Social-Distance With a Nice, Long Game

it's looking like alone inside is gonna be our new normal for a while longer as professional shut-ins Yazzie and i have gotten quite comfortable with that but i understand some people might still be getting used to anti-social life which is why i've decided to put together another handy

guide to one of the hobbies that's gotten me through many a depression day and sick week in my life in the last one of these i recommended some good long anime to help keep you occupied under quarantine today for those of you who prefer more hands-on entertainment i've

got a big ol list of big ol video games to help fill the remaining gaps in your schedule specifically single players story driven ones because that kind of thing is my bag baby i'm gonna try to keep my recommendations on the more obscure end of the gaming spectrum

for this because you probably don't need me to tell you that now is a prime time to get good at a souls like thing or that big triple-a sandboxes like horizon zero dawn make for excellent weekly time sinks and given the kind of channel this is don't be

surprised that my pics tend to lean a little we be i've still tried to select a wide range of stuff that will appeal to many different tastes but i'm only one gamer so i'd love to see the rest of you slunk your own suggestions down in the comments

now without further ado let's jump right into the deep end of this list by talking about The Legend of Heroes Trail series between the trails in the sky trilogy and the ongoing trails of cold steel saga six of the nine games in this epic JRPG franchise have been

officially translated into English so far and with each one clocking in at over 40 hours of play time for just their main stories with plenty of extra content beyond that you're gonna want to prepare yourself for an extended stay in their vivid steampunk world I say that because

once you set foot in it you will want to stay for a while there are a few settings in fiction period as richly detailed and ridiculously expansive as the continent of Zoomer eeeh that plays home to the trails series it's a vast land full of many different nations

big and small connected by wars and alliances each containing within it a variety of regions and peoples with their own distinct histories and cultures all woven together into the greater tapestry of the continent itself that alone makes this series an saluté feast for lure hounds but the truly

incredible thing about the trails franchise what makes it in my opinion the most immersive fantasy setting in gaming period is that every single NPC in every last town is a unique individual with their own name personality and relationships with other NPCs that evolve and change inside stories over

the course of your adventure every time you complete a major quest in one of these games every NPC in town will update their dialogue with new stories about what happened to them while you were away which can range from the usual comments on how your actions have affected

the world around you to a local shop keeps complaints about is busybody mom's embarrassing attempts to set him up with every Bachelorette in town and this makes the world of trails feel alive and inhabited like almost nothing else I've played as you can probably imagine the core parties

in each of these games are even better fleshed out than the NPC's and it's often just as much fun hearing them talk back when you strike up a conversation party members from earlier games often pop up as NPCs and later titles and a few NPCs recur as well

which makes the slices of this vast world that each game lets you visit feel truly interconnected whether you start with the more old-school Grandia esque trails in the sky the 3d persona inspired trails of cold steel or the recently released fan translation patch for trails of zero you'll

be thrust into this expansive world in the middle of a full-blown industrial revolution and all of the strife that comes with it over the course of this series you'll witness political upheaval rising international tensions and full-blown war mostly from a small human perspective that sets the real impact

of these events into sharp relief it's powerful stuff to complement these fraught storylines the trails series features a complex tactically oriented battle system that rewards player experimentation and offers a lot of options for customization there is way too much game here to delve into in a short list

like this but if the idea of integrating ff7 s materia system into grandia's positioning based battles sounds appealing to you you're exactly the kind nerd this franchise was made for and trails is just one of many franchises under the greater umbrella of Nihon Falcom so if you're looking

for something more action II with that degree of world-building I'd highly recommend checking out the EES series as well or brandish the dark revenant if you're into dungeon crawlers there's no other developer out there who builds their settings quite like Falcom does though of course there's more than

one way to write a rich lived-in game world or a poor lived-in game world for that matter disco Elysium is an isometric RPG in the vein of OG fallout with a small twist there's no combat to be found here it's entirely driven by dialogue and skill checks it's

a game mostly about walking around town getting to know people and most importantly getting to know yourself also there's a dead body that's been hanging out in a tree out back of your hotel for seven days and you're a cop apparently so maybe you should do something about

that or not it's only as important as you let it be man actually you're cool straight shooting partner Kim is insisting it's pretty important whether you let it be or not so yeah I probably get to that soon but also you've got some pressing you stuff that you

really ought to work through like that time you woke up on the floor of a trashed hotel room with the killer hangover and no memory of who you were how you got there you know five minutes ago golly now that you really put it in perspective you might

be in a bit of trouble here that's what the voices in your head personifying your sense of logic and savage instincts are telling you anyway and you better listen to them they're the only friends you got well aside from kim and he does seem like a pretty good

friend to have not many people would be this understanding of your catastrophic memory loss and eccentric police procedure you assume you don't actually know many people but hey you can get to know them maybe some of them will be your friends even like the owner of this charming

little watering hole you found yourself in wait no he seems like he's pretty upset with you probably something to do with all the broken in your room or the smell coming out of it but maybe that nice old lady in the wheelchair who keeps talking about cryptids or

the drugged up street urchin throwing rocks at the corpse or maybe the racist lorry driver over by the newsstand no no on second thought definitely not him but the option is there if for some unfathomable reason you wanted a friend like that this is a game where you

can be a gun-toting skull measuring cemani x' supremacist fascist if you want to once you find your gun that is and your badge or you can be the last true communist struggling to spark a new revolution in a city still stuck to the boot that stamped out the

old one or you could be an art cop and devote your time to solving crimes against the aesthetic sensibility though if you do your aim may suffer a bit as your hands shake uncontrollably at how it all is it's honestly as much fun exploring your own character as

it is exploring the world he stumbled into in this game and I can't overstate how fun that is either though to say why would be to spoil the magic of deciphering it's surreal dreamlike writing for yourself the thing you really ought to do pandemic or no disco Elysium

is one of the funniest and most thought-provoking pieces of literature I've ever had the pleasure of reading and one of the most human games I've ever had the pleasure of playing if a mix of existential navel-gazing and inventive world building sounds appealing to you Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for

the switch is absolutely essential gaming as well Xenoblade 2 provides a kind of swashbuckling adventure that's been sorely missing in modern JRPGs it feels is reminiscent of Grandia and Skies of Arcadia other games that you should totally play as it does of its darker more overtly philosophical forbearers

Xenogears in Xenosaga it's a thrilling adventure undertaken alongside a lovable crew of misfits and weirdos I've recommended most of the games on this list based on the strength of their story and characters and Xenoblade 2 is hardly lacking in either department but the appeal of its narrative elements

is overshadowed I think by the sheer spectacle of its story monolith soft the studio behind Xenoblade also contributed a great deal to constructing the open-world hyrule scene in zelda breadth of the wild and gorgeous as that game was the inn environments here are magnitudes more beautiful and imaginative

see Xenoblade – isn't set in any old boring fantasy world with conventional land masses or even unconventional ones that float a bit above the clouds the people of Xenoblade twos world live their lives on and in the bodies of massive titans each large enough to carry a whole

ecosystem with it as it swims through the endless sea of clouds surrounding the great world tree this is a game with vistas baby wonders both natural and supernatural and a whole lot of skylines that are picturesque as each new area is a fresh treat for the eyes and

ears Yasunori Mitsuda is a God among composers and you can spend hours upon hours combing over every gorgeous inch of geography with cool surprises and stunning new views waiting for you around just about every corner if you've been feeling cooped up in need of a scenic vacation on

account of you know everything few games are better at selling the illusion of inhabiting a place you've never been before at least outside of VR and if you like what you see there's plenty more spectacular views to be found in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and the weird we use

sort of spin-off Xenoblade Chronicles X the former of which is only gonna get more beautiful when its definitive edition hits which in a few months time I did a big honkin review of that first game very early in my youtube career and the gameplay systems in all three

of them are largely the same so I'll point you there if you want to learn more about how they actually play or what they're about narrative appeal is one thing but sometimes you just want to tinker with some complex game systems until you see them in your sleep

as a series of deeply involved dungeon crawlers the Shin Megami Tensei franchise persona in particular with its wild escapist fantasy of hanging out with your friends outside is kind of perfect quarantine fodder but it's also well known enough especially with all the hype around persona 5 royal that

I probably don't need to tell any of you that at this point but what if I were to tell you that some of the guys who worked on SMT specifically strange journey perhaps the most finely tuned pure dungeon crawler in the series got together with some folk from

tri-ace a studio known for making janky but ambitious RPGs with unique mechanics and oceanic depth to make a thing and the end result is the best jrpg about time travel this side of Chrono Trigger with music by Yoko Shimomura yeah I'll give you a second to clean that

up radiant historia follows stock a young intelligence agent who serves his homeland Alice tell in their endless war against the tyrannical kingdom of granorg which is to be fair ruled with an iron fist by an evil queen and also monarchies are in general so as justifications for endless

wars go there have been worse ones but also Alice tell is kind of like a theocratic military dictatorship so stones glasshouses war is hell you get it stock sadly doesn't have much of a chance to get it himself before he's goddamn murdered to death at the start of

the game but luckily his spy dad remembered to pack his magic time travel book and with it the weird fairy kids who live in the MC Escher painting at the center of all time help him undo his own death in return though stock has to use his new

time-travel powers to single-handedly save the world from being swallowed up by an ever-growing cursed desert to do this he'll have to jump back and forth between two separate timelines plus a third in the 3ds remake perfect chronology infiltrating the enemy kingdom alongside fellow operatives marco and rainy in

one and fighting on the front lines with his best friend rosh in the other peril beset s– them at every turn in both and stock has given many choices to make that will determine his fate and that of the world most of which lead to doom but between

them all lies a singular path to his world's future and he's the only one with any chance of finding it by limiting your travel to stocks personal timeline instead of letting you freewheel throughout all of history radiant historia de emphasizes world exploration and instead encourages you to explore

its characters and plot which allows a great deal of freedom without sacrificing the tight pacing of Morris maduk JRPGs luckily those characters and all three of its plots are plenty enjoyable and the greater story woven between them is a wild ride that will keep you hooked straight to

its conclusion you will need to put in work to reach it though appropriately for a game about time travel radiant historia 'z combat system lets you manipulate its turn order at will its battles also takes pace into account enemies appear on this 3×3 grid which you can push

and pull them around by using special attacks and if two happened to end up in the same space your attacks will hit both combined these two systems allow you to line up powerful screen-clearing combos in a way that feels vaguely puzzle gaming and if you don't learn how

to solve battles efficiently you won't get very far at all with a fun novel combat system and a strong story radiant historia is one of the best traditional JRPGs out there and if you like the genre at all you owe it to yourself to play it if you

don't but you clicked on a video about RPGs chances are you're a more tabletop inclined Western RPG kind of person or if it's not and you just want to play something good with good writing I'd recommend picking up the sorcery games a series of text-based RPGs adapted by

inkle for phones and PC from Steve Jackson's magnum opus fighting fantasy game books of the same name but don't take this to be a mirror choose your own adventure book in app form the games expand substantially on the original mechanics give you sprawling maps to explore and most

importantly remember the choices you make across all four titles and they give you plenty of interesting choices to make as the title suggests sorcery puts you in the shoes of a sorcerer armed with a book of magic spells and if you're used to how magic works in most

video games you know buffs debuffs various flavors of fireball this series may straight-up blow your mind because yeah you can totally throw fireballs and call down lightning and sorcery but you can also use a magic flute to make your enemies dance themselves to exhaustion or scam shop keeps

by buying with a losery gold or clear a room by making it stinky magically stinky all told there are 48 different spells at your disposal in these games all of which even the fireball can be put to thoroughly creative use their effects on the world and the world

itself are described entirely through beautiful prose so you're not limited by programming or art assets only by the imagination of the game's designers and writers the sorcery games give you a lot to think about as you play and give you a lot of control over the story they

tell there's some of the only video RPGs I've played that offer a real taste of that open-ended tabletop magic and with four of them to work through each with an insane amount of replay value unto itself they have plenty of it to offer though if you're still not

satisfied after playing through them all their developer inkle does have other games you can try eightydaze is a highly replayable semi-random text adventure loosely based on a Jules Verne novel I'll let you guess which one that tasks you as Phileas Foggs stalworth Butler pass pong to with guiding

the rich gambler around a wondrous themed Punk alternate history world in 80 days or less and heavens vault which I highlighted in my fall things I liked video is a full-scale sandbox text adventure that has you sailing between moons along the rivers of a nebula piecing together the

history of the ancient civilizations that once occupied it by translating their lost pictographic language into English if you're curious about how far the limits of interactive fiction can be pushed all of these games are must plays if you're looking to read a tighter more linear game on the

other hand I can't recommend the Ace Attorney series highly enough it's six entries plus four spin-offs three of which never left Japan offers some of the best constructed murder mysteries in gaming period which you'll solve by tearing apart witness testimony and pitched cross-examinations peeling back layers of lies

and contradictions to reveal the elusive truth and in the process you'll get whipt the whole bunch and hit with a lot of straight coffee-cups because basically every prosecutor employed by you're definitely not Japanese city is a total lunatic those courtroom battles feel shockingly exhilarating for a game whose

main Anika's reading thanks in no small part to some of the best tunes Capcom's composers have ever put to chip but equal thanks is owed to the characters who serve as your mental sparring partners and supporters a lively and eccentric lot brought to life with sharp dialogue and

big beautiful sprites that are remarkably expressive and animated especially given the limitations they were created under when these games first hit the Gameboy Advance Dan Floyd over at new frame plus broke down how the series uses exaggerated posing and subtle changes in timing to convey personality and tone

and if you become a fan of the series I highly encourage you to give that video a watch if you've got some free time which we both know you do while the faces you'll see in court change from case to case there is a core cast of recurring

characters whom you'll get to know fairly intimately over the course of the series dick gumshoe Larry Butz Maggie bird miles Edgeworth pearl and Maya Fay and of course Phoenix Wright himself have been better friends to me over the years than most actual humans which I know sounds pretty

sad but joke's on you we all lonely now and I speak from experience when I say that these games do an impeccable job of alleviating that condition for the hundred or so hours it'll take to play them all if after all of that you're looking for more simulated

conversations to kind of fill the void of human contact but not really Ace Attorney wasn't the only visual novel juggernaut to rise to prominence on the des the zero escape trilogy penned by Katara Ichiko she blends visual novel elements with escape the room puzzles to create a very

animate a Kahn saw who Chico she's characters tend to be complicated but mostly likable individuals with believable flaws while his scenarios are some of the most batshit insane high-concept sci-fi goodness you will ever have the pleasure of reading slash playing he has a real knack for writing mind-bending

twists that naturally complement equally mind-bending puzzles and with multiple endings to work toward with a strong grasp of cause-and-effect required to reach most of the ones with more than two survivors solving these games will keep you occupied for a good long while and if all that's still not

enough for you you Chico she just released a new game I the somnium files which is kind of similar in concept to it invaded and from what I've played pretty darn awesome though I'm not that far into it yet so I can't yet give it a full recommendation

most of the games I've mentioned thus far have been easily accessible through digital distribution or online storefronts with apologies my last recommendation of the day is a little bit less available and a lot more self-indulgent steam bot chronicles as its title screen is very eager to tell you

is a relaxing nonlinear adventure developed for the ps2 by Iram and published by Atlas back before the successes of odin sphere and the persona series got them to a point where they could release more than 12 or so copies of a game worldwide so it's a bit rare

and also not on the PlayStation Store which is a Wright tragedy because it's also a real bitch to emulate the game already moves a bit sluggishly on its native hardware and even with a beefy modern multi-core CPU you're gonna have to do some fiddling just to get it

running but trust me when I say it is worth the hassle because be a bad guy if you want steam bought Chronicles is the best game ever made or at least I thought it was when I played it back in 2006 and it's still my all-time personal favorite

you remember how neat it was to discover that GTA 5 had a fully simulated stock market whose prices would fluctuate in reaction to your in-game decisions yeah this game did that back on the ps2 this is a ridiculously ambitious full-featured sandbox game both for its time and even

by modern standards where you tour around an idyllic Edwardian countryside ripped straight from a miyazaki pic hauling commodities between cities hustling suckers in pool doing odd jobs playing music with your literal band of friends and generally just trying to get by in a world where oh yeah did

I mention all the cars are giant steam-powered robots because the terrain in this country is a little rocky you see and before anyone came up with the idea of paving over roads some scientists dude was like yo what if we put legs on the cars and then they

did and now we have Trott nabeel's your particular trot bill the Earl Grey mark 2 can be fully customized to your exact specifications with various arms featuring weapons and tools several different sizes and numbers of legs or wheels even if you want to defeat the whole purpose of

the concept and attachments like a flatbed or bus compartment which you can use to do the odd jobs that you'd expect to use those for but also you can like go into dungeons and search for treasure or excavate dinosaur fossils for a museum or go to one of

several arenas and getting giant robot fights for cash or you can rent an apartment decorate it to your liking and invite one of three datable waifu's over to have hot cocoa and clean your ears for you you filthy degenerate all of this Sandboxie goodness is wrapped around a

wonderful character-driven story about the trials and tribulations of being in a band and dealing with the inevitable breakup yes really one where you have a vast amount of choice as to who your character and amnesiac appropriately named vanilla is and what side he falls on in the game's

big conflict which I won't spoil for you because boy does I hope you enjoy it steam bot chronicles ever have some great twists also I think the way it plays is just the neatest the game gives you a great degree of control over your trot 'mobile with each

leg being assigned to an analog stick while the triggers control each arm it's kind of like virtual LAN if you're familiar with that only way slower and clunkier but it does really deliver that feeling of piloting a giant turn-of-the-century mecha and what more could anyone possibly want from

any video game ever there's few other games of this era or any era really that offer anywhere near this much freedom and as someone who specifically is a real sucker for steampunk and mecha stuff it's amazing to be able to immerse myself to that degree in a world

this inherently cool if you have the ability to play a romantic scrap metal adventure steamboat chronicles I can't recommend it enough but if for whatever reason you can't I am planning to start playing through the whole thing again myself because I want to talk about it and my

one and subscriber special and I might just decide to stream the whole experience if there's interest maybe we can help keep each other company let me know in the comments below if that's a thing you'd like to watch and also what other big-ass video games you think more

people out of play also also leave some good book recommendations down there cuz we should all read more and if things do keep being fine books will be the next self-isolation starter pack I put together for you guys since we're all in the same boat now I'm Jeff

through professional sending my love to your mother's basements nope heard it as soon as I said it [Music]