This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

I loved the hell out of Retro Game Challenge. Such nice nostalgia food…. The inclusion of magazines and etc was icing on the cake.

Sharecrow wrote: ↑03 May 2023 11:49 I loved the hell out of Retro Game Challenge. Such nice nostalgia food…. The inclusion of magazines and etc was icing on the cake.

RGC is definitely cute, and a surprisingly competent overall game in its own right on top of that cuteness... and Xenogears is definitely flawed AF and bogged down by one of the most indulgent trash-anime plots and storylines... but at its core it's a mechanically interesting RPG, so I have to give it a grudging vote here.

I didn't expect to find a matchup where I played and liked both games involved here.

Xenogears has its issues but I have a lot of nostalgia for it. It has a LOT of text, which is both a blessing and a curse (some characters get developed well, but a fair amount of it is fluff and the text speed is pre-set), but the music is fantastic, the set pieces are fun, and the core characters and concepts are interesting. It feels a bit like a SaGa game in that there are lots of different concepts the team wanted to explore but they don't all mesh cleanly together so some characters like Rico get driven to the wayside as soon as their arc is complete. It's definitely messy, but I still enjoy it. I don't think I would enjoy a remake if it sanded off those rough edges.

Retro Game Challenge is great fun. The RPG game was the only one that 100% clicked with me and drove me to complete it. Love the vibe and premise though.