At least you don't have to play completely through an entirely different game every time you need to replace a dead character. Unlike easy RPGs where the monsters near your starting point are all pushovers, there's almost nowhere in the game where you might not encounter a battle that is simply unwinnable. It is literally quite possible (probable, even) that you could put 40 hours into playing Wizardry I, transfer your party to Wizardry II, and then have your entire party wiped out within 5 minutes in their first battle, forcing you to replay 40 hours of Wizardry I again before you even have an opportunity to give the second game another try. I've not played Darkest Dungeons, but I see that it's labeled a roguelike. Rogue (released in 1980) was coincidentally the first computer game I ever owned. It and all roguelikes feature permadeath as a defining gameplay mechanic. Of course, actually finishing Rogue wasn't something that most people could ever do, but it was fun just to see how far you could get before dying. "Finishing" wasn't really the point. We are so off topic.
Just for two posts, the rest was enough on point, I think. I honestly don't know what influenced what besides having that mascot overflow after Sonic was successful and little more. The few I knew are already listed, the only one I could think of right now is Sonic influencing the market trend of resurrecting or not giving up with a franchise because, if Sonic has survived for 30 years, a lot of other series could as well. I used to play Tomb Raider games and, there they are still! You wouldn't believe that after playing The Last Revelation and specially Angel of Darkness.
Lara Croft has wide-reaching celebrity that far exceeds any games she's ever appeared in. She's been on more magazine covers than any other game character, and a lot of those magazines were not gaming mags. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of people in the world who know who Lara Croft is have never played a Tomb Raider game in their lives. Rebooting her game series isn't going to have much impact on that. It's like rebooting Spider-Man or Batman...happens all the time, but people are more or less satisfied so long as the character remains recognizable. I also have nothing further to add regarding influential Sega games, but to me, the most interesting thing about Sonic is that it's the only media franchise I can think of which is FAR more successful outside of its country of origin. Sega would still be going strong in Japan with its various RPGs, but would Sonic still exist if Sega had only the Japanese market to depend on?
I think you're right about Metroid. I'm no expert in soccer games, but it seems obvious that any soccer game is going to sell better in the rest of the word since its the most popular sport in the rest of the world (except America). Of course, Pro Evolution Soccer IS the most successful soccer game series within Japan, while FIFA dominates sales in the rest of the world. What would be REALLY crazy is if some Western-developed game found its biggest success in Japan, but that is probably of the "when pigs fly" kind of likelihoods.
Well baseball is the most popular sport in Japan while it has limited appeal in Europe and is declining in the US. Don't know if that translate to any gaming IP though.
Yeah, I meant Western-developed VIDEO game, not just any type of game. I'm not aware of any Western-developed baseball games being published in Japan, let alone being successful (non-localized English versions of some MLB games are available, though).
Yeah. It's rare to even find a Western game that is popular in Japan. On one hand, would you call Donkey Kong Country a game with potential Sonic influence? It has the roll, and the sidekick.
I'm not the one to ask LOL. I honestly think this thread was finished a long time ago and it's sort of resorted to grasping at smaller and smaller straws in what is (in my opinion) a sort of insecure (and unnecessary) attempt to seek validation for games that can stand up just fine on their own, regardless of how they might have influenced anything else. Picking games apart to the point of singling out every gameplay mechanic shared by another game is taking things too far, I think. No one needs to point to the first game featuring a character who can jump or the first game where killing an enemy gives you points and say that it directly influenced every other game with those mechanics. They simply became part of a common videogame language, and their inclusion in further games isn't due to any specific influence from any one game that came before. Even less common mechanics like a roll aren't so removed from basic concepts of movement that their inclusion has to be traced back to inclusion in another videogame. People and objects were rolling well before videogames existed. I'm not picking on you or anyone else contributing to this thread, but I DO believe all of the major influential points have already been covered.
It's a reach definitely, but with more context it kinda makes sense. DKC was Nintendo's comeback game against Sega/Sonic. If it was a random game, then I'd call it a streach. As for Japan, it is rare to even find Western games popular there besides Minecraft. Heard Crash Bandicoot had a following?
Sonic had such a profound impact on the 16-bit generation it’d be a stretch to say it played no role in the minds of devs. I mean Sonic even got a call out in the DKC (well his shoes did), so I’m sure the devs had the series in mind as “the game to beat” even if Sonic’s actual gameplay were not an inspiration for the game’s mechanics. Edit: The reference was actually in DKC2. I don’t like the DKC games very much so they blend together for me. Music kicks ass though!
Heck Sonic was getting targeted even in the PS2 era. I'm not too into DKC much myself, or Rare as a whole. I can play them but like you said it all blends together for me.
I only ever played Lunar Silver Star Story Complete on the PlayStation, but it seems like a fairly standard JRPG to me. A pretty good one, but I wouldn't consider anything about it influential. The original was apparently the all-time best-selling Sega CD game in Japan...with 100,000 copies sold. Which is less than half of what the PSX version sold in the USA, despite it being a niche RPG made perhaps moreso by its inhibitive price (the PSX version shipped with a soundtrack, making of CD, hardcover book, and cloth map, so the initial retail price was around $70 IIRC). Vastly different numbers of installed user-bases, I guess.
I'd say that the Lunar series, on Sega-CD and Saturn, along with the first two Grandias that followed on Saturn and Dreamcast, were highly influential JRPGs. I know that I'm not alone in holding the Grandia series in especially high regard, but we wouldn't have them without the Lunar series. Each of these entries were critically acclaimed upon release, with Lunar: The Silver Star, the first in the series, ranking as the top Sega-CD release in Japan and second worldwide behind Sonic CD. It was innovative at the time for incorporating voice acting and FMV cutscenes. Grandia was noted as a benchmark of 32-bit JRPGs and more deserving of any genre fans attention than FFVII in contemporary gaming mag reviews. The sequel was/is praised for its innovative, fast paced combat and came highly recommended for Dreamcast owning RPG fans.
Sure, it was a great game, but influential? OK, so it had voice acting and animated cutscenes, but that wasn't new in 1992. The PC Engine CD had been out for 4 years by the time Lunar was released for the Sega CD, and RPGs with voice acting and fully animated cutscenes were popularized by Tengai Makyo, released 3 years before Lunar, in 1989. Not particularly known in the West, the Tengai Makyo series was nevertheless hugely successful in Japan (over 2.2 million copies sold) and the 2nd game in the series was the best selling PC Engine game ever, so it definitely deserves all of the credit for jump-starting animated cutscenes and voice acting in JRPGs. I guess Lunar could be considered influential in that sort of general "it was a good game that people liked" kind of way, but I don't think it did anything particularly new that was copied by others, which seems to be the definition of influential being used in this thread.
Some of mine would be Joe Montana 2 - One of the very 1st games with play by play commentary F1 Beyond the Limit - One of the 1st games I can remember that featured a classic history mode, where you could play classic evens from the past. PopfulMail - One of the 1st games I can ever remember when more or less every character in the game had a speaking part, fully voiced. NBA Action - One of the 1st games I remember to use actual player likenesses (face scans) for the player's faces. Sonic Adv - I think one of the very 1st games to look to use actual facial capture for lip movement and expressions, building on what the Sonic Team used for the Irimajiri-san demo Sensible Soccer - Must be one of the 1st and very few games to use actual fans chats from a real league game
