Browsing the reviews, I can only conclude that people were expecting a very different game than what they got. It currently languishes at a baffling 77% on Opencritic (86% on Steam) and doesn't really seem like it found its audience. Unfortunately, I have never actually met anyone else who has played Phoenotopia. It's a beautiful package, and despite its surprising length (around 30 hours) it never felt like it was overstaying its welcome. The combat is tactical and rife with interesting techniques, and the difficulty curve was challenging but only rarely frustrating. The map is prety small on the whole, but quite dense, with plenty of exploration that often leads to some real high-impact stuff. The core gameplay is inventive and organic, almost like an immersive sim at times. The writing, music and animations are all joyfully made, and that joy creates such an enticing aura that it brought me back to the feelings that got me playing games in the first place, back to my first time with Yoshi's Island and Donkey Kong Country, unsullied by all the expectations and standards I've acquired over the years. A fresh coat of paint applied by a team of developers with more modern design ideals is all it really needs to be great. Despite all that, Zelda 2 is first and foremost a very interesting game unpolished, weird, and daring. Castlevania and its sequel was burned so badly by this effect that it took a decade for anyone to even attempt to shake things up. It's not hard to see why Zelda 2 has so few imitators the obvious black sheep of the series, it remixed the core gameplay of its predecessor so profoundly that it's difficult to even conceptualize it as a sequel. That's right: Phoenotopia: Awakening is a Zelda-2-like, a subgenre so vanishingly small that I can only think of two others ever made (Super Win The Game and Getsu Fuuma Den). And yet, the best game I played last year draws its most salient inspiration from Zelda 2 instead. It's not an outlandish claim to say that Zelda 1 might be the most influential game of all time. Tunic is deeply driven by the same mysterious, unguided, experimental vibe that made Zelda 1 what it was, later adopted by Dark Souls and rebuilt from the ground up in Breath of the Wild. In less-patient circles, there's been a lot of talk about last year's indie darling Tunic, a game that owes an extraordinary amount to the first Zelda game. The old /r/patientgamers Essential Games List Please use flair to display what games you’re currently playing, not a punch line, username, tag, URL, or signature. New, mobile-friendly spoilers can be posted using the following formatting: Want to play online in a dead gaming community? We expect you to know these rules before making a post. Please click here to see our current rules. We no longer maintain our posting rules in Old Reddit. Join our Discord Join our Steam Group Follow us on Twitter Posting Rules Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases. A gaming sub free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game.
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