Jeffrey Combs was also in DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, and that series’s cast was a fun synthesis of video game voice actor luminaries plus Star Trek alumni (Michael Dorn, John de Lancie, Anson Mount, Andrew Robinson and more).

But yeah, really that whole late 90’s/early 2000’s gaming era had some genuinely great performances from actors of different media. I still think about David Warner in Baldur’s Gate 2 from time to time.

I mean, if y’all really insist, I can specify “not AAA games.” That’s the point I was making; this year’s game of the year nominee lists are going to look quite different than usual.

I’ve got 1,000 hours in this one over the years and the PC port is the main reason I’m getting it (eventually). Hoping it’s not too locked-down for mods, FFT’s mod community has been a vibrant one.

In a world where game budgets balloon to over $300m, Hades 2 fits comfortably into the “smaller game” category. As do Blue Prince, Expedition 33, Silksong, and Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, among other top-rated games this year.

Some of these scores haven’t been updated from early access yet, so this number’s probably going to go higher. Might be the top-rated game of the year. I’m sure it’s well-deserved, too. I played the crap out of the EA version when it first dropped.

What a year for smaller game projects.

Again, Sky 3rd is the third game in a continuous series. This is not Ys, which is an entirely different narrative format following a hero in stories specifically designed to be standalone. Ys isn’t even told in chronological order. Ys can absolutely be played in any order without losing anything (other than the second game, which is a direct sequel of the first).

You didn’t make it to the Cold Steel games, so you don’t know what I’m talking about here. Most of Sky 3rd’s throughlines continued in Cold Steel, not the Crossbell games (they even continue into the Daybreak arc). Falcom pivoted during Sky’s development; they initially weren’t going to do games in Crossbell.

Trails is Mass Effect writ large. It’s Game of Thrones. It’s Harry Potter. Yes, one can jump into those properties at any point, but they will be lost at some point–if not immediately–or otherwise missing context critical to their enjoyment of the property. That’s basic fictional media literacy. It’s just highly unusual in video games, so people assume it’s like other series. It’s not. It’s closer to long-running manga, television or novels.

There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail’s combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it’s going to look like Meucci’s contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.

Even the impact of Trails’s hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it’s never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story design won’t be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII’s impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP’s neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.

Sky 3rd is simply the third game in this continuous series. It’s not a “die-hard fan” thing. It’s the third work, just as much the third season of a TV series or a third novel in a novel series is. Whether or not it’s a good work is a matter of taste. But whether it’s a necessary part of it is not up for debate.

It wraps up the first arc of a major throughline in the series and starts many more.

I’m beyond excited, this was the best early access experience I’ve ever had by a mile. It’s gotta be a GotY contender.

Hell of a year for indies/small publishers.

High enough regard to be very profitable, which makes the job cuts even more ridiculous.

Alicesoft is one of the major dev studios in this exact space, but their games range from having some non-con to outright featuring it. Not for everyone.

Honkai: Star Rail. I love turn-based RPGs, and it continues to have the best turn-based combat I’ve ever played. The main story also has my favorite fiction trope (a shake-up of a pantheon) and it’s got amazing music, so it just hits a lot of really good spots for me.

Having played a chunk of the demo with Japanese audio, this hasn’t been a literal translation situation. It’s a standard JRPG localization, closer to NISA’s work with the series than XSEED’s that was on the loose side.

Yeah, was a solid move to echo the series opening with the in-game engine.

A roguelite structure seems like a natural fit for the premise, too.