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I had a good feeling! Celebrating 40 Years and 108 JRPGs of Destiny

Peklo said:
don't really care to hear about why someone didn't like an RPG in a thread about liking RPGs.
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I don't agree with this, criticism is just as important as praise. Understanding why someone was frustrated by or disliked a game is useful and usually fascinating. In many cases what someone thinks is a negative about a game is someone else's positive and that discussion is healthy.

Anyway, I'm a giant baby about horror and so will never play Parasite Eve, or most games with a lot of horror/gore, but I've read the plot and watched a few scenes and it has always struck me as unique and cool.
 
As a horror fan who has never played Parasite Eve, I would like it to be more readily available.

Its only on PS1? Did it get a PS3 PS1 port? Even if its on PS3; its essentially unavailable.
 
Violentvixen said:
I don't agree with this, criticism is just as important as praise. Understanding why someone was frustrated by or disliked a game is useful and usually fascinating. In many cases what someone thinks is a negative about a game is someone else's positive and that discussion is healthy.
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In other contexts, sure, and in any other thread that'd be the baseline. These popularity votes are by nature a celebration of the subjects, however. I have been constant and probably annoying to some in my repeated stressing of this, but it's informed by precedent, in how this forum in the past--and the previous iteration of this vote a decade ago--has had a real problem of negativity and naysaying seeping into these events, mostly by coaxing "debates" about the merits of this or that. The last turn at this thread ended up particularly unreadable and toxic because of it. Whether because of that precedent or common courtesy, lots of these threads include a "don't crap on other people's submissions" guideline which I prefer to follow even if not directly stated, and by definition that means every possible nomination there is. Criticism through a positive lens is a completely achievable goal, and if an indifferent shrug or worse is all I can muster, I'm likely to not say anything.

Sorry for the possible derailment. I'll ease up if I'm mistaken about the thread's general spirit.
 
Parasite Eve eventually got to a point in its combat where I just couldn't get good enough to finish it without GameShark but the aesthetics were super cool throughout. Always loved this theme:

 
My own stance: this is absolutely a thread for celebrating things people liked, but it's also the only place anyone's discussing any of these things anymore, and as someone who experienced Parasite Eve only in the form of its demo disc (only 90s kids will remember), I'm interested in hearing both sides. It should be possible to discuss its faults without yucking anyone's yum. The ostensible alternative is to create a sister thread just for saying bad things, and I don't think anyone is really looking for that.
 
The way I usually couch these things is an acknowledgement that, while I might not have cared for a game, I can see the inherent quality in them. Or, "the game just wasn't for me". I think that can be valuable, too - there's so many objective and subjective variables in games that hearing what people didn't like can be useful, as long as it's constructive in nature.

But yes, I've tried to keep my own thoughts towards the positive side of the ledger in this thread. We'll see if that holds up as the entries are revealed... :ROFLMAO:
 
I enjoyed the Resident Evil-esque tone of Parasite Eve but I remember geting stuck at the end of the game on a boss where I had basically run out of ammo and there was no way to get more that I could see. Spending a few hours with a game and then just having no recourse felt pretty terrible. Game was fun up to that point, though. I'd likely bite on a modern remake.
 
Sadly said remake is unlikely to come, the og Parasite Eve games were based off some novel Square Enix lost the rights to, apparently.

And, well, concerning how 3rd Birthday turned out, I wouldn't trust them to not fuck up a remake.
 
Mogri said:
... I'm interested in hearing both sides. It should be possible to discuss its faults without yucking anyone's yum. The ostensible alternative obvious in hindsight solution is to create a sister thread for that discussion just for saying bad things, and I don't think anyone is really looking for that.
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Can we cosign on these amendments?
 
So are you suggesting we don't discuss the games in this thread? Because otherwise, you're saying that you can say good things here and anything there, and anyone should be able to guess how that works out.
 
It works out fine because what's notionally being given its own space is longer discussion rather than "just saying bad things"?
 
I may be a little confused, but it seemed to me that the comment that prompted this sidebar was referring to the (unlikely to appear in this list) sequel in a negative light because it changed things up from the original, positively discussed, game which made the list. Which, to me, is removed enough to not be verboten even if we wanted to have a soft rule against speaking ill of the listed games.

I don't necessarily support such a ban anyway, mostly because I find this forum polite and respectful even in the harshest disagreements compared to [gestures around wildly], but it's also not my thread and I don't want anyone at all feeling unwelcome for any reason.
 
Anyway, my experience with Parasite Eve is buying it and Brave Fencer Musashi in a double-pack at Sam's Club, being too busy to play either for the rest of the school year, then my roommate stealing both when they moved out. Such was college.
 
I never played Parasite Eve, but I support using this thread for trash-talking the games that come up in the list.
 
I can see both takes. On the one hand, it does feel a bit eye-rolly to trash-talk a game in a thread that is ostensibly about celebrating them. On the other hand, sometimes the warts are the most memorable thing about something, so negativity is not necessarily mutually exclusive to celebration. Example would be Final Fantasy 16, which I enjoyed despite its shortcomings (and there are many). Still, I'm not sure that outright shit-talk should be verboten here but I'm pretty sure an entirely different thread isn't the answer either.

And since I've added nothing to this conversation, I will go finish making dinner.
 
I think there's a balance that can be struck. These threads are for celebrating, sure, but they're also about memories, and not all memories are good. I think it's okay to remember a game's flaws constructively if they are integral to your memories of it in this thread as long as you're not just dumping a lot of negativity.

And yeah, the first JRPG countdown was very negative but a lot of that was facilitated and encouraged by the hosts, one of which got banned a year later for being a sex pest. I think we're at a point now though where if someone is being too harsh they'll get called out.
 
Honestly I'm kind of reeling from the idea of behaving differently in different threads?! That's wild to me.

But yeah, this all started because multiple people didn't like a sequel, not the game being discussed, and I think saying you didn't like a sequel is just fine, especially when comparing to the game that was nominated. Good stuff to point out.
 
I get why Peklo is touchy about this since there was a period where people were being outright nasty about entries in the top 50.

But things have changed, and I think we can discuss and eventually arrive at some kind of consensus about what qualifies as too negative.
 
If Chrono Trigger doesn't take the top spot, you will all be receiving a sternly-worded letter. 🤪
 
Clearly, Tecmo Secret of the Stars will have received its long-overdue critical reappraisal amongst the intelligentsia of this here forum.
 
Long ago a friend of mine compared me to Kunihiko Maeda from the Parasite Eve series. I can't remember when he made that comparison but as I understand it now that becomes far less flattering / more insulting as the series progresses...

RT-55J said:
Clearly, Tecmo Secret of the Stars will have received its long-overdue critical reappraisal amongst the intelligentsia of this here forum.
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If there's any game that can dethrone Chrono Trigger then the game that gave us BADMAN* must be it.

*No, not that one. The other one.
 
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WisteriaHysteria said:
If I became a multimillionaire overnight and could just quit my job forever, I would make indie games as a hobby, and an RPG with PE-style combat is what I'd do.
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Peklo said:
It's a budding subgenre these days--I can think of at least four Parasite Eve clones off the top of my head. Parasite Mutant above is one, yes
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I do wonder if the success of Fallout has made more people interested in battle systems like that.
 
RT-55J said:
Clearly, Tecmo Secret of the Stars will have received its long-overdue critical reappraisal amongst the intelligentsia of this here forum.
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I think that SotS is legit great, and I voted for it here, unironically, and I think that drive-by shitting like this is a great example of why I agree with basically everything Peklo has already said on the subject up-thread. I was trying, trying so hard to just shut up and not weigh in and hope that this thread derail would quietly disappear, but ya'll just wouldn't let it die and then someone had to go and say my activation phrase. This is exactly the kind of shit that happened in the prior thread that immediately had it opening with arguing and a sour taste and the aforementioned toxicity (the initial whipping boy in that case being Quest 64). All games are good, and that game that you think is so obviously fucking terrible that no one could possibly like is someone else's childhood favourite. (And that someone is probably me.) In this case, I decided to do a blind Let's Play of SotS on this very forum a few years ago, having heard its reputation, and was surprised and delighted to discover a fun, quirky, imaginative game that history is unkind to largely because it had a poor localization and didn't look very nice compared to its contemporaries.

Ya'll want a space to shit on stuff? May I suggest literally anywhere else on the internet? You'll be welcomed there. You want to start a new thread to shit on stuff? How about not, because I don't want to see it there either. Can ya'll really not just keep it in your pants and not be shitty about stuff?

I will note, however, that I am not asking for a space free of criticism. I've criticized several games in this thread already! But before I do, I first ask myself if I have anything useful or insightful to say (there are already games in this list that I didn't care for and just chose to remain silent about, and one that I expect to rank highly later that I absolutely loathe and will be biting my lip on so hard that it will draw blood), and when I do so, I endeavour to also call out what I liked about a game, or what made it unique, and if that's not immediately obvious to me, I challenge myself to examine that further. Hell, there was one game up-thread (Triangle Strategy) that I started talking about with the intention of explaining why I didn't like it and then I started to examine the things that were cool and unique about it and by the time I finished writing I ended up talking myself into realizing that it actually slapped. "I didn't like this game" isn't criticism, it's just yucking someone's yum.

This thread, and its direct predecessor, attracted more attention than these top lists typically do, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the discourse is more toxic for it. Among those of us who frequent this little voting corner of the forum, Peklo is 100% right: these threads are intended to be a celebration, and negativity is at the very least implicitly discouraged and sometimes explicitly (outside of perhaps some razzing from consenting parties). I sure would like if we could maintain that here, but even if we can't, I'd love it even more if we stopped sucking all of the air out of the room to talk about it. (Yes, I know this makes me the person replying to a company-wide e-mail with a "PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO THIS EMAIL" reply-all.)

At this point, I dearly wish that I had anything to say about Parasite Eve so I could put my money where my mouth is, but alas, I've never played it! "I watched the opening cutscenes and I think I saw my cousin fight a cool dinosaur skeleton once" is probably not worth a post! As someone who likes classic Resident Evil games (I literally watched a friend stream some Biohazard in the original Japanese just last week!) and quirky RPGs, though, I have little doubt that I'd have a good time with it.
 
JBear said:
In this case, I decided to do a blind Let's Play of SotS on this very forum a few years ago, having heard its reputation, and was surprised and delighted to discover a fun, quirky, imaginative game that history is unkind to largely because it had a poor localization and didn't look very nice compared to its contemporaries.
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Wait really? Dang.

After namedropping the game, I was half-tempted to give it a spin to see if there was anything to it besides the memes and surface-level criticism, but now you actually have me interested (!!).

Sorry if my post came off as harsher than I meant it to be.
 
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