Games

The Banner Saga, beautiful hand drawn rotoscoped visuals and animation, great characters, strong story and lore. Gameplay is turn based strategy, and it’s very addicting. Absolutely fantastic music. Never hear anyone talking about it.

Blood Wake on the original Xbox.

I was a kid visiting my friend’s house and we went over to his neighbor’s house and started playing on this new video game console I never heard of. He pulled up this game that was boats battling one another on the waters and it was so damn cool. My grandmother coincidentally bought my brother and I an Xbox shortly thereafter and it was one of the first games I bought used from EB Games. That storytelling was something else. Not state of the art, but just so cool being drawings and the world setting was amazing, being ancient but with modern and some futuristic/magical weapons too.

I still play it sometimes on an emulator. Just sad it never gets talked about or ever got a sequel or remaster, not even some backwards compatibility love :/

Ogre Battle, either March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Caliber. It's such a weird cul-de-sac of tactical RPGs. The same company made Tactics Ogre, which then became Final Fantasy Tactics, which in turn inspired a zillion other post-2000 tactics games; and Tactics Ogre got a remake version recently. But the Ogre Battle side of the family just disappeared.

X-beyond the frontier got me into space games as a kid. Had trading, piracy, fighting, ship building, factory ownership. Great series, and they made more after that. I've never met a single person that has played that game before.

Puppeteer for ps3. It was creative and underrated

Monday Night Combat/Super Monday Night Combat. Absolutely loved that game, and a lot of the FPS I play is to fill that hole

Digital Devil Saga on PS2. It's a favorite, easily outshines other SMT games in narrative, character development, and plot twists.

Yet I bring it up at a wedding reception and I'm the weirdo. Pfft.

I miss the savage series. Probably no chance of those coming back though.

I really loved rocket slime as well. There's a spiritual successor called connectank on steam that gives me the same vibes, and has fun co-op!

Just for your information, there are actually two other games related to Rocket Slime. Unfortunately they are JP only. The one that release outside of Japan is the 2nd game. There's a GBA game that came out before it and a sequel to the DS game focused on pirate ships

Kenka Bancho. It's a series of japanese games for the PSP, with only the 3rd game being officially translated and released outside Japan as Kenka Bancho Badass Rumble. It's like playing a typical shonen anime set in high school, you're a delinquent who fights everyone from the other schools in order to become the ultimate badass. It's semi open world and you can beat pedestrians and innocent civilians, which reduce your badass meter, because real badasses only fight people who can fight back! And with their bare hands, weapons are for weak pussies! It's over the top and fun as hell. I've only ever met one other person mention that game, and it was an RPG friend of mine, when he bought a PSP for himself.

Something I highly recommend for anyone that enjoyed River City Ransom or similar beat'em ups.

May be a little off from what you're asking but one of my favorite games period is Bookworm on the GBA. It was originally a flash game but when it came to GBA you could save your progress. The music was so cute and the sound effects were just awesome. They tried to bring it to the DS without that music and the effects and it just didn't work. Other iterations exist as well, none as cool and enjoyable as the GBA version. I'm stuck emulating until someone rediscovers this neat little game and brings it to switch or steamdeck.