Quirky Indie RPGs - Depression is optional

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Sparky Lurker

Sparky Lurker

kiwifarms.net
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On the last decade we saw a boom of Quirky Indie RPGs, with varying degrees of quality, the majority of them used Mother/Earthbound and Yume Nikki as their foundation, but as of more recent they branched out and started using other game's mechanics too (Bug Fables with Paper Mario and Everhood with Guitar Hero), a lot of popular ones already have dedicated threads on the forum, but I decided to make a more general one covering less talked stuff that might be good or just another YIIK, here a few upcoming ones:

Oddventure, another Mother-like with prefix Odd that likely won't release anytime soon:
In Stars and Time, a Quirky Indie RPG with a depressive OC, letter soup characters and time looping mechanics:
A Frog's Tale, clearly inspired by Mario and Luigi with timed attacks:
Born of Bread, a Paper Mario inspired one that has a very clumsy UI:
Another Crusade, a Super Mario RPG inspired one where almost every character looks like Geno:
Dreamed Away, a lesser Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass a Yume Nikki like with bullet hell combat:
Demonschool, a Persona-themed Into the breach:
Wrestlequest, a recently released wrestling RPG full of QTEs that got criticized because of said QTEs:
World of Horror, a survival-horror RPG that is basically Junji Ito meets Lovecraft and also got very popular in Early Access:

Also talk about released stuff that can either be creepy (Fear and Hunger), abstract (Hylics) or retard (Ikenfell).
 
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Im not really into this genre, so I'm not a fair judge of whether this game is good, but it fits the Earthbound/Mother mold. I played a few hours and it is kind of funny in a snarky redditor way.
Citizens of Earth
This is an excerpt from a metacritic user review of the game, its a fair summation of my experience.
What do you get when take an old school RPG and mix it with a new and fresh way of story telling? You get Citizens of Earth. In Citizens of Earth, you’ll play as newly elected “Vice President” of Earth who wakes up at home after his first day in office, only to find a sinister plot happening in his home town.
Citizens of Earth plays out just like you would expect from any traditional RPG, but rather than a hodgepodge group of people who don’t know each other, you’ll begin Vice President’s adventure fighting with (rather as) your mother, brother and other townsfolk from your home town. I think this worked well with the story line, because what better reason should a Vice President fight evil, when he’s not fighting next to his fellow politicians, than to protect his home? You can have up to three citizens in your party, all having different abilities like the Baker who produces freshly baked, health-restoring bread to heal his allies. Vice President leads his trusty citizens through combat, including a Barista who can scald enemies with hot coffee or sell useful power-up items to other party members. This type of initiation and story telling makes the title fresh and interesting and I wish more games would include a fresh, funny story like Citizens of Earth has, but does the meat of the game hold up to its great introduction? It left me wanting to see what all the citizens do, and collecting all of the Citizens of Earth helped stretch an already long title into a quest for more than completion.

While Citizens of Earth isn’t a visual diamond, live game play does the title considerably more justice than a screenshot can give it. In the traditional style of a JRPG, you’ll be fighting in an arena for every fight, with menus for selection. Citizens of Earth looks as good as it gets in this regard, but it’s not flashy either, just respectable. With a cartoon-focused style, Citizens of Earth is its own league of art and design, but it’s not the shiniest title on the block – it just looks good.
You’re the Vice President, as we mentioned earlier, and waking up in your mother’s house after your first day of ruling over the entire world is a fitting scenario for this tale of twists and turns. Set in a small home town sent into turmoil, Citizens of Earth runs across a major plot-line and a sub-plot, disguised as the major plot. As you spend your days fending off the forces of evil on Earth, your first adventure blends straight into a war at the corporate level – an appropriate fight for any new Vice President of Earth. At home, you’ll begin by taking on your former rival candidate for Vice Presidency, who causes a small riot in your town. Forcing a barricade of police around the city, this begins a small scale experience of that traditional RPG feeling that CoE will be known for. Tackling your way through endless waves of protesters; fans of your latest election of course, begin unlocking the Vice President’s first followers with the defense of the town, and later the world. Reaching forward, after the protesters are cleared, you’ll unravel a sinister plot from an alien civilization to take over the world – but can you conquer the scum of the universe, or will Moonbucks’ evil alien corporation conquer you? Citizens of Earth pulls a fun twist while not taking itself too seriously, making the story a nice change of pace in a world full of overly confrontational titles.
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Peanut Butter in Peril said:
I stumbled upon this a while ago.

Apparently this is the fourth year of Mother Direct. If you do a liitle more digging there might be some gems from the previous years.

I know it's mostly EarthBound/Mother related stuff but there's a few indie ones in there.
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They are all uninspired imitations. Maybe they should come up with some original ideas
 
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I'll vouch for World of Horror. I think it's a pretty good adventure/RPG game, though I'll always say that it needs more and more cases/stories available to add variety in runs. I'm a fan of Ito's work, and it feels like it nails that kind of horror pretty well. It's a decently challenging game, too, and I'd say it's more akin to a roguelite than something like Earthbound.
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
Earthbound might be the most damaging game ever made. The games it inspired are trash and probably caused more deaths (through trooning and suicide) than any "violent" game.
All the "Quirky" indie games are trash that take the quirkiness of the original as justification for degenerating into an infantile state.
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Motherlike games have a tendency to focus on quirky first, good experience second.
 
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What I don't like about a lot of these and similar "spiritual successors" is how they copy everything.

You like Paper Mario. It's fun. You want to make a game inspired by Paper Mario. Do you make a game that takes what you loved about the original, expands on it, removes some stuff you didn't like and adds some brand new ideas you wanted to try? No. You take the gameplay from Paper Mario, along with the art style, animation timing, feel, UI, atmosphere everything. That's Bug Fables.

Same with Born of Bread. Why the hell is everything made of paper? Because you liked Paper Mario and have no originality.

At that point you're not making a game inspired by something else, you're just remaking the game but worse.

B-but if it's not exactly the same, how will people know what it was inspired by?
 
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Omori is a good example of this. I actually forgot the game of the game so I searched "depressed earthbound game" and it came up lol. There's nothing special about the game it's just a typical JRPG with a boring plot that takes too long to go anywhere. I dropped it after a couple of hours what a waste of time.
Biggie Smalls' Taint said:
What I don't like about a lot of these and similar "spiritual successors" is how they copy everything.
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That's a very good point. If you look at the end of the Another Crusade video that OP posted you can see they're even copying the design of old SNES covers for their own cover. It's sad even something as simple as a cover is stolen from the past shows just how uncreative these people are.
 
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I hope In Star and Time sells 41 copies. A Frog's Tale looks okay, but too cutesy and also kinda cringe, plus I don't like the fact it has some sort of rhythm mechanics.

Biggie Smalls' Taint said:
What I don't like about a lot of these and similar "spiritual successors" is how they copy everything.
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I wouldn't mind that if they at least put their own spin on it, and actually make a good game. That seems impossible for Earthbound and Pokemon clones, but other genres do it pretty well, especially Mega Man clones.
 
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Anon88 said:
Omori is a good example of this. I actually forgot the game of the game so I searched "depressed earthbound game" and it came up lol. There's nothing special about the game it's just a typical JRPG with a boring plot that takes too long to go anywhere. I dropped it after a couple of hours what a waste of time.
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Never forget.
Getting away with accidental murder and staging a suicide is perfectly okay so long as your cast are young, adorable and look like loli/shota characters for tranny groomers to lust after.
 
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Peanut Butter in Peril said:
I stumbled upon this a while ago.

Apparently this is the fourth year of Mother Direct. If you do a liitle more digging there might be some gems from the previous years.

I know it's mostly EarthBound/Mother related stuff but there's a few indie ones in there.
Click to expand...
Tails from Alteria might be the dumbest Paper Mario-like ever, it looks like they completely gave up after adding their fursonas in the game:
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
Earthbound might be the most damaging game ever made. The games it inspired are trash and probably caused more deaths (through trooning and suicide) than any "violent" game.
All the "Quirky" indie games are trash that take the quirkiness of the original as justification for degenerating into an infantile state.
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LISA Trilogy was pretty good imo
 
There's also "OTHER: Her Loving Embrace" where you fight a bunch of clones of the Wario Land 4 shopkeeper
and "Knuckle Sandwich" which is coming out soon and I made a thread on. Not sure whether this is going to be good or bad because the art and music is great but the personality could either be "almost YIIK levels of bland" or "Australian Psycho" but I'm thinking it's the former and the WTF bit in the DEMO that got me hooked was just a fluke. Was also extremely surprised to find that the developer was married to a woman. Guess the "marriage" part should've clued me in.
E: There was also Blue Omen Operation but then the developers decided that they didn't want to finish the game people paid them money for on Kickstarter. Thanks guys, you rock!
 
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Blue omen operation was shilled as the next big thing from "hype" youtubers like the two best friends iirc, least I remember the "YOOOOOOO DOOOODSS LESSGOOO" types were creaming their pants over it, but at the time the devs were spending more of their time shit posting on twitter so the signs were there

I just find it funny that they waited this long to finally admit they don't care anymore
 
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