Favorite game franchises outside of Megaten?

Quoting myself...

Quote from: yksehtniycul on September 23, 2008, 04:15:53 AM

I'm not sure why, but the core Fromsoftware franchises just feel the same way games used to before people found out you could make easy money with them doh

I actually am pretty sure why, just wasn't in the mood at the time to digress. Basically these games are good because they're tailored to a specific audience and don't even so much try to attract people outside of the audience into the game. The game knows what it is, and that's what it is. The barrier to entry / learning curve is very high, especially for Armored Core. AC constantly gets panned by reviewers in the states, though some of the bigger names are beginning to admit it's the best "mecha" game -- if that is you can get into it and still wanna play it. AC is really not at all popular in the states. It appears to have a rabid core audience in Japan of significant scale, but still they don't overlap with more casual players. The King's Field games are much less complicated, but apparently most people just feel like playing them is some form of torture... citing the slow speed/turning and depressing environments -- doesn't help that Japanese players say KF gives them motion sickness -- which probably accounts for the slower speed some. Never the less if you don't load your character down with the biggest baddest equip, it's generally quite fast, and there is a run button to boot. King's Field is probably the penultimate masterpiece of immersion, everything about it serves to suck the player mentally into that world. And it's the only game of it's genre produced in Japan afaik... though the format is not uncommon in western games, there tends to be nothing artful about it's western counterparts (first-person non-shooter dungeon crawler)

Bottom line, I think Fromsoftware uses these two founding franchises as a bulwark against their books dipping into the red. I think they know there are a fixed number of people in the world that will buy everyone of these games no matter what, so that allows them to always know bare minimum what their fiscal quarters will look like down the pipe. Which ultimately I'd think is more valuable than gambling on a breakout hit with every title with the risk of alienating a reliable fan base that knows exactly what it wants.

PS: Someone said Tenchu?? I played the first game to hell... 100%. The follow-ups never recaptured that magic however. Fromsoftware apparently owns the rights to Tenchu now, but I haven't seen any signs of that being a better deal for Tenchu. In fact most of Fromsoftware's stuff is really eyebrow raising I think. But their two babies the company was built on remains tried and true. I'd hate to produce games in the Japanese market honestly... I have a feeling the islands of Japan are sitting astride a sort of insanity vortex?? ninja