by mento
If I were a video producin' kinda guy, and I wanted (and were allowed, for that matter) to create some video content for Giant Bomb, my first port of call besides the usual LPs and Bombasticas would be belated Quick Looks for the following games to fill in some important (if only to me) gaps in the site's coverage. Giant Bomb has a small team (well, two small teams) and can't reliably cover everything in their busy schedules at the best of times, but in addition they also have a handful of blindspots with the most prominent being Japanese RPGs, and to a lesser extent - I can usually rely on Vinny, Alex or Brad to catch these - graphic adventure games and CRPGs: three of my favorite genres. There's also the handful of games that, for whatever reason, did not see a North American release but did see a European one. It'd be easy enough for Giant Bomb to miss those.
I've specifically chosen games for this list that came out after the Giant Bomb site as we know it formed in July 2008. Technically speaking, they "missed" every game release before then, so there's no point drawing from that immense catalog. In fact, I'm going to set the start point after the first Quick Look that ever went live on the site: The "Gamecock Demos Legendary" video, which appeared on August 27th 2008. I'm also excepting any games that appeared on TNT or UPF in lieu of a separate Quick Look.
If the next person Giant Bomb hires is a JRPG fan, I implore them to get some of these games the overdue attention they deserve. Just find a way to shoehorn it in between the wrestling and DOTA talk.
(P.S. #1: I was tempted to add Deadly Premonition on a technicality, since it never actually got a Quick Look, but I think the site has thoroughly chronicled the adventures of Agent Francis York Morgan (just call him York, everyone else does) in the sleepy burg of Greenvale.)
(P.S. #2: Please feel free to suggest your own favorite games without Quick Looks in the comments below, or make your own list and let me (or ZombiePie) know about it. I'd like to think I can keep up with current releases, but as Giant Bomb is my primary gaming site the chances are if they missed something, so did I. I'd love to hear about any forgotten gems you might know about, especially if they're from the three above genres.)
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(October 24th 2008 [EU]) This utterly absurd disaster survival game takes a few ideas from Irem's famous Zettai Zetsumei Toshi series, released over here as Disaster Report and Raw Danger, and embellishes them just a smidge with an entire 90s Blockbuster's store's worth of awful action movie clichés and overdramatic acting. It out-Kojimas Kojima in its adherence to sheer cinematic lunacy, and ties it all together with some moderately fun light-gun action, some terrible driving sequences and ZZT-style civilian rescue mini-games. It's a game I want Giant Bomb to experience one way or another, if not as a Quick Look then as something more long form. I particularly think Dan and Drew would get a kick out of this one, being the bad action movie buffs they are.
(November 20th 2008) Square-Enix's 2008 RPG, which made ripples at the time for briefly being a 360 exclusive JRPG (that wasn't from Mistwalker) and for adopting the thoroughly Western Unreal Engine, was a hodgepodge of curious ideas and themes that didn't entirely pan out. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easier to look at the game now and marvel at its many innovations and risky chances, though there's no denying it's still on the rough side with its frustratingly randomized combat direction, horrendous UE texture pop-in (mitigated on the PC version) and abstruse character progression mechanics. I really enjoyed the story and setting too, even if the protagonist was a bit of a whiner.
(March 17th 2009) I have a soft spot for Suikoden games, and this was the last one Konami ever published for Western audiences. It's unlikely we'll ever see one again, barring the possibility of a pachinko game that lets you have 108 balls on the table at once. The data truncation process that this DS cart went through meant scrapping a lot of what made Suikoden stand out - the tactical warfare using heroes you'd recruited - and created other interesting problems in the process, like the ludicrously speedy delivery of the main character's voiced lines. It's still a Suikoden game though, and worthy of respect for that if nothing else. Like the Last Remnant, I also think the story is kinda cool. A nihilistic gestalt being comprised of all the souls of a single universe, moving to neighboring dimensions to repeat the process? Eerie.
(March 16th 2010) Speaking of eerie, Fragile Dreams is half RPG and half melancholy walking simulator of the Let's All Go to the Rapture variety. You pick your way across a series of dilapidated and lifeless environments, fighting the literal ghosts of civilization and befriending numerous characters only to lose them again. It's a game that broaches the subject of hope, and the perils and travails faced by its young protagonist often serve to quash that hope more than end his life. This is emotional anime teens dialed up to a nauseating degree, so it's definitely not for everyone. It is, however, a game that deserves some recognition for its distinctiveness.
(September 17th 2010 [EU]) Giant Bomb wasn't around to cover the release of the first Kyle Hyde game, 2007's Hotel Dusk: Room 215, and its sequel Last Window also passed them by thanks to the odd decision to not publish the game in North America. The appeal of these games is twofold: it makes palatable the "things just happen on a schedule" Japanese approach to adventure games, halting the exploration whenever the player finds an important clue to suddenly kickstart some exposition or a completely unrelated incident that moves the plot along, and the game's hero has an appealing rundown quality to him. Kyle Hyde's seen it all in his years on the force and subsequent years as an undercover private investigator and grows tired of fools and liars quickly, so it's fun to watch him bounce off the various NPCs he meets in his two adventures, who either have something to hide or are complete dumbasses (the exception being his boss's flirtatious secretary Rachel, his intellectual equal). Two well-paced, well-written portable adventure games to rival the Phoenix Wrights on the system.
(October 10th 2010) Between Vinny discovering the Zero Escape series now with the recent release of Zero Time Dilemma, discussing his time with each one on the Beastcast, and Patrick's coverage of the first two games in his own features for the site, I think it's fair to say that visitors of Giant Bomb are well acquainted with Kotaro Uchikoshi's series of narratively-complex room escape adventure games. All the same, none of the three games ever saw a Quick Look, and anyone who is interested in the Zero Escape series and their fearsome reputation but doesn't want to get whole swathes of the story spoiled for them (via Patrick's Virtue's Last Reward spoilercast) won't have any videos to peruse on-site for an immediate impression. It'd be hard to convey in a Quick Look what makes the games so endearing - you'd have to show off some of the wild late-game content, perhaps a "bad ending" or two - and for some versions of the game the room puzzles are no longer a factor. All the same, it's a conspicuous gap.
(February 22nd 2011) Another RPG for a portable console, from which it is already hard enough to record footage without having to justify that effort to cover an RPG no-one on staff is interested in. Yet Radiant Historia might be the best RPG for the Nintendo DS, even with all the competition. Its branching timeline paths provide a fascinating non-linear storytelling structure, one that depends on knowledge gleaned from alternate futures and the dangers to come to create a better result in the past. Getting caught in ambushes, rewinding time to warn your allies ahead of time, choosing not to trust the companion who will eventually betray you - as you continue to subvert the timeline to fix errors in your judgement, more and more complications arise to confound you. It's rare to see an RPG so intelligently obtuse, and while its Mega Man: Network style grid-based RPG combat is engrossing enough, it's the many ways you can discover early game overs and see how things would've shaken out if you'd chosen a different path that makes the game so compelling. Like reading a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book with your fingers stuck in multiple folds, strategically holding your place on several earlier decisions just in case you need to go back in a hurry.
(March 29th 2011) As is often the case with their Ys games, Falcom first developed this entry in their long-running The Legend of Heroes series many years ago for PC before it eventually got a PSP/Steam localization thanks to frequent partners XSEED. The Trails in the Sky games are nothing particularly special in terms of graphical wonder or pushing the envelope, but it's a very solid series with some clever writing and twists that perhaps doesn't get the attention it deserves for administering so carefully to the fundamentals of the genre. In addition, new Legend of Heroes games are getting localized all the time now - Trails of Cold Steel 2 is out next month (September 2016, if you're coming to this list late) - so it'd help to have a base with which to help differentiate the new entries in the series.
(February 21st 2012) Vinny and Ryan produced a memorable and typically hilarious co-operative Quick Look for Drinkbox's first Tales from Space game, About a Blob, but the duo never followed it up with a look at its superior sequel. Rather than a pair of blobs, the player now controls a singular and royally-pissed off mutant blob that follows the Katamari Damacy route of starting small - evading giant humans while passing through the plumbing of their homes - before getting big enough to devour the entire planet. As well as being an inventive and brilliant puzzle-platformer, the game has a great B-movie sensibility and macabre sense of humor akin to the "true ending" of the 1980s Rick Moranis "The Little Shop of Horrors" musical, though much of the core gameplay is retained from its predecessor.
(May 31st 2012) I can forgive the Giant Bomb guys to an extent for neglecting Ys. Ys Origin originally came out in 2006 for PC in Japan, so covering its long-delayed English localization in 2012 would've been a stretch. All the same, it'd be the easiest of the five English-language Ys games that came out between 2008 and now - which include The Oath in Felghana for Steam in 2012, Ys Origin for Steam in 2012, Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim for Steam in 2015, Ys Seven for PSP in 2010 and Ys: Memories of Celceta for PS Vita in 2014 - for the guys to record footage for. Maybe they don't care about anime RPGs that look a decade or so old? That'd be fair too, except the Ys games are some of the most fun and accessible (though hardly "easy") JRPGs out there for PC gamers and, unlike their contemporaries, move at an incredible clip rather than bogging you down with hours of exposition. Unusual for a RPG series developed primarily for home computers, they have an "Arcade" sensibility akin to a Gauntlet or a brawler like Shadow Over Mystara from the speedy pace to the rad thrash metal soundtracks. They're all worth a Quick Look at least.
