PixlBit

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I guess the closest thing I ever had to a gaming spirit animal was Squall from FF8. I was a lot like him when I was a teenager, though the game came out when I was 21. I was a lone wolf who didn't really want to be a lone wolf, like Squall, I had extremely poor social skills like Squall, and I was sometimes a belligerent jerk like Squall. Squall even looked a bit like me. Well, I didn't have the face scar and I didn't wear a leather jacket with a fur collar, but you get the idea.

Pak Watch:

I'm actually going to second Tyrone's opinion on GoW. The gameplay was okay, but Kratos was thoroughly unlikeable as a character. I know he's an antihero of sorts, but I disliked his design and characterization, which came off to me as Extreme Angry Dudebro Asshole, very strongly to where it's kind of off-putting to the series as a whole. For that kind of game I much prefer the Bayonetta series.  Shame, too, I was into Greek mythology when I was an adolescent and still have a fondness for Greek mythology, and I thought it was cool that they got Kevin Sorbo (TV Hercules) to do Hercules in GoW III. The game is high-quality, I just didn't enjoy it.

Oh, and I really liked the Project A-Ko soundtrack in the podcast. Project A-Ko was one of my first anime movies (along with Akira and Ninja Scroll), and as such, I still have a fondness for it and will watch it once in awhile. I used to have a DVD collection of all four of the Project A-Ko movies.

I have the original Tokyo Xanadu for Vita. Not a spectacular game, but solid.

I haven't picked up Ni no Kuni 2 yet, but I will on payday. I loved the first game, combat and all. This game looks incredible.

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This was a tougher category than I thought it would be. A lot of my favorite games did get sequels. Until last year, my top pick for this category would have been Ni no Kuni, as an example. A lot of the games I would pick would be games that I felt never got a "proper" sequel.

1. Rogue Galaxy

This would probably be my favorite one-off game I can think of, and it's from the same company that made Ni no Kuni, no less. It's a shame this game never took off. As a space-faring RPG, I honestly enjoyed this game a lot more than Mass Effect.

2. Okami

This is one of those games that I felt never got a "proper" sequel. The DS follow-up didn't do justice to the scope and grandeur of the PS2 game, which sits in my top 20 list of all time favorite games and is my favorite Zelda-style game that isn't a Zelda game. Given that Okami didn't sell well, we were probably lucky to even get a DS sequel, but this situation illustrated a lot of the frustration I felt with the late 2000s in gaming. A lot of sequels to great console games ended up on DS and PSP instead of consoles due to economic issues, and were hamstrung by the constraints of those platforms, not only in graphics, but in terms of gameplay structure. Hopefully the Switch will mean the end of stripped down console-to-handheld sequels.

3. Eternal Sonata

This was a charming little RPG for the 360 and PS3 (I owned the PS3 version) that was based very loosely on the life of Frederic Chopin. It would have been interesting to explore this theme in other games.

Pak Watch:

I skipped MGS2 on its first go-round on the PS2. My sights were set on games like Final Fantasy X and Devil May Cry. I did play it some as part of the MGS HD Collection on PS3, but since I wasn't that invested in the series and had already read a few spoilers, the plot twists just weren't as shocking to me as they would have been if I had been a fan back in 2001. I never finished it.

Breath of the Wild is an awesome game. I didn't think that a Zelda game would ever impress me the way that the original, ALttP, Ocarina of Time, and TP did. Nintendo said, "Hold my beer..."

I always thought there were three types of 80s vertical shoot 'em ups: the Space Invaders type (slow marching aliens with shields and bombs), the Galaxian/Galaga type (diving aliens), and the Centipede type (the insects, mushrooms, and the ability to move through the bottom area of the screen). I played a lot of clones back in the day as well as the actual games.

I remember when the bosses in Ghosts 'n' Goblins on the NES were named Satan and Lucifer. Even Nintendo Power called them that. I guess that was before Nintendo really started cracking down on religious/demonic imagery.

I actually played this, in the 80s, on my Atari 130XE computer. I played the arcade version on Midway Arcade Treasures on PS1.

I got almost all the way through Vesperia before my 360 decided it couldn't take life anymore. :( I really liked it, it was one of the best looking games in the series and Troy Baker was great as Yuri. My favorite game in the series is still Symphonia. I do have Berseria but I got sidetracked on that one.

As far as losing progress, that happened to me the first time I played Final Fantasy VI on SNES. It was in the Cultists' Tower. It takes a really long time to get through unless you have the Moogle Charm (I didn't), you can only use magic and half the time you're bouncing spells off of your party members because the enemies have Reflect on them, so the battles are really slow, and at the top, you have to fight a boss that, when you kill him, he blows your party away with an Ultima spell. You're supposed to use Life 3 or drain away all of his MP (I did neither.) It took me an hour to get to the top, 45 minutes to beat the boss... and I died. I was really mad. The strategy guide I was using didn't warn me about the Ultima spell for whatever reason. And there are no save points in that dungeon, either. So that was two hours gone. If Samuel L. Jackson were there, he would have washed my mouth out with soap.

Victor Ireland, of Working Designs and Gaijinworks, put it best: "Saving your game is your best, and only, friend."

I didn't necessarily hate it, but I bought Final Fantasy Tactics when it was on sale at Target in 1998. I had just finished Final Fantasy VII and wanted another RPG to play. So I picked up this one. At first I found its gameplay very confusing and strenuous. It was my first real experience with SRPGs. I missed out on earlier games like Ogre Battle and Shining Force. And it was easy to get killed by one mistake. So I rage quit it for about 3 days then tried it again. This time, I got the hang of the game's mechanics and I was hooked. I almost rage quit for good when I got into an unwinnable situation with Wiegraf at the end of Chapter 3 and had to start all over, since you couldn't backtrack and I had saved my game. I learned to keep two save files going especially before going into boss battles. But I played it through all the way to the end.

Not only did FF Tactics go on to be one of my favorite games of all time, it was my gateway drug for SRPGs. Since then, I've played Disgaea, Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, FF Tactics Advance, and then I played my two favorite games in the genre, Sakura Wars, and Valkyria Chronicles, which was my favorite 7th generation game and one of my top 5 games of all time. But FF Tactics is where it started for me with SRPGs, and it is still one of the best out there.

Pak Watch: I played a little bit of Dishonored, but it got buried under other games. So I don't have much here.