Put a shocking amount of time into Unicorn Overlord last week.

I think they executed the cross between Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle very well. Squad composition makes up for the lack of individual customization that is typical of the FE lineage of strategy RPGs (as opposed to the FFT/Tactics Ogre line). The overworld management is a fun exploration side activity that isn’t as time-consuming as Three Houses’s social stuff. Basiscape brought its usual excellent soundtrack, and Vanillaware their usual impressively detailed art. Plot is whatever, I don’t play these games for the plot, I play them to make anime sprites stab each other so numbers go up. So, yeah, it’s fun.

(No, I don’t actually like Disgaea that much, mostly because “figuring out how to break the game is the game” doesn’t appeal to me.)

If the head needs to be empty, I find that droney Japanese noise is the best way to get that. Example: Aube - Flare

Lots of great sf/fantasy authors mentioned already, including some I’d argue for as great writers regardless of genre (Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, N. K. Jemisin).

I have three more to suggest in this genre and from this period:

• C. J. Cherryh (Cyteen, Foreigner series, lots more) uses the lens of alien societies – just different enough from ours – to make us look critically at the structure of our own;

• Sheri S. Tepper (Grass, Raising the Stones, The Gate to Women’s Country) carries one or another of the dark currents underlying our culture to its horrifying conclusion, and shows us what we get;

• Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan saga) gives us a hilarious and improbable hero who utterly transcends his disabilities, in the end perfectly embodying what it seems he could never hope to be.

Was hoping someone would mention Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms! The PS2 truly was the janky AA JRPG console of all time. Also don’t forget

• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Digital Devil Saga 1-2
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
• Stella Deus
• Magna Carta: Tears of Blood On second thought do forget this one

Baba Is You is fantastic, and I think its difficulty curve is much, much more reasonable in the beginning than Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t utterly bounce off it either.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).

But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.

Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.

Another vote for Cherryh - pretty much anything by Cherryh. And in the “journey” department, perhaps also look at John Varley’s Gaia trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon)? (Probably falls into your “excessive violence and some smut” category)

You might also try the “far future/dying Earth” genre as a way of getting the exploration without necessarily being tied to the space/hard sf milieu. I think the most awarded member of this subgenre (and I liked it quite a bit) is Gene Wolfe’s three Sun series (Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun).

Old, but I think at least inspired or adjacent: Apparat Organ Quartet - Romantika

Swans - Song for Dead Time

So bury your trust beneath the ground with me, dear

And lay your loneliness down for the sun to burn

To sand…

Various groups are running fan servers for Monster Hunter Frontier since it shut down in 2019. There is a translated client that mostly works. Search for “rain frontier server” for more info.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of this myself and I don’t know whether the client they distribute will give your computer encephalitis.

OK, that’s what I had kind of feared. Thank you!

Not like it will be such a hardship to finally finish it - just have to resist the temptation to play Monster Hunter instead :)

I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game’s plot?

A few I’ve enjoyed that aren’t mentioned elsewhere so far:

• Robin McKinley, The hero and the crown. If you’ve never read this, please, just go and do so, if you read nothing else on this entire response. The Newbery Medal it got was well deserved. (And it has princesses and dragons and wizards.)

• Louise Cooper, Indigo (8 short books). Sealed ancient evil, cursed protagonist on heroic journey, talking animal companion. Just lots of fun all around.

• Lois McMaster Bujold, The curse of Chalion series. Maybe a little more politics than you are looking for, but the divinity/magic system works well and I appreciate that the viewpoint characters are generally kind of old and busted. She is of course better known for the (excellent) Miles Vorkosigan military space opera series.

• Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A companion to wolves et seq. Exactly what it says on the tin; the catch is that the viewpoint character of the first book becomes bonded to a female wolf, which radically changes how his culture sees him.

• Elizabeth Moon, The deed of Paksenarrion. Basically what you’d get if you wrote down a really good D&D campaign (but mostly for only one viewpoint character). Formulaic in spots but enjoyable and well executed.

Other replies have mentioned Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos books, which I enjoyed a lot; and David (and Leigh) Eddings, which were my first big-kid fantasy novels (as for many other other American children of the 70s and 80s). Another long series in something of the same vein as Eddings is Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar saga; I haven’t read the entries after 2000, but before that it was a lot of fun.

I’m surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that’s because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.

I don’t know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: “Rulers of the Wildspire”, “Dancer in the Coral Highlands”, “Roars across the Hinterlands”. You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you’re fighting something in that zone that doesn’t have its own theme - so they’d better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!