I fully believe that Souls is like Pizza, inasmuch as the worst FromSoft Souls game is still pretty good. I'd go even further and say that the worst Souls game is still better than like, 75% of imitators out there. There are hard exceptions like Nioh, which I might take over MOST of these, but that's its own deal.
As for your ranking itself, it's pretty similar to what I'd probably do if I were to put these in some sort of ordered list (other than Bloodborne being at 1 or 2.) I fully admit I'm lukewarm on Demon's Souls, coming to it years later (and then finally finishing it with the remake,) but that's a discussion that requires more paragraphs of text than I'm willing to write at the moment.
Having watched a playthrough of Lunar Silver Star Story Complete recently, the Working Designs script definitely injects a lot of... personality into that game. Most of it is good. Some of it is not. There's a charm to that stuff; it loops all the way around from being embarrassingly dated to retrograde kitsch. It's the flipside of something like Revelations: Persona's original localization.
Sometimes I think y'all could benefit from playing like... a Ys game or something whenever JRPGs are brought up on the pod. If you want a fast, fairly straightforward game whereupon the numbers do go up which lasts less than 20 hours, may I recommend Ys Origin or Oath in Felghana. It's not like every single example of the genre is some ponderous animation-heavy turn-based affair which lasts 80 hours.
While more people should plays Ys, it's and action rpg, when people talk about jrpgs they generally don't mean any rpg made in Japan, they generally mean the classic FF/DQ style (party based/turn based/random encounters etc etc)
I might challenge that point a little but, even if you restrict it to those specific criteria, there are plenty of JRPGs that don't fit the generalization of "they're all 100 hours long and grindy and so slooooww." I mean, hell, mainline Final Fantasy hasn't been turn-based for 20 years.
This is absolutely a "me" problem, and I want to acknowledge this, but like... there's nothing interesting about rehashing the same handful of complaints people have had about Japanese RPGs since like Final Fantasy 8, especially when alternatives do exist.
Sometimes I think y'all could benefit from playing like... a Ys game or something whenever JRPGs are brought up on the pod. If you want a fast, fairly straightforward game whereupon the numbers do go up which lasts less than 20 hours, may I recommend Ys Origin or Oath in Felghana. It's not like every single example of the genre is some ponderous animation-heavy turn-based affair which lasts 80 hours.
You are deeply cursed, but at some point you'll have to run out of bad N64 racing games, right? oh, what's that? The only good N64 racing game is Diddy Kong Racing, a game that has a non-zero chance of appearing on the NSO offering before it comes up for your feature? Well that's cool. Have fun with, um... Lego Racers. Or maybe one of those Cruisn' games. I bet those are probably still at least playable.
Don't worry, I'm sure the Chameleon Twists and Gauntlet Legends of the N64 catalog are right around the corner.
Also, and I don't mention this often, but we're excluding any game that is already available on NSO. Kinda defeats the purpose otherwise. It is very brave of me to exclude a dozen of the few games actually worth playing on the N64, and I thank you for saying so. (Related: February 25th saw the addition of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, so now that's out of the running.)
Oh, I see you've chosen pain. Wouldn't want that pesky Ocarina of Time to get in the way when there's the best of the best, like Rampage Universal Tour, to be played. I, um, rented that game at one point back when I still had a N64 and game rentals were still a thing. I don't remember anything about it, other than thinking World Tour was actually a better game. Mischief Makers is probably okay, given the Treasure pedigree, but I never rented that one.
We recorded our Ogre Battle 64 pod today, so look forward to our comprehensive thoughts on that sometime in a week or two. That game is, um. Dense. It's a lot, and most of that podcast is just breaking down the mechanics. Our next ep is gonna cover the three remaining RPGs for the system that aren't named "Paper Mario" so please look forward to me serruptitiously streaming at least some of Quest 64, Hybrid Heaven, or Aydin Chronicles: The First Mage. You know, so you have an idea of what you're in for.
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