#BGE2020 - Round 2 - Pool 113

[This Old Neon]

Welcome to the second round of #BGE2020 pools!

Each game is randomly seeded into pools using the sequence generator at Random.org. There's no seeding, no ranking, and no preference or prioritization.

The results of the pools will determine how each game stacks up in the elimination rounds, coming... realistically in early 2021.

HOW TO VOTE

Voting is ranked, but it's not super intuitive, so listen up.

• You have 6 total votes to distribute.
• You can only select up to 3 options.
• You can only give each option up to 3 votes.
• NOTE: The number you pick is not the RANK of your choice (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd), but the number of VOTES you're giving it.
• The more votes (bigger numbers) a game gets, the better for that game.

EXAMPLES

• You could pick three games and order them by giving them 3, 2, and 1 votes.
• If you like three games equally, you could give them 2, 2, and 2 votes.
• If you only like two games, you could give them 3 and 3 votes (or 3 and 2, etc.).

This gives you a lot of granularity for how you assign your votes and thereby a lot of influence over which games can do well. Use your power wisely!

If you have questions, ask before voting!

[Kong Wen]

Damn, this is a great bracket. I'm going to lock these votes in before I overthink them.

Full votes to the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a surprisingly deep and complex strategy game for a console at that time. It's also quite unforgiving! When someone sends you an envoy, you have the option to kill the officer outright! (In later games, they add a layer of RNG to this feature so the envoy has a chance to escape.) If you leave a unit on a tile that's on fire for a turn, the general instantly dies, instead of just taking damage and/or getting injured.

Two votes for Dark Souls II, which is excellent but falls just short of living up to its predecessor(s). It's still quite a solid entry in the series and holds up fairly well now that some time has passed.

My last vote could have been for almost anything else here, particularly the amazing visionary genre-bender ActRaiser, or the surprisingly competent 3D-ified and voiced remake of Final Fantasy IV, but I had to toss it to the charming run 'n gun from The Behemoth, Alien Hominid.