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Xenogears
Xenogears
Just like change your perspective man. You’re looking up into the gooch of the molecule bro.
Sounds like you’ve got some classics lined up but I’d suggest throwing in some more casual stuff too, especially if you’re losing interest in the long-form, story-based games. Something like excite bike or crazy taxi or road rash (I’m partial to old racers) or anything where you just pick it up, play a few rounds and move on. Think arcade style.
I made a favorites list in retroarch and cycle through it. I’ll play the story-based classics too but sometimes it’s difficult to get invested with dated graphics and sound. The pick-up-and-go games I find more accessible as I’m getting older.
Chrno Crusade sorta I guess. You’ll tend to see more Catholic motifs than Christian in anime. Even then it’s not usually explicitly using Christian or Catholic themes, more just aesthetics.
Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve
Played them as demos back when that was a thing and I didn’t get why there’s spheres popping up making battle stop (semi-turned based combat) and why there’s a dude named Ashley.
Tried again a couple years later after playing FF7, connecting that they were all by squaresoft, and it all made sense. Absolutely became a couple of my favorites.
I installed Retroarch on Steam and wrote a script in desktop-mode to point it’s default folder to my emulation files hosted on a home server (raspberry pi w/ external drive). I loaded the script into steam as a non-steam “game” and can run it in game-mode so once it was all set up it’s literally two clicks to get to an enormous library of retro+arcade games.