This entire topic is flamebait, so why the hell not, dawg :3

Eusis, having read the spoiler text, WTF? Does the scene actually go like that? If so, it's damn brutal. Then again, it's mother. That series isn't nice in the oddest of ways.

Also, someone mentioned buzz-buzz earlier. While I think that was at least partially IN JEST or something, and while I wouldn't say it's say, it is a rather odd seen! Buzzbuzz, being a being of a immense power (of immense power?) just gets... squished. 'Voltaireian' would be a suitable adjective, were that a word.

Also! The Mani-Mani statue. what was up with that? Also, was Carpainter supposed to be Jesus? The guy looks like a rabbi, Carpainter as a word looks a LOT like carpenter (which jesus was), and he DID found a religion.  Anyway, that wasn't sad.

Hm. Metal Saga. Talk to some of the important NPCs with the main character dead and watch them freak out (or talk to Misha or N...icolai's parents when one of them is dead).

Ultima 7. Just gonna go ahead and spoil this one because the game is old and this isn't really a plot twist or anything. basically, you go to skara brae, which is some island where everyone is dead because an experiment to get rid of a necromaner went wrong and sort of just blew everything the fuck up. anyway, the ghosts are still on the island and going about like nothing is wrong, which is just a tad surreal. However, when the plot arc there comes to an end, the mayor ends up sacrificing his soul to, er, I guess complete annihilation in order to stop the necromancer and free everyone's spirits. I'm horrible at retelling these things. It's really quite sad, though. Honest.

Also, this technically isn't an RPG at all, but there was this secondlife predecessor called ActiveWorlds that I played for a bit. It was, like secondlife, relatively vacant. So I'd just walk around some of the various empty, yet frequently well designed, worldspaces. It was sort of like walking through a post apocalyptic dreamscape. Maybe not sad, actually. Just oddly chilling.

Also, the endinf to Honor Quest: Special Edition. If anyone knows what that is, I'm going to be extremely... terrified.

I think i saw someone mention Terranigma. Quite. The part where you have to eat that animal after it fell down the... landslide thing (Goat? Elk?) was... odd.

the junkyard of toys in legend of mana was awesomely warped too!

also the harvest moon series had various sad moments. karen's implied suicide! that seen in the original where elle's bird flies away (P-Chan? Ptitsa-chan?)! the entirety of forget-me-not-valley!

Alternatively, just make a game based on symphony fantastique. that's ready-made tragic classic music fun. It could end in the famous scene where Berlioz slips in front of a streetcar and is decapitated after leaning on the railing that Ananushka spilled sunflower oil on.

This isn't really sad, but it's sort of warped and tragic in its own right. There's this game, which I doubt any of you have played, called Albion. Amiga game? PC port? Easily downloadable from places on the web which willn't be linked to.

Anyway, so the first race you encounter in the game is this species of cat-like people-things, who are rather short lived. 30 years is the average lifespan or thereabouts. The implications of this and their acceptance of it are sort of grim (especially in the context of you getting a few of them in your party, which at that point consists of a guy that's 25 and a guy that's 50).

The rather disturbing part is that they can extend their lifepsans by putting their consciousness into another person. That person has to be one of their own infant children. Transfering conciousness, btw, kills the host body. So given that this is basically infanticide, certain people elected to do it if and only if they are vital thinkers or mages or whatever. Some of them refuse to do it.

The saddish part is this:

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I'm not willing to say that this is totally true. While, say, a lot of shooters do just focus on action and whatever, a lot of them go beyond that. Isolation, for instance -- really heavy isolationg -- is a common theme, and a lot of games just run with it (System Shock, Metroid, etc). Or the Nali culture in Unreal is just, well, sad, really, what happened to it. Going with things like Half-Life or Unreal, we're not so much focused on story, but atmosphere. You can have a tragic, depressing atmosphere. And the end result isn't really that different. Although, caring about story in shooters might be something unique to the PC crowd. I dunno

Also, the psychological and sexual themes that end up in the R-Type games -- especially, er, Final -- are definitely worth noting.

the wing commander series and freespace also come to mind as action games that are rather plot centric. Wing commander was *not* a happy series, for that matter.

Anyway, sad content.

Does Valkyrie Profile really count? Everyone dies, sure. But the fact that they all end up being legendary heroes in the afterlife or whatever sort of deadens the effect. The idea of characters dying being sad is because they GO AWAY FOREVER. By reversing the process, it's sort of... a different effect.

Also, I do consider the ending you get in CT when you lose to Lavos to be the best. The 'good' endings are kind of sappy.

And... I'm tired of people using the word philosophical to refer to everything.

Philosophy or not, it's horribly worded and it sounds emo. As verifiable, absolute proof of this fact, when I was 15, I wrote this horrible emo poem, which had a line in it that was ALMOST IDENTICLE to that.

also, nietzsche is dead.

Okay, so people talk about like, getting 20 or 30 hours into a game and getting bored. Are you ONLY playing that game during that time? If so, jesus christ, no wonder you're getting bored.

Right. FFXII's battle system actually requires to use buffs and things, and you can eventually null certain status immunities. Other FFs have sort of conditioned everyone to, er... do this less, I guess.

And as for levelling up, just develop a good rotation strategy for your characters and you SHOULDN'T need to do much extra fighting to keep everyone roughly even.

Actually, you might need to grind, but that would be MUCH more for money than for the exp. Usually you can get by with older equipment though.

Every JRPG I've spent longer than 60 hours playing:

Xenogears
Chrono Trigger
Tales of Symphonia
Legend of Mana
SMT:Nocturne

They're could be more. We're not entirely sure.

It's philosophical if, say, you're 15 and don't know what philosophy is. Other than that, it just doesn't really make sense. I mean, it seems to be saying that religious people are murderers. Sure. Okay. That's a nice sweeping generalization. It might make sense in the context of the game, but beyond that, no, it's very simple on a philosophical level, and too inspecific to mean anything.

Ahaha. This. Yeah. See, I don't might it being real time hack 'n slash at all. However, I believe that if a game is an action RPG, it needs actual action, which DS did not have.



Do you mean losing, or getting knocked over? If it's the latter, that's just some visual effect that doesn't matter at all.

Also, your experience level doesn't matter much, so much as your equipment does. Whether or not it's hard depends on if you've been using the licenses properly.

Did Square always have such horribly emo writing in their games?

Ultima 3 is actually... beefed up from the PC version, somewhat substantially. Ultima 5, like Ultima 7 on the SNES, seems to have very little to do with the PC counterpart. At least visually and engine wise, it's totally different. It's also real-time and runs at about three frames per second, so I have no idea if it actually IS that different. It is, in any case, utterly unplayable.

Basically if it matters, though, in Ultima 4 PC, each NPC had a dialogue tree of sorts, and gathering information, finding out things to ask certain NPCs, and basically getting info from people was a VERY substantial portion of the game. Ultima 4 NES just reduced everyone to one-line, signpost NPCs. So basically, were talking reducing everyone from about 4-8 sentences down to about one to three.