A good fantasy book? you know, wizards, dragons, princesses, that kind of stuff
ystael @ ystael @beehaw.org Posts 0Comments 29Joined 2 yr. ago
ystael @ ystael @beehaw.org
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Into Great Silence (originally: Die große Stille), a nearly wordless 3+ hour documentary about the monks of a Carthusian monastery in France.
You should watch it because it makes one really feel, as much as a movie can, their lives of meditative devotional repetition. I was able to touch for just a moment the peace they strive to immerse themselves in.
(I also felt cold. Those habits cannot possibly be enough in winter.)
This is all going to be "great gameplay" rather than "great story".
If you have a way to play 3DS games and a tolerance for punishment in your JRPG dungeon crawlers, the Etrian Odyssey series has some of Yuzo Koshiro's best work.
- This is the first random battle theme in Etrian Odyssey IV. Your first battle of the game, against a couple of grasshoppers, to this.
- When you hit something more serious for the first time, you get this instead.
- Now you're in trouble.
- And, uh, there's this memorable remix of the wandering-boss theme from the first game.
You already have Persona games in your list, but let's add some more Shin Megami Tensei:
- Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne random battle theme
- Shin Megami Tensei V random battle theme
- Digital Devil Saga I last boss, first phase (the second phase is sadly less original)
Finally ... Monster Hunter is an incredibly fun and addictive game series, and though it doesn't center the music quite as much as a typical JRPG does, it's got some great stuff. I particularly like the soundtrack of MH: World -- although the newer game MH: Rise tried something new with its mostly choral arrangements, I think they are not quite as memorable overall.
- Desert zone battle from Monster Hunter: World
- Arena battle from Monster Hunter: World (it's particularly impressive the way this theme, the small-monsters arena battle theme, and several of the town themes reuse the same melodies in different arrangements)
- Ice zone battle from Iceborne expansion
- Zinogre, everybody's favorite thunder puppy, World version
Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.
- bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)
- climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset
- share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach
They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while you're not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)
That is gorgeous! I do a lot of curry, tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, etc but I have never tried ramen - always thought the broth would be a huge project. But you make it look so good!
Are you older? My parents moved near Traverse City to retire, since my family has done summer vacations up there for 70+ years. The year-round population in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties now skews heavily older due to all the retirees, and also due to gentrification pricing a lot of families out.
This has mixed effects on health care in particular. On one side, a higher proportion of medical professionals work every day with the specific problems of an older population, and there are lots of relevant specialists. On the other side, availability of primary care can be difficult.
There's always Super Hexagon!
I'm surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that's because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.
I don't know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: "Rulers of the Wildspire", "Dancer in the Coral Highlands", "Roars across the Hinterlands". You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you're fighting something in that zone that doesn't have its own theme - so they'd better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!
If you are looking for "learn fight, get better, epic win" without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?
It's not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.
And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all you've lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you haven't even lost that.)
A few I've enjoyed that aren't mentioned elsewhere so far:
Other replies have mentioned Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, which I enjoyed a lot; and David (and Leigh) Eddings, which were my first big-kid fantasy novels (as for many other other American children of the 70s and 80s). Another long series in something of the same vein as Eddings is Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar saga; I haven't read the entries after 2000, but before that it was a lot of fun.