#7

(-1)

Merry Christmas y'all! And we got a very happy game to talk about today!

Jokes aside, and Christmas spirit lacking here lmao, this game is phenomenal. The peak of the multi-choice tv like games I enjoy so much with everything built up and developed so well. The characters are all so fully realized and are among my all time favorites in gaming, especially the main two Clementine & Lee who just have a dynamic for these games. Every emotion, choice, action, etc. is impactful and you'll leave every episode more devasted than the last. It's a bleak but potent zombie tale and one of the best I've seen realized in the video game medium to date

Correct

#9: Super Metroid

#7

YoY: =        My Rating: 9.6/10

Trails in the Sky SC is the absolute peak of the series, one that no other game in it has managed to reach despite several excellent entries having followed it since. Picking up pretty much immediately after the first game, following mostly the same cast of characters with a few nice additions thrown in, SC uses the foundation set up in the first game to push the story to new places and start to reveal the larger world that would soon be explored further. However, even with the scale of later games dwarfing this one, none of them have quite reached the same heights of storytelling and character development as Nihon Falcom did here. 

The writing here is excellent (owing much to the wonderful localization work), and though it's not quite as vast as some of the other games in the series, anyone who wants to experience everything this game has to offer can still expect upwards of 60 hours of game time, almost all of it brilliant. Another element that makes The Legend of Heroes games stand out, are the little stories that happen around the main characters. There are several minor characters in this series whose exploits have spanned through several games in the series, across different sub-series. You can meet characters here that will later appear in the Trails of Cold Steel games for example. It's not something the developer needed to do, but it makes the world feel so much richer and lived in, simply because it's not just the main cast that have lives. People around them travel the world, get married, find jobs, and it's all up to the player to witness these little stories should they choose to do it.

With an excellent score and a great, tactically deep battle system rounding things up, this is simply one of the best games I've ever played. I started playing video games over 30 years ago now, and in that time very few games have had such an impact on me as the first two Trails in the Sky games. This is the best game in a series that is behind only Final Fantasy and Dark Souls in my personal ranking, and I can't wait to find out what the next games in it have in store.

Completely agree with you both. Some of that intense, carefully crafted level design is lost, and not entirely made up for with the various castles and dungeons in Elden Ring. I also felt like the game needed a firmer editor who was willing to say 'no, we can't re-use assets from regions x in region y, it takes away some of the mystique and impact of the open world we've created' or 'we need to change more about these catdog bosses if we're going to duplicate them half a dozen times'.

A lot of difficulty is lost too; there are so many things to go and do that it's easy to become over-leveled (and the game seems to be balanced around quite a low overall completion percentage). That's an advantage in a way, because if you get stuck with a certain boss you can go do half a dozen different things instead and then come back to it later, whereas in Souls games you'd basically either have to keep hitting your head against the wall until you broke through, or go grind areas you've already beaten. Weirdly I kind of prefer the Souls way...

Now I'm doing that thing where I poke holes in my favourite games ^^

#8 - I figure it can't be a Zelda else someone would have guessed it by now. Ori and the Will of the Wisps?

I wouldn't be so sure given how long it took for A Link to the Past to be guessed. But no, it isn't either Zelda or Ori.

Okay, one last hint for #10 and #8. To keep the post a bit more on the compact side I'll post just the new hints, they should be guessable enough on their own, but here's the post with the previous hints just in case.

And I'll also post the hints for #7 and #6, both of which are games with very iconic ambiances imo. Mind you, I made each game's first hint at the start of the event, I grossly overestimated how guessable they would be. So I'll get something easier to help out if they go unguessed, but I'm going to bed now.

8 is Hollow Knight, right? Now I feel really slow for not getting that earlier.

#10 - Is a Pokemon game then. Sounds fairly modern (uses actual instruments) but I don't think it's one of the Switch releases. Sun & Moon/Ultra Sun & Moon?

#6 - Shadow of the Colossus.

Second set of hints, four game left.

#5 Valkyria Chronicles

-Join the militia to ward off an imperial invasion in an alternate reality Europe

#4 

-Perpetuate the cycle or break it

-Your journey begins locked away in an asylum

#3

-For 32 years, the path to earth has been lost

-The Shivans return

#2

-10,000 years after the war that freed humanity

-The main character has spent the previous five years searching for the monster that killed his parents and destroyed his village

#1

-Contains numerous references and allusions to the series' past

-Starts with some of the characters putting on a stage play