@ami_angelwings The Ar tonelico/Ar nosurge series springs to mind. Wow the Atelier series is popular, but most people don't even know those games exist. They recently got a "DX" remake on modern consoles and even though it's probably a zero effort thing, the publisher can't be bothered to release them in English because they assume no one would buy them.

Also, the game has plenty of flaws, but I've always wished that Empyrion had more appreciation. It started around the same time as No Man's Sky and IMO does everything NMS does better, but it never had the marketing or budget, so has always remained essentially indie (or whatever comes just above that.) Most of the flaws and lack of polish would have improved a whole lot more if they'd had the popularity and budget of NMS...

@ami_angelwings "The Window" #ttRPG system, by MIMgames (Scott Lininger). It's my favorite system of all time, and it's completely free, although the website is defunct. It can be found via the Internet Archive, but to save people the time digging through snapshots, I have a copy of it on my blog site.

https://gcvrsa.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/windowrules.pdf

@ami_angelwings Also, I would definitely say the Disney adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's "The Chronicles of Prydain", which Disney released as "The Black Cauldron" in 1985, and has been widely reviled ever since, even though it's not actually that bad.

Prydain was the very first fantasy series I read as a child, and Eilonwy will always be my favorite Disney princess whom Disney refuses to actually recognize as a "Disney Princess".

@ami_angelwings And I still can't believe that neither Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books nor Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionanvar Tapestry have been adapted to films. They are so much better than most of the fantasy works that have been adapted.

Fantasy, in general, is one of the most popular genres that gets disdained and dumbed-down by Hollywood most of the time.

@ami_angelwings The Vision of Escaflowne! It was very well received worldwide, but not as successful as hoped in Japan, which I think limited its influence.

it really showed that it's entirely possible to create a series with broad appeal with both boys and girls, combining action and romance. I think if there were more series like it, we'd have less pigeonholing of boys and girls anime today.

@ami_angelwings There were several U.S. quiz shows in the 1970s that had the same challenge level of Jeopardy! but with different, more interesting game mechanics (The Who What Or Where Game, Split Second, The Big Showdown). None of them made it past a few years at most, and a couple of revivals left out the best parts of them (and also didn't last).

I don't hate Jeopardy!, but I dislike how it's just become THE buzz-in quiz show.

@ami_angelwings

i feel like mass effect partly reinvented what suikoden was doing much earlier with the large cast of missable characters and branching choice structure. writing and directing that kind of game is certainly really difficult, but suikoden 2 and suikoden 5 especially were pretty compelling.

anime endings often do something with a similar catharsis, at the end, so there's something fundamental about the kind of story the suikoden series featured that works, but it's probably also a bit depressing to carefully write a bunch of long tail narrative scenarios that most probably will never play through (visual novels invert this by making discovery of the ending scenarios its own reward).

i do wonder if rpgs as a whole would be a lot different now if suikoden ii had hit just a bit better.

@ami_angelwings For me, it’s a couple of cartoons I was in love with.

Thundarr the Barbarian
Pirates of Dark Water

And I’ll never get over Firefly.