Lurker > Evillordexdeath

6

Though this is a game whose rating I might be tempted to change later down the road. I've started this one a few times but never gotten very far. It seems kind of bland and doesn't really draw me in, but I can appreciate the detail that went into the lore and all that.

Psychonauts 2

Unpacking

Unpacking

3 sounds right, yes.

Metroid Dread

6

Enjoyed it at the time, and I think it gets a little more flak than it really deserves, but it does start to expose why Telltale's game model wasn't very good.

Pancham is one of the few later Pokemon I love.

WarioWare: Get it Together
Omori
Shin Megami Tensei V
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

haha yeah it's not great. It also bugs me that they've been calling it "Earthbound Beginnings."

Yeah, I do think Terranigma would've been a good inclusion.

I thought Live a Live was great, though thinking back on it it's only the thing that happens once you complete all the stories that really stuck with me. The other parts were still neat though.

Resident Evil Village
Inscryption
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
Bowser's Fury

1

Crazy to see someone fail to understand their own work this badly.

Yes

He's alright. The robot was the only truly good character in this show though.

I can't remember killing any. FFXII was my preferred bunny-killing simulator I guess.

5

Admittedly can't remember this one very well, except that even as a kid who had loved Superstar Saga I didn't like it all that much.

8

The wind fish concept is rad

Mother did it first though

New Pokmon Snap
Psychonauts 2
The Forgotten City
Unsighted

2

Metroid Dread
Sumire
Hitman 3
Unpacking

3

I love this game, but as a story it's mostly just Pokemon again.

Shin Megami Tensei V
Cruis'n Blast
The Binding of Isaac: Repentance
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

I think the initial pack of dogs being all-male is Anderson's implicit commentary on the inherent sexism of the animal kingdom. When you consider the contrast with human society in Japan, where not only a girl but a foreigner is given the social support to achieve important things, and how the main dog character Chief's positive development is brought on by service to a human master in Atari, the true message of the film becomes clear. Its title being a pun on "I love dogs" is in fact ironic, and the movie is actually Anderson's celebration of the moral progress made by human beings.

Johnbobb posted...

darn, if only the fish people had turned into dogs

Luca becomes Ermine's #2, and ties for first place

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
WarioWare: Get it Together
Omori
Returnal

Xeybozn posted...

This. Four excellent movies, and then one decent one that's obviously not on the same level as the rest.

True, Spider-Man feels a bit out of place with these four heavy-hitters

3

I guess it benefits from coming out at a time when this series was not as mired in years of accumulated nonsense, but it's still Kingdom Hearts.

JONALEON1 posted...

Not having watched the movie and just judging based on the write-ups, but it didn't seem like this was an artsy movie and that it just had a weird art style.

"Artsy" isn't a very good term to try and categorize movies with, lol

tazzyboyishere posted...

I would guess Ultima IV, though it's more platonic

Thanks, I'm glad someone who knows about 80s PC RPGs showed up. I know nothing about them but kind of suspected one of the Wizardry or Ultima games might qualify for this. Platonic is fine, the example of Mother is also mostly based on familial love. Reading about the gameplay, it sounds like this game does also include the idea of solving fights without killing, which is part of the virtue of Justice.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Girls Garden (1985) is about a girl gathering flowers to give to the boy she loves. The time limit display is the boy walking away toward another girl who he will fall in love with instead if you dont finish your bouquet in time. This was Yuji Nakas first game for SEGA. 1985 seems kinda late for the first instance of what you want but its the first I can think of.

Nice, I had never even heard of that one, but it looks really cute. January '85 makes it just a little bit older than Ultima IV. It looks like this also has pacifist idea since you give honey to bears to make friends with them. It's also interesting that this is one of the rarer examples (from what I know) of an old game where you play as a girl trying to win a boy's affection and not the other way around.

Snake5555555555 posted...

In Nosferatu the Vampyre (1986), you play as multiple characters, including the married Jonathan and Lucy Harker, and travel as a party protecting each other (along with Van Helsing). You slay the final boss (Dracula himself and an inherently tragic figure) through a non-combative method (luring him in to sunlight).

Um, just don't look at how the game actually looks and sounds and portrays all this!

Another one I'd never heard of, but okay, that sounds like it includes all the ideas I brought up! Though yes, the idea of killing Dracula by luring him into the sunlight does suggest a very different tone to convincing Giygas to stop fighting in Mother. It's cool to see these types of things being present in a horror game at all, especially in a time when not a lot of games were using them period. Maybe it helped that it was an adaption of a film.

KCF0107 posted...

It doesn't check all of your arbitrary boxes, but Donkey Kong is about love/rescuing your loved one.

Yeah, that was something I realized I hadn't conveyed very well when I posted the topic, that I mean to draw some kind of distinction between a game being "about love" and games about rescuing your girlfriend, like Donkey Kong, River City Ransom, etc. I'm not sure I can explain it too well even now, but I'd say River City Ransom is about punching people even though the goal of the game is related to love, similar to how DQ is "about" fighting monsters even though rescuing and marrying a princess gets in there somewhere. Mother is "about" love because the whole story can be interpreted as being about witnessing/discovering different types and expressions of love, I guess.

No

She comes off as a kind of shallow waifu-bait character to me.

Most of the first video games were extremely simple and abstract, focused around one pure mechanic. When themes and context did start to come into things, I feel that most early games were still about things like fighting or competition. There are some older games that include the idea of love, like Ms. Pac-Man (1981) or Dragon Quest (1986), and there were those Atari porn games like Bachelor Party or X-Man, which were about sex, but the oldest game I can think of where love is a central theme that the entire game is based around is Mother (1989). I feel confident that this isn't the real answer, though. This is a hard thing to search for, so I thought I'd pose the question on a gaming hobbyist board. What is the oldest game you know of that's about love (feel free to define exactly what this means yourself), and can you think of one older than Mother?

As a bonus, I'm curious to know if there are older examples of a few other ideas I can't recall being done in games before Mother, so please tell me if you know of an older game that has:

• A sympathetic final boss, who is defeated by a method other than fighting
• An NPC who protects the player in an area where they're mostly helpless
• A romance between the main character and someone he spends most of the game traveling with

Pichu and Togepi are alright. I voted for Elekid, of course.

Even as someone who loves Charlie Brown, I was really surprised Peanuts do so well. I kind of felt like it was a movie I enjoyed but if challenged on it would have to grudgingly admit is not great.

This is totally pedantic, but I feel it should be said that the Little Red-Haired Girl isn't a new character. She was introduced to the animated end of this franchise with You're in Love, Charlie Brown back in 1967! She probably appears even earlier in the comics, though I don't know much about those.

It's a close call I think, and might depend on what order the movies fall in. I think you have the advantage because your #34 is still alive and you have a small lead.

Seginustemple posted...

this is our culture

It's just marketing. All kinds of great and creative movies get made both in the States and abroad, they just don't end up making as much money as the stuff on this list. I'd rather it wasn't that way, but it's not so bad.

The only good movies on the list are LotR and arguably Titanic or Harry Potter.

haha, I see what you mean, but you know, it's nice to throw at least one or two mainstream American animations along with all my film-snob favored movies just to keep people guessing. Plus Lego 2 was a pleasant surprise for me because I expected not to like it much, which was something I took into account with the rankings. I put Trolls 2 as high as I did because it was way funnier than I expected, and my #26 was a disappointment for me which dropped it down a few spots.

1. It's Such a Beautiful Day
2. The Red Turtle
3. The Lego Movie 2: the Second Part
4. Boy & the World
5. ?
6. ?
7. The Illusionist
8. Fritz the Cat
9. ?
10. Loving Vincent
11. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
12. ?
13. I Lost My Body
14. Anomalisa
15. Toy Story 4
16. ?
17. ?
18. ?
19. Incredibles 2
20. ?
21. ?
22. Onward
23. Frozen II
24. Trolls World Tour
25. Missing Link
26. ?
27. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
28. Spies in Disguise
29. Hotel Transylvania: Summer Vacation
30. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
31. The Croods: A New Age
32. Over the Moon
33. Abominable
34. The Polar Express
35. Despicable Me 3
36. Raya and the Last Dragon
37. The Secret Life of Pets 2
38. Ralph Breaks the Internet
39. The Grinch
40. Ferdinand

I think it's Felix from Golden Sun, lol. His name being written just as Felix and Otacon being called "Octagon" in the last thread title probably gave an advantage to their opponents, not that I'm complaining about Jak and the King getting wins.

I've always really liked Tyrogue.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection
Guilty Gear Strive
Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Yeah, it's unbelievably stupid. At least it's only one small county.

In general, the books that get banned in American schools and the reasons cited for the decisions are kind of laughable. The most frequently-challenged book is Captain Underpants, of all things, and the Bone series of comics also got banned for "racism," which having read those books I couldn't tell you for the life of me what was being referred to.

With Maus, when I first heard about this Pulitzer-winning comic on the Holocaust being banned, I thought it would be because of the subject matter it covers. The real reason sighted was that the book includes the words "God Damn." It's a joke.

Resident Evil Village
Deathloop
Axiom Verge 2
Inscryption

5.5

Classic, ultimately generic plotline, like most Dragon Quest games. This game is kind of drag to play now, especially in its original NES iteration, but the bonus .5 comes because the princess is really funny.

Sure, that's fair, though I do think the similiarity extends beyond plot and into theme and aesthetic. Both of them have superficial aspects of Chinese culture flattened into a generic American wannabe-Disney animation style and story structure, which comes off as pandering to the Chinese market. I think the reason I ended up rating Over the Moon slightly higher was that I felt the theme of grief came across a little better in that one, because it was what made the main character and the Goddess relate to one another (and because the viewer actually gets to meet the main girl's mom, which makes it easier to feel the sense of loss imo.)

You are within your rights to believe that :)

After the other dialog-free films got butchered I thought Red Turtle would be soon to follow, so I ended up being pleasantly surprised it ranked that high. Over the Moon on the other hand deserved to go way sooner, it has all the same problems as Abominable really, they're almost the same movie. It's another one that feels like it managed to sneak into this placement because everyone hated all the films below it.

8.5