I honestly don’t get it. I’ve been playing the same game for about three months of real time now and clocked in about 120 hours. I didn’t play anything else and and it’s consuming most of the time I have to myself. The game is Witcher 3.

Now, that means every 1000 hours would take me 25 months or just over two years of playing a game exclusively. Probably more since my data above includes my Christmas vacation, which was quite lengthy. No single game is good enough to take such a big place in my life. I could play so many shorter better games.

No, I don’t think so. They are just different and people don’t like change. For context, I’m a massive JRPG fan and I’ve played: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 and 15. And of course tons of spin-offs. Planning on playing 7, 8 and 13 - don’t care for MMOs and 16.

Out of these, I love of course the obvious early ones: 4 and 6.

However, 10 is my favorite overall. It has the most solid gameplay (fuck ATB tbh) and a great story, even though we sideline Sin way too much for Seymore who I don’t care for. It’s biggest problem are the minigames though, I hate Blitzball and especially the Cloister of Trials.

9 could be better, but the steam version crashes so much I didn’t get to finish it.

Now, after 10 we got a lot more experimental:

12 was fun but had massive problems. It’s biggest was the autobattle mechanic alongside the speed up in modern releases. You basically don’t play the game and you don’t even strategize. It’s always faster to sprint a few minutes around the map and get back with more levels which ultimately killed any interest I had in the battle system. But I dislike programmable party members in every game, so your milage may vary. The world building on the other hand was awesome.

15 was a great game. I think it’s reception isn’t wrong necessarily because of how much it differs from trailers and such. However, I played it years after release and without having seen a single trailer. I had a blast throughout. The writting is among FF’s best, not because it’s such a great story, but because the relationships between the main party are so strong. I even liked the battle system - it’s different and has a lot of potential, I think. It’s biggest failure is that you need to watch a series, a movie and read lots of other material to grasp the story - a lot of it isn’t in the game.

16, I can’t say much about. I’m honestly not very interested in basic medieval fantasy settings, they’ve stripped out the RPGs mechanics and quite frankly I just don’t own a system I could play it on. Maybe I’d like it after all, I don’t know.

Assuming that’s not some default config I just don’t know, that’s actually a rather competently built config for i3 or similar. If he did that hinself he should manage.

My vote goes to Dragon Quest. Early gaming was dominated by JRPGs like DQ, Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. Pretty much every modern game has RPG elements. While there are earlier RPGs, DQ popularized them and invented the JRPG.

Of course, literally speaking, the first game ever is the most influential - therefore Tennis for Two.

I don’t think I can stomach the plain YuGiOh simulators from back then. It’s quite boring, especially after having played the modern game. I do think it’s worth getting at a dicount for the weirder ones though.

However, I’d buy a collection of all their weird 3D games in heartbeat. Forgotten Memories, Kingdom of Illusion, Duelists of the Roses and so on.

I don’t think the mainline games will change anytime soon, just like they didn’t adopt the battle styles of the last Legends game.

Like, don’t get me wrong, I think the idea they are going for is good. But I also think it does look really clunky and would kill the PvP scene.

Personally, I’d go for a turn based and position based approach like Like a Dragon or Dragon Quest are experimenting with.

So admittedly, I’m not far into the game and only played a single Ciri segment thus far as well as read a few in-game books. (Please don’t spoil me.)

My main point is that she’s more talkative with more personality shining through. Geralt usually answers in a short straight forward fashion and does not seem to care either way what happens to most things. Ciri on the other hand showed a clear alignment.

There’s also more innate conflict about her character with her being the daughter of the Nilfguardian king as well as the Elder Blood thing (I’ve only read the book of the same title). While someone already spoiled me that she gets kinda OP because of the later, I think there are more options for interesting power progression with her. I’ve read all skills Geralt can learn and I’m quite sure I’ll be playing in a similar way towards the end of the game as I do now, just popping more potions. In addition, the only innate conflict with Geralt so far (and from what I remember playing WItcher 2) is whether to romance Triss or Yennefer (and I’ve got no horse in that race, neither of them is my type).

Lastly, while it wasn’t a plot point in Witcher 3 yet, Geralt does lose a lot of points for being a (former?) amnesiac.

My stance could change, but that’s my current view about 15h in. Currently doing the Keira questline with the ghost lamp.

That’s funny. I’ve just started Witcher 3 some time ago and one of my early thoughts was “Damn, Ciri seems much more interesting. Why don’t I play as her more?”