games, i fuckin love the sim genre and I adore simcity etc but for some reason I always fall off of the more-focused ones really quickly. I'm not sure why!)

... the truth is it's often incredibly difficult to push past my own ADHD to actually put up with one anymore.

It does not help that of all genres, none seem more determined to make tedium a fundamental part of the gameplay with such religious conviction.

And it's not an East vs. West thing, much as the Gamer™ discourse often tries to paint it as one. Both traditions bring their own sense of tedium to the experience, just often in different ways.

Western ones, in fact, seem to instantly exhaust me more often than Japanese ones these days. Much as I loved what I played of Disco Elysium, I also never finished it, because I just hit too many moments of realizing I was going to have to watch Harry slooooowly trundle across the map for the 5th time that hour, and just went to find something else that wouldn't waste my time.

Honestly, as someone who used to bang on about the evils of "JRPGs" for years, I've come around on them a lot more. No I don't like level grinding much, but newer games don't tend to have much of it that isn't optional. Yes they tend to be full of long unskippable cutscenes and linear narratives with no player agency ... but so do most Western games anymore, except the latter will maybe periodically interrupt me to make some meaningless dialogue choice that has no real impact on the plot except maybe which cutscene plays at the end. Japanese games are just more honest about it, and usually actually has something to say in the process.

Either one though is also going to demand a simply ludicrous time investment that I ... just don't have the patience for anymore. And the number of times that investment hasn't really panned out has started to make the genre at times feel very much like how I feel about the tabletop exercise that inspired it: something long in promise, that rarely lives up to any of it.

Figure it's still helpful to have convenient links to my stuff, so here's a little master post of my writing and FFXIV stuff.

• My tabletop games:
  • The Bedroom Wall Press Collection is a complete digital set of my past published old-school RPGs, including the beloved SF dungeon crawler Hulks and Horrors. PWYW.
  • Battle Carrior Kharon is my latest, a micro RPG/wargame about trans mecha pilots fighting alien gods. $5 or more.
  • If you prefer print, you can get POD copies of Hulks & Horrors and Arcana Rising over on my DriveThruRPG page.
• My writing:
  • Cold Comfort: An irregularly updated romantic fiction series about Anna Verde, post-Endwalker
  • A Chip's Edge: original SF fiction series pilot about furry space pirates
  • And my ao3 profile for everything else
• FFXIV deets:
  • Anna Verde (Primal/Excalibur) - Main, also my fic OC and the star of Cold Comfort.
    • Azem's Rest: Empyreum, W12, Ingleside Room #15. Cafe venue, open Tuesdays at 7PM CST.
    • The Travel Office: Shirogane, Ward 3, Plot 43, Room #33
    • Catswood Cottage: Empyreum, W12 P14
  • Miri Tal (Crystal/Malboro) - Lala alt, pirate machinist
  • K'aliya Tisiphone (Crystal/Malboro) - Voidsent alt, Anna's former RPR avatar, set loose in an alternate timeline
• Code stuff and misc:
  • Github
  • Glitch
  • redpanda.fun

And finally if you like the stuff I do and wanna send along a tip or anything, I have a Ko-Fi, and it even supports Stripe so neither of us have to deal with Paypal.

The NES port of Exodus is ... rather unloved, but in its day I was blown away by it. The sheer vastness of the game world and comparative freedom of exploration was like nothing I'd played, certainly more than any console RPG would offer until again FCI brought another Ultima to console in the form of the also under-appreciated port of The False Prophet.

It's ugly and ropey and definitely hacked up compared to the PC original, but I didn't have a PC back then that could even play that, and I had even less access to games to even try to run on it. We were poor, and PCs were for word processing, games weren't really a serious consideration. My best machine until well after high school was a 286 with a Hercules card. Gaming options were limited mostly to random shareware titles a friend had laying around on old disks from when his dad ran a BBS.

But it was an early hint that informed my taste for decades to come, that games could be bigger, freer, than what most consoles were offering at the time. And I'll love it for that forever. It's also an interesting relic considering how polarized the definition of "RPG" became, given it's a Western game ported by a Japanese developer and then retranslated for Western console release.

It really goes to show that dichotomy for the falsehood it always was and should've stayed.

Plus the Fuzzies were cute.

a decade of white guys claiming that "JRPGs never innovate" and meanwhile BG3 has like the exact same interface problems as every WRPG of the last goddamn 30 years because motherfuckers are still just making the same damn engines over and over again