#scarmonde

CRYSTAL PROJECT

Essentially an open world Final Fantasy 5, with extremely well crafted classes and boss fights. It's very light on story (as most of these games tend to be), but has incredible quality of life features, such as changing what classes you leveled for stat buffs, the ability to change classes basically on a whim, as well as CLEARLY EXPLAINED MECHANICS (it explains and shows how the emnity system works), which a lot of rpgs don't exactly... excel at. also it is ridiculously mod friendly, and has a thriving modding community, who are all very nice folks on their discord.

SCARMONDE

Jumping back a few years for inspiration, scarmonde is a similarly well-crafted and (relatively) simplistic rpg taking notes from the original Final Fantasy. You choose your four adventurers from 14 classes, developing their skills, eventually giving them subclasses which are borrowed from the previous 14, and making your way to the bottom of Scarmonde. I really enjoyed my time with the game but I do think it's emphasis on older mechanics (random encounters and a leveling system that can feel kind of arbitrary) tested my patience a little bit, but genuinely for the price it's a really solid game that hooked me for the time I played it. Pretty sure it's got an update for some postgame recently as well.

LABYRINTH OF TOUHOU 2

This was the game got me into Touhou as a franchise believe it or not lol. Genuinely, I fucking adore this game and what it has done for me personally, and there is a lot to love about how fun it is to teambuild with all of these characters, and how creative some of their skills tend to be, as well as the KINDS of team builds that are really supported by skills. Like a debuff focused team that tries to stack as many as possible, or even just one like fear, or forgoing debuffs entirely just to max out on buffs and nuke enemies from orbit with a giant rock courtesy of the onis. Almost no character feels like they're completely without a niche, and I really respect it considering the game is FUCKING OLD.

It came out in like 2012, and got some dlc in 2014. It was remarkable for it's time, however I cannot in good consience recommend the game for it's own merits UNLESS you've played and love the Etrian Odyssey formula, because that's mostly what it borrows from. There is a bit of a grind associated with it, and there are some fights that I will curse until my dying breath they were so shit to beat. Most of the time it did feel like a good puzzle but even then, the dungeon crawling could and usually was mind-numbing, and the puzzles especially in the midgame just kinda sucked. And that's not to mention how much of a letdown the postgame DLC was: it's literally just number bloat the game. SO, instead of posting THAT game's steam page, I will instead post THE THREEQUEL THAT'S CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOO

To not go into too much detail, essentially take everything negative I had to say and ever will say about 2, and remove it from the equation. Genuinely the game I am most excited for this year, bar none.