The Daunting Sagas of Gaming (AKA calm down RGG Studio / Falcom)

 This is my first blog post in well over a decade, after I totally erased my extremely embarassing late 2000's blog. I have no idea how or why that thing was still live.

Anyway, I'm here to have a ramble about something that's been on my mind for a few years now - very long video game series with interconnected lore that get new entries far too regularly.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some long-running franchises with ridiculously complex lore. I'm an unabashed fan of Kingdom Hearts! But there's one thing Tetsuya Nomura and company aren't - efficient. It's been how many years since Kingdom Hearts 4 was teased and we've gotten basically nothing except mobile game cancellations and blurry screenshots?

By stark contrast we have my two white whales - Like a Dragon AKA Yakuza and Falcom's Trails series. I've played numerous games from each series but they have such a consistent yearly release schedule it feels genuinely impossible for me to "catch-up" without becoming becoming burned out.

Like a Dragon admittedly goes out of its way to essentially pitch each game as an entry point, even if the fanbase would probably vehemently disagree. I bought into this with the first Ichiban game, but I fell off soon after for whatever reason and sure enough, years later, I find out Kiryu is back for the sequel. Naturally that made me want to see Kiryu's whole story through before getting back to it, and since I had only completed 3-5 and 0 prior, that meant a full series playthrough was in order.

The thing with Like a Dragon, though, is that the games are very similar to each other. This has a charm, like a warm blanket made of fistfights on top of skyscrapers, but back-to-back? Even with a few months in between? I just can't muster the enthusiam. And again, this wouldn't be an issue if Sega wasn't continuously pushing them out. In the time since I started playing through the series again, we've seen Ishin, The Man Who Erased His Name, Infinite Wealth, the silly Pirate spin-off, and now Kiwami 3 with new content.

Sure, I'm digging my own grave here, no one is forcing me to be a completionist, but I just can't see how simultaneously pitching the series to newcomers while banking on recognisable characters every year is a good strategy.

Falcom's Trails saga, meanwhile, is even messier. The first game I completed was Cold Steel - I considered it a brilliant entry point as the cast of characters and setting were entirely new. There were allusions, sure, but the cast was just as unfamiliar as the player. Then the sequels were essentially sequels to the (then untranslated) Crossbell arc. Then the Sky guys came back. And all of this felt like it was in the span of 4 years. If you wanted to catch up, you were going to be years behind, unless you have the stomach for very similar RPG mechanics for 200+ hours.

Part of this I would put down to jealousy for those who got in on the ground floor, but once again I have to wonder how sustainable this is for new fans. And now we have remakes of the Sky games which seem like the perfect place to start but by the time they finish up that trilogy would it be worth playing the Crossbell games or waiting for their remakes? And would Cold Steel feel extremely antiquated?

Anyway this is just incoherent ramblings from someone who would love to catch-up with these games but their developers seem dead set on making it impossible for me. Which is obviously a me problem! And what else is an old fashioned blog for it not self-indulgent rambling?

At least Judgment, Ys, and Stranger than Heaven have got my back.