Are your tastes different from the majority of your area?

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I live in an area where video games are considered by most to be a casual past time. Because of this, most people who play video games only play ones that cater to the general and "bro" crowds.
The former generally stick to the latest Super Mario titles or just play the older games while the "bros" only care about the latest Call of Duty or FPS games as well as sports games that become dated as soon as they are a year old and clog up the shelves of the few game stores around here. Sometimes they'll play Mortal Kombat since they care more about gore and shock value in games instead of a game's story and characters or if they do care about the characters, it's mainly the gimmicky guest characters.

My tastes lean towards JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Disgaea as well as fighting games like Street Fighter and Guilty Gear. I also enjoy the Mega Man X series and beat 'em up arcade games. I can hardly ever talk to anyone about video games because of this because the interests on both sides don't synch up very well. I either get "Oh, sometimes I'll play on my old Nintendo 64." or "Huh? Guilty Gear? What's that?" or "Dude, Call of Duty f*****g rocks! Everything else is gay!" and it's gotten to where I hardly try anymore.

Is it just me or am I not alone?

You are not alone! My tastes are also different from many people around me. I also play Final Fantasy(my brother loves the series, I actually didn't play it but one year he said that it's lonely playing a game by yourself so I played a Final Fantasy game and actually enjoyed it. FFXII was the one that I played. Then I played FFX, FF7, FFXIII)

Anyway, I like the Fire Emblem series, in the area where I live that series doesn't exist! Most of the time they only know about Marth and Roy only because of SSBM or if there is some they only played the very recent ones(and that's like Very few!) and Fire Emblem now is much different from GBA and NES versions. I also like Atelier and Demon/Dark Souls(HA,
HA HA HA, HA!)

I played the heck out of the first Disgaea! My favorite thing in it was Item World.(Until I found out killing the enemies was actually pointless, then the challenge was gone.)

Post was longer than it was supposed to be.

Yep, same here.

I live in the middle of bloody nowhere, and most gaming around here is indeed the "bro" stuff, which is what I'm going to call it from now on. Everyone I know is always playing things like the latest FPS shooter or Dark Souls over and over.

Me though, no. AAA games, for the most part, just bore me. I lost interest in most of those as they're A: too easy, and B: too simple to hold my attention.

My favorite genres are fighting games, shmups (bullet-hell), and roguelikes.

When it comes to fighting games, Guilty Gear is the main one for me. I got *really* into that. Not just in terms of skill level. But also, well, this: https://i.imgur.com/qVTdlL2.jpg Bridget is my favorite character in what has always been one of my favorite game series, so I even do a cosplay of him (I look a hell of alot younger than I actually am, because why not, and I'm not exactly masculine to begin with). I dont play the RECENT GG games though. If fighting games drop characters I like... which that one did... I tend to just switch to something else, because screw that.

So in recent years, there's also Blazblue, which is the main one I play these days. I also really loved Persona 4 Arena. And am very much looking forward to their funky crossover game, and also looking forward to Dragonball Fighterz (I may have gotten the name wrong) since that's being made by the same developer and therefore is destined to be bloody amazing. Finally, a developer who actually knows what they're doing, making a DBZ-related fighting game.

Let's see... what else?

Shmups, bullet hell types. I've played so many. I've IMPORTED so many (which were extremely expensive at the time). My favorite is probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fktC9WKgS00 But Ive got so many more than that. The genre is good at giving me what most AAA "bro" games wont: A real challenge. Which is to say, most of these are nigh-impossible.

Also roguelikes of any sort, turn-based or otherwise. I'm really into Crypt of the Necrodancer lately. Also playing a ton of Heat Signature, which is sort of a roguelike sandbox stealth game in space. It's so freaking good... I dont get that level of pure awesome out of the "big" games that everyone I know is into. And then there's Binding of Isaac, dont even get me started on how great that is.

And you mentioned Megaman X, look up a game called 20XX on Steam (if you do PC gaming at all). It is similar to X in many ways, and is also the game Mighty No. 9 should have been.

I also play alot of retro games, too. Like, the REALLY old sort. Going back to the Atari 2600. I also play alot of arcade games, particularly from the Golden Age, and I have basically all of them on this PC (ah, what trouble I went to in order to make THAT happen).


And I'm in the same boat as you, too: I very rarely ever talk to anyone about games, not even my gamer friends, because there's no bloody point. I dont care about the "bro" games, and they dont have the foggiest damn clue what I'm talking about when it comes to anything else. Or sometimes they DO know, but they wont actually try the game in question because it's "way too hard" (thanks, AAA devs, for the constant dumbing down that leads to that).


I dont play RPGs though. Two reasons: 1, they're WAY too easy, and I've never once found an exception, and 2, I tend to just not care enough about the stories in alot of modern ones. Also, I hate cutscenes, I really do. Used to be, that games only needed text boxes to tell their stories, which you could read at your own pace instead of having to wait for it to be acted out. Worked so much better, way back when. Bah.

So I guess you dream of Touhou all day? I agree that RPG games are very easy, I still play them because I hope some of them will have a good story.(unsuccessful...)

What is different from Blazblue and Guilty Gear? I played Blazblue but not Guilty Gear. I would like fighting games more if games like Smash Bros and Blazblue didn't have such an unbalanced roster, some characters seem flat out better than others.(Blazblue not as much...till you get to unlimited characters, but Smash bros is bad for that.) I just hate losing not to skill but to something that's not really in my control.

I've never played a Bullet Hell. It's mainly because they are just never talked about in the culture I live in. It's either Call of f*****g Duty or Assassin's Creed or Minecraft or Mortal Kombat. I've also never played Fallout or The Elder Scrolls (except for one time) despite their popularity.
Whenever I go into a video game store, it's always the "bro games" that are advertised and for some reason I've felt sick the last times I've gone into them; I actually had a sudden heat spell come over me one time! I don't know if the AC was just malfunctioning or what but I remember feeling extremely hot and sweaty out of nowhere. I guess it could also be the fact the store was in the mall and it's quite a hectic place so maybe I was feeling the negative energy from other people around me?

Funny note: A lot of radical feminists dislike the GTA series because of its portrayal of women but a female coworker told me she enjoys playing the games! I don't play the games myself, though. Just not my cup of tea.

Guilty Gear tends to be more "hardcore" than BlazBlue. The characters tend to have more moves and the bosses have more obvious cases of SNK Boss Syndrome but not the tear your hair out level that you get in early SNK fighters like KOF and Samurai Shodown. Guilty Gear also has a more rough and gritty atmosphere and world than BlazBlue with characters that looked like they came out of the manga Bastard!! (A big influence on the series. I do like GG more, though, especially since Bastard!! fell into hiatus hell) while BlazBlue characters tend to look more like Negima characters. Furthermore, Guilty Gear's music leans more towards hard rock and thrash metal while BlazBlue's is more orchestral.

My tastes are different from the majority of the entire planet. The games I like most are "engineering" games where you build complex systems of parts and optimize them such as Factorio, From The Depths, Children of a Dead Earth, etc.

Hmm, Touhou, not as much. It's a decent series, and I like the characters (Wriggle Nightbug being my favorite) but some of the design aspects dont really agree with me. Particularly the "form over function" design style when it comes to the bullet patterns used. So very, very many of the patterns used look really pretty, but arent actually all that interesting to go up against. So the games I tend to go for are the opposite. If you look at the video I linked to, that game doesnt bother with pretty geometric anything. It simply goes berserk and attempts to murder the player over and over. The video gets pretty crazy, but that's not even close to the difficulty that game can put out at it's nastiest.


Anyway, as for Guilty Gear (I usually call it GG) vs Blazblue, as Marknis says, GG is a hell of alot more hardcore. The most difficult to do combos in Blazblue, for instance, would be on the lower end of difficulty in GG. It also has waaaaaayyyyyyy more mechanics in place than Blazblue. And they usually then make it even harder. If you have a moment, look up the mechanic named "False Roman Cancel". It's EXTREMELY difficult to learn to even do whatsoever, and it's even harder to do in an actual heated match. GG is, to many, considered to be the single most difficult of all fighting games to fully learn or master... well, the older ones anyway, X2 and it's followups on the PS2. I cant speak for the recent ones, because screw those. Wheras Blazblue is far more accessible from the start.

As for balance with Blazblue, and I'm speaking from a rather silly amount of experience on this one, the game is actually pretty well balanced. There are no useless characters. There are some that are much harder to use than others (such as Carl, whose specials often need to be done A: backwards, and B: AT THE SAME TIME as his normal moves and basic movement... I'm not going to even bother to explain how that works) but they're all perfectly viable. Any character can defeat any other. I know the fighting game community likes to divide things into "tiers", but it's best to ignore those. They would say that I'm a "scrub" for saying that, but... I usually make a point of defying the tiers, and even against very high level players (who are using supposedly OP characters in addition to having very high skill levels) I'm still going to win. Had MANY chances to prove that. The difference is that I dont bother copying other players or looking up any of that frame crap, I just learned entirely on my own. So my tactics are highly unusual and not based on pure analysis, and can thusly function in ways that dont make sense to most opponents, who usually just follow the herd. So, just pick whoever you like and go for it. Doesnt matter who it is, they can be made to work, it's just up to you to find out how to make that happen. But do it yourself instead of just following guides made by others, or you WILL get stuck in those stupid tiers.

Smash, on the other hand, I'm not so sure of. I remember Meta Knight used to be so damn broken that he was outright banned much of the time (extremely rare for that to be the case with any game). But then, the creators of the series were never intending for it to be a super competitive game to begin with.




Aye, this is exactly why I dont even bother going to game stores anymore. The physical side of the industry is mostly ruled by the big-giant publishers such as EA, Activision, Square and so on. The games cost such an extreme amount of money to make that these groups have actually dug themselves into an inescapable rut: They MUST stick with trends and never deviate, because to do so is very, very risky and can do massive financial damage of the sort that ends careers. Thus, the "bro" games become ever more common, and other genres literally dont even show up. Strategy games, shmups, roguelikes, for instance. You dont find those on consoles, period.

Instead, if you're after true variety, you have to go PC. I used to be more into consoles myself, but after years of lame releases and uninteresting gameplay, I got fed up, said "screw it" and jumped into Steam instead. Best gaming-related decision I ever made. I went from buying new games very rarely (because there was nothing interesting to buy on consoles) to buying them very frequently, because new and interesting/creative things of ANY genre appear with extreme frequency on PC. You dont need a giant publisher of doom to put a game out on there... ANYONE can do it... so developers are free to do whatever in the bloody hell they want to, rather than being forced to follow the edicts of an uncaring corporate entity. Those bullet hell games are a great example. On console, they dont exist. Among console players, you will never hear them discussed. But on PC, they're actually very common. Not only that, but PC gamers tend to know about them. Not that those people all play them, but that's usually due to super intimidating difficulty... they still often know of those games.

I can actually give a very specific example of the sort of creative freedom I'm talking about here. I'll show this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cGOkBPd1ow

That, actually, is a game named Starward rogue, and the reason I'm showing it is because I'm one of the developers. The boss shown in the video is my own creation; I made the horrid thing because I bloody well could. I have a *ton* of creative freedom here. With the big-name games, you follow the strict rules generally set by the corporate group (because otherwise, you can lose your contract). But this? No.

The head developer of the group (which is named Arcen) offered me a contract to work on this game. Proper college degrees and experience werent necessary... they actually offered me this because A: I talked about the genre alot and am good at analyzing it, and B: they saw some of these videos I make, and recognized the skill and knowledge it takes to do those. So they figured I could get them results. I was immediately put in a position of authority for some baffling reason; I could even veto the ideas that others on the team came up with, and even the head developer would often say "well make sure it's okay with Misery first" when it came to other stuff being added. And my own content... enemies and bosses... were entirely up to me. I remember when I first started, I asked the guy "So what should I work on first?" and he said "What is it you think you should work on first? Whatever it is, just do that". WHich frankly was a scary thing to say, and my initial thoughts were "oh god I'm going to screw this up", but it ended up working very well. I ended up also balancing entire difficulty modes (a task which mostly consists of trying not to punch the monitor in great anger). I made the choices, not some big controlling group. But alot of more "professional" developers for the big games simply dont get to do that. They want to try something totally new? Well, bloody tough: They get to make another grey-and-brown military FPS, because dammit that's what sells, and if they dont do it they're in big trouble.

That's all just an example of how development of indie games (regardless of how "big" they are) tends to work. Total creative freedom like that leads to all sorts of awesome things that dont give a crap about trends. Look at Minecraft, for example. Notch, the developer, had a similar approach to mine: He did whatever he bloody well felt like doing when it came to development. Like when he added the Nether: That wasnt part of the game's original design plan. He actually added that after reading some book that contained the idea of a hell-like realm that is often used to travel through, allowing great distances in the "overworld" to be traversed due to the fact that 1 mile travelled in that realm equaled 10 miles in the overworld. He thought this was a very fun concept, so Minecraft... a supposedly family friendly game... suddenly gained portals that took you straight to a burning hell filled with horrid monsters (complete with tortured screams) and lava and sand with screaming faces on it. It didnt make a whole lot of sense, but he wanted it so there it is. And since he knew what he was doing, it ended up working really well and it's hard to imagine the game without the Nether (which contains the same fast-travel mechanic that was in the book he read).

And despite his screwball design style, Minecraft exploded and warped the entire industry. That's what a bit of creativity and design freedom can do, but the Big Guys are outright not allowed to do that. Which is a shame... anyone who remembers the olden days of gaming probably recalls the fact that LOTS of games were super creative back then, and were all the more awesome for it.



Yeah, sorry, I'm rambling a bit, but I tend to find this topic to be very interesting. And I hear, so very freaking often, gamers lamenting about exactly what you were saying, that everything is just Call of Halos or whatever (as I call it, with great sarcasm) and stale and repetitive. So I usually give this explanation in the hopes of showing people that there are other options. And before someone mentions something about "but I dont want to use keyboard and mouse" I'll just point out that damn near everything I buy (hundreds of games now) I always use a PS4 controller for. I dont much care for mouse control in games either.

Also I understand your problems with going into that store or mall. Those crowds can do that to some of us, eh? I'm not to affected by it myself, but that comes from going to so many anime conventions (which are utter bloody chaos for 72 straight hours and filled with things that dont make any sense).

One thing that might help is just going for digital purchases rather than physical copies, regardless of what platform you're on. It's just... so much less trouble that way.

Eh, you're not the only one.

Games like Factorio are actually pretty popular. That game has quite the following.

Factorio is the most popular out of them all and one of the better ones. Children of a Dead Earth (my favorite) has a much smaller following on the other hand.

Hmmm...I'm not sure. My sibling is all about Call of Duty. I'm more into Disgaea, Tekken, Soul Calibur, LittleBigPlanet etc...


My sibling and I can be opposites with video games but he likes a some games I like but he calls me a noob, says that I'm not a real Pokemon fan because I enjoyed Pokemon X (I still play it) even though I was six years old when I got into Pokemon (I've played Blue, Crystal, Gold, Yellow, Silver, Diamond, Platinum, Pearl, Heart Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, X, Leaf Green, Fire Red, Alpha Sapphire, Stadium 1 and 2, Gale of Darkness, Colosseum, one of the old Mystery Dungeon games, Sun and Battle Revolution) and used to say "silence casual"



Marknis...do you like Darkstalkers? It's my favorite fighting game. One of my Vaporeons in Pokemon Sun is named after Rikuo.

I don't talk to people about gaming because gamers are scum. That's a joke, but let's be real, I've got very little in common with someone who loves Ass Creed, CoD, Fallout 4 or any number of other games with big marketing budgets that the crowd flocks to. It's not about the area that you live in, either. The marketing budgets for these games are often as large as the budget for the game itself and the hype machine is immense; unless you've been brought up playing lots of different games and have that context for judging the quality of a game & your enjoyment of it then you're probably going to go with whatever you recognise rather than spending the time (and let's not forget that time is a valuable and limited resource) establishing a wider context. Given the homogenisation of the media it's also more difficult for the kids to play a variety of games unless they dip out of the mainstream.

Not that I'm averse to all big budget games - I could name plenty that I've enjoyed in the last few years - but the average gamer hasn't heard of Bloodborne let alone, say, Shin Megami Tensei or the original Deus Ex. Might as well try talking to these people about how profoundly funny Xavier: Renegade Angel is while I'm at it.

Tekken is fun! I've been trying to get into it lately, playing Tekken 7 online, but no matter how many times I try I can't do the incredibly complex aerial combos that people manage no matter how long I spend in practice mode. At the lower level my chances of winning seem to come down to that.

Wow, your sibling should be nicer to you. I've never played the original Guilty Gear and actually like Xrd Revelator the best. Does that make me a noob? No, I never knew about the series until later on because it was just never popular in the Bible Belt. I've never seen it in the wild, even at used game stores, and the prices for it on Amazon or eBay are ridiculously high. I don't want to break the bank on a game that's been surpassed by it's sequels which is something fans of the franchise tend to say. Before finally playing XX Accent Core (Unfortunately the Wii version), I had only seen a hentai pic of Dizzy that I stumbled upon during my early hormonal teen years; I realized it was her when I played the game!

I do indeed like Darkstalkers. I actually played it before I ever played Street Fighter; I would see an arcade cabinet of the original at the mall but I didn't bother to memorize the name of the game so I didn't know what it was for many years and it wasn't until I saw a picture of Jon Talbain that I finally figured out what the game was called. In a similar situation with Dizzy, I saw a lot of hentai pics of Felicia and Morrigan as well as Lilith before I finally played the game. I wish Capcom would stop just using the characters as guests for their Vs. games or cameos in their other series and make a whole new game already. Darkstalkers also helped me find out about Guilty Gear since it was said to be an influence on the franchise.

So Marknis and Zeromancerlove, what's your favorite disgaea out of all of them? Have a favorite character? My favorite character is either Flonne(Disgaea 1. Later on they over did the love stuff.) or Etna(she's just funny!)

My favorite Disgaea was the first one. I liked the story better in the first one.(Disgaea D2 wasn't bad though.) Disgaea 4 wasn't bad but they kept making them repeat their goals which kinda started to get on my nerves... I was like "I get it already! Stop saying it!"

Disgaea 2 and Disgaea D2 I've enjoyed the most out of them all. Etna is easily my favorite character and for the same reason you like her.

I feel the same about Disgaea 4. I haven't played it in a long time because I could never beat Pringer X and the Fuka and Desco Show I couldn't get past a certain level so that killed my enthusiasm. I realized I boosted my Special Skills too quickly so they consumed too much SP and trying to start all over again felt like too much of a headache. I haven't played Disgaea 5 yet but I will eventually after I complete my vow to beat Final Fantasy IX before buying new games. I will say as much as I like the Disgaea games, I don't know if I'll ever "fully complete" any of them. I've only played through the games to see the "good" endings and I do some of the post game scenarios but I've never completed all the extra levels and beaten the extra bosses in any given Disgaea game.

My first Disgaea game was Disgaea 4 but I was more into D2 to be honest. Didn't get a chance to beat 4 or D2 because my Ps3 doesn't work anymore.

As far as a favorite character goes...well, my mom said I would be Flonne if I were a character so Flonne is my favorite character.

I would love to name my future service dog Etna though..

That sucks to hear. Will you get it fixed or will you get a new one?

I like Flonne a lot, too. Her voice is hilarious and her emotional outbursts make me die laughing!

Ironically, Maderas called Etna his "faithful little doggy". :p I am glad Etna got back at him. He was a jerk.