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Post by Feynman on Jan 4, 2018 13:09:28 GMT -5
2008 was one of the last really good years for jRPGs before the genre went into major decline on home consoles. We got Tales of Vesperia, Valkyria Chronicles, Persona 4, and Lost Odyssey that year!
Atlus was still in their boom years at the time as well, and were localizing a crapload of DS games, but I don't remember exactly which ones I played in 2008 specifically.
jRPGs took up most of my time that year!
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Post by GamerL on Jan 4, 2018 16:50:58 GMT -5
2008 would have been about the time my Ace Attorney madness was in full gear...but it'd also be about when I got my first PS3, the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. Ace Attorney was huge around that time. There was a brief window of a few years where "wacky Japanese games" were mainstream, it all started with Katamari Damacy and continued on with stuff like Elite Beat Agents and Ace Attorney obviously. Then it all petered out around 2008/2009 when suddenly everything Japanese was bad and for losers in the eyes of the wider culture, which brings me to.... 2008 was one of the last really good years for jRPGs before the genre went into major decline on home consoles. We got Tales of Vesperia, Valkyria Chronicles, Persona 4, and Lost Odyssey that year! Atlus was still in their boom years at the time as well, and were localizing a crapload of DS games, but I don't remember exactly which ones I played in 2008 specifically. jRPGs took up most of my time that year! 2008 was a weird end of an era for a lot of Japanese gaming stuff, it's the year of the final Iga Castlevania, the year of the final Itagaki game at Team Ninja, the last installment of Fatal Frame for years (which never even came out in the US), the last Advance Wars at all so far and so on. For most of the 00s Japanese stuff was very popular in the US and then all of a sudden that just went away at the end of the decade and the Japanese gaming scene struggled for years trying to imitate western games in a bid to win back attention. Not to sound too hyperbolic, but I think Dark Souls may have single handedly saved Japanese games, it was something no one could be ashamed of saying they were playing, unlike Final Fantasy or whatever and it offered something no western game was at the time, high difficulty, it made it ok for Japanese devs to do their own thing again and not palely imitate the west.
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Post by backgroundnoise on Jan 4, 2018 18:19:02 GMT -5
GamerL : While Dark Souls was popular and influential enough to spawn its own set of imitators, "saving Japanese games" is a bit much. Looking at various sales data (mostly VGChartz and sales data released by the NPD group; yes it's not exactly accurate, but it's the best I could find) DS was the 6th best selling game in October ( not the entire year, though). The VGChartz list for 2011 in the US (for games released in that year, at least, which are highlighted in yellow) sort of matches up with the news story on the NPD report, aside from Pokemon Black selling about 4 million copies that year.
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Post by Snake on Jan 4, 2018 18:33:58 GMT -5
Circa 2007 ~ 2008?
Had to be GrimGrimoire and Odin Sphere. Hokuto no Ken by Arc System Works on PS2. Dragon Quest 8.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.
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Post by GamerL on Jan 4, 2018 18:42:35 GMT -5
GamerL : While Dark Souls was popular and influential enough to spawn its own set of imitators, "saving Japanese games" is a bit much. Looking at various sales data (mostly VGChartz and sales data released by the NPD group; yes it's not exactly accurate, but it's the best I could find) DS was the 6th best selling game in October ( not the entire year, though). The VGChartz list for 2011 in the US (for games released in that year, at least, which are highlighted in yellow) sort of matches up with the news story on the NPD report, aside from Pokemon Black selling about 4 million copies that year. I meant Dark Souls as a series, not just the first entry because yeah, the original Dark Souls was a cult classic at first, much like Demon's Souls before it, but it's popularity grew and with the release of Dark Souls 2, Bloodbourne, Dark Souls 3, hell yeah I'd say that saved Japanese gaming, Bloodbourne alone in 2015 got ten times more attention than Sony's western developed new big "AAA" game The Order: 1886 which came out a few months prior in the same year.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2018 18:56:22 GMT -5
Are we talking January of 2008, or just 2008 in general? No earthly clue what I would have been playing in January, but I can clearly remember buying a PS2 hard drive in March and going through both of the Resident Evil: Outbreak games. Persona 3: FES was in April, and despite my best efforts, I failed again to max out all Social Links.
There was some kind of random ass tax refund around May of that year, which lead to me finally buying an HDTV, the one that died only a couple of months ago. MGS4 was right around the corner in June, but I was anxious to test out the new tv, so I bought a 360 Elite in May. Some of the first few games I got for that were Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed, which oddly enough were both entertaining for their time, but became rather dated in only a year or two.
I can still remember the day MGS4 came out. I had worked that night, getting out at around 4 AM. I ran back home, picked up my wife, and we went to Walmart to see if the new PS3 bundles were on the shelves yet. We got the first one. Apparently no one else in the region was as excited as I was, or maybe they just knew how that particular game would turn out. God, installing that game was a nightmare. At least Act 4 was fun.
After that? Hmm. I know GTAIV was in there at some point over the summer. A friend I'd known since grade school had recently gotten into Rainbow Six Vegas 2, as well, so I got both of those games and had a lot of fun with them. Things get kind of hazy around the fall/winter area, but I do know that I didn't end up getting Valkyria Chronicles until the following February. Dead Space and Mirror's Edge both launched that fall as well, but I didn't pick those up until a year later.
All in all, a year like any other. Certainly nowhere near as gigantic as 2017.
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Post by toei on Jan 4, 2018 19:08:16 GMT -5
I was still in my quest to catch up on all the RPGs I couldn't play as a kid, either because I couldn't afford them or because they were recent-ish fan translations. Mostly 16-bit stuff. I keep a list of games I finish at home, I'll have to take a look to see what games in particular, but I think this was the year where I finished the most.
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Post by GamerL on Jan 4, 2018 19:34:07 GMT -5
Are we talking January of 2008, or just 2008 in general? No earthly clue what I would have been playing in January, but I can clearly remember buying a PS2 hard drive in March and going through both of the Resident Evil: Outbreak games. Persona 3: FES was in April, and despite my best efforts, I failed again to max out all Social Links. There was some kind of random ass tax refund around May of that year, which lead to me finally buying an HDTV, the one that died only a couple of months ago. MGS4 was right around the corner in June, but I was anxious to test out the new tv, so I bought a 360 Elite in May. Some of the first few games I got for that were Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed, which oddly enough were both entertaining for their time, but became rather dated in only a year or two. I can still remember the day MGS4 came out. I had worked that night, getting out at around 4 AM. I ran back home, picked up my wife, and we went to Walmart to see if the new PS3 bundles were on the shelves yet. We got the first one. Apparently no one else in the region was as excited as I was, or maybe they just knew how that particular game would turn out. God, installing that game was a nightmare. At least Act 4 was fun. After that? Hmm. I know GTAIV was in there at some point over the summer. A friend I'd known since grade school had recently gotten into Rainbow Six Vegas 2, as well, so I got both of those games and had a lot of fun with them. Things get kind of hazy around the fall/winter area, but I do know that I didn't end up getting Valkyria Chronicles until the following February. Dead Space and Mirror's Edge both launched that fall as well, but I didn't pick those up until a year later. All in all, a year like any other. Certainly nowhere near as gigantic as 2017. I started the thread thinking more along the lines of month by month, but if you can't remember that specifically just talking about the whole year is fine. As for some of the titles you mention, I was hyped as hell for MGS4, that 3 year wait from it it was first shown at TGS 2005 felt like an eternity, for past titles there was a 3 year period between them, but they weren't shown until a little over a year before they came out, so that 3 year gap between when the first trailer dropped and the the almost 4 year gap from Snake Eater just felt like forever to teenage me, funny how 2008 is now a full decade ago and doesn't feel like very long ago to me at all, your perception of time sure changes a lot when you enter your 20s. As for the game I really enjoyed my first playthrough, unfortunately it's one of those games that as soon as you finish it and start to think about it you go "huh?" and the whole thing deflates like a souffle, it's an ok game, but it feels very compromised, Kojima finally giving the fans "what they want" rather than what he wants to do and it's consequently the least interesting of the mainline entries, it's got some really great nostalgia though, it was cool to see the original MGS1 cast return and even revisit Shadow Moses, that was without a doubt a great moment. GTAIV came out in May I believe and it was a day one purchase, unfortunately I was disappointed in it albeit for shallow reasons, but I got it on 360 and the game was butt ugly, I remember as soon as I stepped out on the streets of Liberty City during the day time my very first thought was "what is up with those shadows?" and I just never got over the fact that it looked nothing like what the screenshots and trailers led you to believe, this was technically also true for the past entries, but it was a lot more noticeable when playing the game on an HDTV and also expecting a "next gen" Grand Theft Auto to actually have good graphics, instead it was a blurry mess.
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Post by nerdybat on Jan 4, 2018 19:44:16 GMT -5
It's pretty much when I got my first portable console ever (a modded PSP Slim), so a lot of both cool PSP exclusives and various GBA games were discovered during that time. It was a lot of fun .u.
As for big AAA releases, I don't really remember, it was the time where all the western AAA releases felt kinda similar. Burnout Paradise and Prototype are the two I've spent most of my time on. A lot of indie releases. Really, going back to that era, despite having a powerful PC to play all the latest vidcons, it's the old and indie stuff I've spent most of my time on, mainly due to how fresh it felt to play something as unique as Aquaria and Braid. That haven't really changed over time, with me still being more interested in smaller and more ambitious new releases (though titles like Nier Automata and new DOOM motivated me to try and gather some cash on a new rig)
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2018 19:49:23 GMT -5
Hmm, I don't really remember having any issues with the way GTAIV looked. Honestly was really impressed with the story. So much so that I went to bed one night after reaching the final mission, only to get back up at around 5 in the morning because I just had to finish it right then and there.
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Post by nerdybat on Jan 4, 2018 19:52:29 GMT -5
Hmm, I don't really remember having any issues with the way GTAIV looked. Honestly was really impressed with the story. So much so that I went to bed one night after reaching the final mission, only to get back up at around 5 in the morning because I just had to finish it right then and there. The PC port was horrible though, as far as I remember - especially the infamous memory leak that made the game slower the longer you play, up to becoming practically unplayable until you restart the thing. It's more than playable on modern PCs, but back in a day, it was an optimization catastrophe.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2018 20:00:02 GMT -5
Ouch. Yeah, that sounds like it would have soured opinions back then.
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Post by Serah on Jan 4, 2018 20:20:57 GMT -5
I barely played games at all from late 2007-2011 when I got back into PC gaming but I remember having a lot of fun on SMB Brawl at my friend's house and I think I might have played Assassin's Creed and GTA IV that year maybe? My younger brother had gotten a PS3 but I didn't really use it much.
I think that was also the year I played Crisis Core. I still used my PSP a lot, albeit, mostly as an MP3 player.
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Post by GamerL on Jan 4, 2018 20:30:43 GMT -5
Hmm, I don't really remember having any issues with the way GTAIV looked. Honestly was really impressed with the story. So much so that I went to bed one night after reaching the final mission, only to get back up at around 5 in the morning because I just had to finish it right then and there. It may have been more issues on my front than I realized at the time, for starters it was only a 720p HDtv which really isn't that much of a step up from the CRT I was gaming on prior, then I also never calibrated any of the settings, didn't even know HDtvs had video settings then, so the brightness was probably way too high which made the game look more washed out than it probably really was. I would love the revisit the game on PC, but obviously there's a million other things, including GTAV, that are a higher priority, so who knows if I'll ever find the time. Of course that wasn't the only issue, stuff like the constant phone calls and just the fact that it was generally more toned down and "realistic" made it less fun, it was hard to go heavy on the mayhem when Niko just wasn't the kind of character to really do that (GTAV brilliantly solved that with Trevor, who is supposed to be crazy and thus you can literally anything you want when playing as him and it never "breaks character"), it was also lame to go back to only a single city with no wilderness after San Andreas (I read that originally the game would have been set in "Liberty State" as opposed to simply Liberty City, complete with forests and mountains, too bad that didn't pan out) I had more fun with Saints Row 2 even though that wasn't anything to write home about in the looks department either.
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Post by toei on Jan 5, 2018 10:46:30 GMT -5
So looking at my list, 2008 was indeed a big year. My favorite game that year was Mother 3; though I used to dislike it when RPGs revolved around a single town (I prefer adventuring throughout a large world, etc.), Mother 3 really pulled it with the theme of how the town rapidly changes with the introduction of modern inventions and, especially, the big reveal later on.
Second was Snatcher. I do not believe this game is overrated at all. I was completely absorbed by the atmosphere and story and didn't even mind the shooting sections (they're just short gallery shooter sequences, what's so wrong about that?)
Also memorable was Exile, with its idiosyncratic take on history, tight, fast-paced blend of RPG and side-scroller, and Yuzo Koshiro-remixed soundtrack.
I got completely into Metal Max Returns, which blends post-apocalypse, westerns and tank battles and manages to be partly non-linear without losing the more appealing aspects of classic Japanese RPGs, contrary to the more (in)famous SaGa games. I'm a big fan of side-quests if there's actually some story to them (ie not that MMO-style Go Kill 10 Slimes shit), so hunting the wanted criminals for bounties was a joy to me.
Other highlights include Wozz, Arc the Lad 3 (which I prefer to the second on account of a more interesting world, structure, and less repetitive battles), the obscure semi-comedic RPG Magna Braban (didn't KingMike work on the fan translation, actually?) and Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes on the Turbo CD, which impressed me with its emphasis on story at a time where the standard formula was 1 town 1 dungeon (there's like 15 towns for 4-5 dungeons at most). Also, first morally ambiguous final boss I know of in a video game (ie it has motivations beyond "evil").
The only contemporary game I played that year was Blue Dragon, which had an odd way of alternating between good and bad every ten hours or so. Even the boss theme song eventually lost its humor.
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