5:52 This sounds painfully like the kind of game I imagined up in my mind when I was a kid. "And then after that tower, there's another tower with a THOUSAND floors! And then after that tower, there's another tower with TEN THOUSAND FLOORS! Oh man, I'm such a genius! Why hasn't anyone ever made a game like this before?!"
I once dreamed I was some kind of swordfighter that gained 100 hp, 100 mp, 10 attack, 20 speed... And a single defense point per level up. And that's supposed to be the main character and also the only human in the setting.
@@sjake8308 Starting the player with a loaded gun that only works if you fire the bullet through their own head is generally pretty bad implementation, yeah.
Unlimited saga made slot reels do everything include open chests lol so many traps. I also think of the tediousness from shining in the darkness lol especially traversing town on a first person rail.
I saw this thumbnail at random and thought "Surely whatever this guy is talking about isn't that bad" and then you immediately open up with "Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory" and I immediately started cackling.
Their pre-Neptunia: Rebirth releases are legitimately awful. Nowadays? Their games range from mediocre to surprisingly good. I am enjoying the Death End Re;Quest series right now but while the gameplay isn't flawless, the narrative from the creator of Corpse Party? It's good stuff.
What do you mean, being able to save every 5 or so floors in a roguelike is awesome even if you can't save in between dungeons. I'll gladly take it instead of no save opportunities at all in 99 floor dungeons of Pokémon MD games where you die a few floors away from the goal and have to restart from the beginning...
@@Diwasho you can save in some of those Pokémon Mystery dungeon games but I forgot which ones. But this game isn’t better than MD. Going through 1000 floors and not being able to save because rng wasn’t in your favor (random save) is worse than 99. Also the game in this video is pure rng. Imagine not being able to heal because it’s rng and when you can it damaged you because your level is not high enough. And losing heals because the enemy stole them!
I love how you didn’t call this just straight up “the worst rpg” and said it is “one of the worst rpgs” leaving room just in case someone makes a game worse than this, I love that optimism 😂
Someone somewhere in the wasteland has probably cobbled together the silicon and vacuum tubes of 1000 PipBoys to decompress and open a file they found on a pre-war storage drive, only to discover that it was Spectral Tower.
It makes Idea Factory seem even more deranged. If I were a developer of Spectral Tower, I would try to get it off my resume by any means and forget about it forever, but it looks like those psychos are proud of it (since they reference it). Insane.
@@4ndr00med4 Or maybe it means that they are able to laugh at themselves and don't feel the need to hide their past. Also the 10,000 floor tower concept makes a lot more sense in the way that they (or rather Compile Heart) used it in Neptunia games as you only see that many floors in the Stella's Dungeon minigame in Neptunia Re;Birth2 and Re;Birth3. Because it's designed to progress in the background and the game checks how much progress was made by checking the system clock (progress happens even when the system isn't on, which makes sense given that both games were originally released for the PS Vita) it's actually realistic to complete the 10,000 floor tower unlike in this game.
@@4ndr00med4 It's just a bad videogame, no need to take it so seriously. So melodramatic, honestly. Even being "bad" kind of depends on your perspective. It's a low-budget game with some odd design decisions, but otherwise made well enough. Decent presentation, core gameplay is fundamentally sound, runs well, it isn't shovelware. The egregious length-to-content ratio notwithstanding, this looks pretty average for PS1 era shelf filler tbh, which from other comments seems to be how this developer operates on average: Make a tiny game worth of content and then stretch it thin like your life depends on it. I guess that's one way to hustle. Besides, if you make trash, you might as well laugh about it. Even good devs make bad/underperforming games and make fun of themselves afterwards.
@AVesselOfFlesh Hey I'll gladly participate in any tarring and feathering of the game, don't get me wrong. Roasting things is fun. It's just, the idea that this is a game you should be deeply ashamed of ever being involved in, and that not having it on your resume is somehow better than just listing it among the things you worked on, it seems a wee bit silly doesn't it. The game's not a grift, it's not a bootleg. Game's bad, but an attempt was made. It's kinda like the PS1 equivalent to a mediocre flash game. I tend to hear the advice that you should, in essence, be proud of every project you worked on (within reason of course). It's all expertise gained, it's all a means of showing off, every finished project is a goal. They don't have to be your headliners, but it's very hard for "I also made this thing" to make you look worse. On a more personal note, I think it's a bummer that the belief that you shouldn't be allowed to show off something unless it's your absolute best seems to be so common, these days. Shunning your perceived failures is a bad and insecure mindset to have. Flawed works can be interesting in their own right. A work that was too afraid of being flawed is often just really safe and bland.
Thats why i stopped playing final fantasy 3 The final dungeon is such a bunch of bullshit only for you to get to the final boss and be killed in 2 turns and just like that you lost at least an hour and a half of your life
Wow. As someone with a real love/hate relationship with Iffy, this is fascinating. Their basic design style of "too little content spread across too much game padded out even further with mandatory grinding" goes all the way back to the beginning! They're certainly committed to their niche, I'll give 'em that.
@@southanime Not the good ones. Really, grind-heavy RPGs went out of style 20+ years ago. It's rare for a company today to still hold onto that design. (Unless they're Korean.)
@@jasonblalock4429 The issue with the Idea Factory games I've played isn't that they're grind heavy, it's that there's not much of a payoff for all the grinding and grinding itself is especially dull because of how frequently the assets are recycled.
Games like these are so interesting to me. These super niche Japanese only games from the 90's that nearly no one knows about. The top google result for this game is simply an entry on PSX Datacenter (which also mistakenly assumes the game only features 3 dungeons lol). No wikipedia article, no forum posts, CERTAINLY no fan translation, this game is basically nonexistent in the cultural zeitgeist and that fascinates me so much.
Reminds me of Fire Heroes (PS2 firefighting game). You cant find any kind of wiki or even forum discussion but thankfully it was released internationally and thus theres LP of it on RUclips.
A Torrent for a GBA Emulator I tried about 10 years ago had Japanese games that were quite interesting to me. One I think was called Killer Dice, and it had two versions, Pokemon style! I found no GameFAQ so I had to translate the Katakana and learn more words to figure out how to play...
There isn’t even a Japanese Wikipedia article for this game, lol. Although there appears to be quite a few results for the game in Japanese, including auction sites. Most Japanese-only games have little to no presence in the English-speaking side of the internet, so this isn’t strange.
There once was a game called "Torneko no Daibouken - Fushigi no Dungeon" which had an enemy who would PERMANENTLY REDUCE YOUR STATS with no way to recover them besides dieing and starting over again AS HIS BASIC ATTACK!!!
@@robertwildschwein7207 i feel like a enemy with that attack COULD work , but you must be really good balancing the game , because not even Fear and Hunger has such a bullshit mechanic
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Demon's Soul had a boss that could drain levels from you, however it is both intended to be the final boss, and you could just grind your levels back.
There's a reason IF is known as the "Landmine Company" in my country. Whether a game from them is playable or not is a literal gamble, because the basic concept of "balance" simply doesn't exist in most of their games. When the HD Neptunia series are the best games they ever came up with, you can tell the quality of their lesser-known titles... Speaking of Neptunia, they actually parodied this game as one of the minigame dungeons called Neptral Tower, also with 10000 floors. At least said minigame was made as an "idle RPG," not an actual dungeon...
Look at the original PS3 Neptunia. It's peak IF. The entire tutorial can be unwinnable if you don't succeed the RNG checks to heal, because of course healing is a luck check on top of needing to be low HP to do anything. You can increase the odds of it, but the tutorial has you at a flat 50% chance to minorly heal if you're below 50% hp iirc. So you can just die if it fails enough times. Compa, the nurse character, is a party member throughout the entire game unless you get DLC characters or very late game get the other nations' CPUs. Compa, the nurse character, never gains the ability to heal. Not a single move. It's all up to the RNG checks. Not that the game's hard. It's quite the opposite, outside of the very beginning testing your luck you will almost never die. Once you unlock Neptune's HDD form, as far as I recall there's no cost nor penalty for activating it. You can just turn it on at the start of the fight and use her huge attack Neptune Break, every single turn the rest of the fight. It trivializes the entire game, which is good since it means less relying on RNG, but it has the small side effect called the entire game is boring since you crush everything very easily and there is nothing appealing in the rest of the game. Even the writing is trash compared to any later Neptunia game, so you'll likely groan if it gets any reaction out of you. Like the OG's example of a joke is the 3 main girls standing, stoic-faced, going "Look, there are blue hedgehogs. They are going downhill. They are then going into a panchiko parlor. Hm, I wonder if that means anything." or "Oh look, it's a man in a green space armor. There is a halo in the sky above him. Hm, a green armored man associated with a Halo..." Not even artwork, just randomly vaguely describing a franchise and the scene ends. It's almost impressive how bad it is that it makes the later, generic Neptunia games seem well designed.
@@chaptap8376 The PS3 original version felt as if they couldn't decide whether to make it a pure visual novel. The rudimentary RPG elements seem to be tacked on at the last minute. The game might have been better as a VN, since the development time and budget could be much better used to flesh out the story and improve the visuals.
i’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to make every aspect of their game as frustrating as possible like this. imagine losing all your progress in the 10000 floor dungeon because you couldn’t find a save statue 😭 the only positive thing i have to say about it is that the monster designs are cute
I'd argue that even the "cute monsters" is a bad thing, since the MC designs are pretty "blegh," and it makes the cute enemies more annoying because it makes me wish I was playing as them instead.
Japanese gamers seem to have a much higher tolerance for frustrating nonsense. For example, they consider Tower of Druaga to be a beloved franchise instead of a cruel prank somewhere on the level of Desert Bus.
@@billvolk4236 Ironically, Nightmare of Druaga: Fushigino Dungeon happens to be one of the best rogue-like RPG dungeon crawlers out there. It does everything this game doesn't. Also it's super hard, impossible post-game dungeon is only 300 floors.
@@juannaym8488 I was going to make a snarky comparison between these two games but then typing it out I realized just how right you are. Desert Bus can't be topped
I wound up getting my hands on Spectral Forces: Genesis for the DS a long, long time ago from a bargain bin at our local Walmart. It's this weird and not very good strategy game, but it had this feel to it like it was taking place in a well-established world that you had NO business being in, full of characters the game thinks you SHOULD know but definitely don't. This was a peek into a rabbit hole I'd pretty much forgotten about.
Spectral Tower is honestly impressive I thought the 100 floor dungeons in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a slog I thought I'd NEVER finish Tower of Fate because of the difficulty I'm not even sure if I ever tried to play Toriko's Dungeon translated But this absolutely takes the cake A 10,000 floor dungeon might as well be an infinite one and with a game with as many broken systems as this, it might as well be purgatory.
Idea Factory is a glib name for a studio that literally does nothing but pump out variations on the same game ten times a year with occasionally new still art for 'cutscenes' and narrative that is 90% VN style talking heads. At one point the Neptunia games seemed inviting because of their sheer level of sheen, but having played several of them I now realize this company is like a romance novel publisher.
tbh tho. in the otome scene they're well liked for their releases. compared to aksys the other company that primarily localizes otome games people like the releases from idea factory more. idea factory does nice limited editions while aksys usually just does a cd. although i think they are just a localizing company.
It says a lot when the Neptunia spinoffs are most innovative, because they are made by third party devs. They aren't always the best (like with Producing Perfection and U: Action Unleashed) but they are the only ones that doesn't feel like a total copypaste.
That's Compile Heart, not Idea Factory. Granted, CH is a subsidiary under IF but IF themselves haven't made a proper game in like over a decade. They instead focus on Otome, where they are actually pretty successful and liked.
The thing that gets me most is how slick and epic the characters look on the box art, even the comic in the manual looks pretty neat, but then in the actual game they look janky and ugly.
And perhaps the saddest part is that there are elements of what clearly could be a very good game, but they just absolutely ruined it. Almost makes me wanna make a "rip-off" that's actually playable.
I *LOVE* this video. It's the perfect balance of spite and receipts, explained in a calm voice with just enough venom. I would absolutely watch more videos like this
There was actually an arcade crossover fighting game that crossed over Spectral Tower and Generations Of Chaos called Spectral X Generations. It was actually pretty good.
@Nathan-rb3qp It seems to me that game came out on ps2, at least here in EU, iirc. Maybe the one i'm referring to wasn't the game you think of, but a sequel.
their games are extremely simple and reuse everything for example Neptunia has used the same gameplay, assets, models and engine for years and other games they have made have also reused these elements as well so each game only needs to sell a couple thousand copies to be profitable and that's IF/CH's strength, local sales are all that matters and international ones is pure profit
Beyond being cheap, they also had a tendency to luck into making stuff that was fascinating (fun characters and/or interesting ideas) despite the weak mechanics, Neptune was just the peak of that. Also worth noting that IF got a *lot* better about a decade ago when NIS's execs went mad and started doing really evil stuff to with employees (shuffling them around then claiming this meant they only had to pay them as though they were new employees) and they picked up a lot of talent.
Roguelike with 10K floors was bad enough but having each battle be a Face-to-face with enemies and not in-dungeon battles like Rogue just saps the soul out of me. Now you know why japan ranks so high in depression.
By looking at the speedrun of this game, reading the Spectral Tower Strategy Wiki, and playing the game a bit myself, I noticed a few anomalies regarding this video: * werewolves actually do exist in the game, both as a player class and as an enemy type * there are four different set pieces, each with one recolored variation (moldy attic, wooden mine, stalagmite cave and brick cave), and the game appears to change from one set piece to another, and only Spectral Tower and Last Tower do have all eight of them * some enemies do indeed home in you, if you are within their perimeters, like Thief, Assassin and Item Hunter * you get multiple attempts to run away from battle, as long as your character has that special move, and the enemy hasn't either sealed it away from you, or got you cursed or smitten, after you failed to flee the first time * being turned a pig disables you from interacting with almost everything (including the goddess statues), but you can still fight enemies normally (somehow, and as seen in the footage), get the key and unlock the door to the exit stairs, and eat any edible item without regard to their food levels, and not suffer any tummy ache penalties * Fairy Rod guides you to keys, floor exits, and boss monsters, too * Warp Rod can take you up to the maximum of sixty floors (again, as seen in the speedrun), and can also be used multiple times, unless Warp Rod breaks after one use, in which it does have a high chance to, but is still ain't guaranteed Just to make sure that we all are on the same page.
I don't know that ive seen an accurate video game doc or essay in years. Half these kids didn't exist when the thing came out they are talking about. The other half doesn't put in the work
If you want to put a 10k-story tower as a bonus or side-thing, go for it Don't make me suffer it to beat your marginally functional game Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is
Something real weird about knowing IDEA FACTORY from the Neptunia games and how mediocre of the games are but then finding out that they've got a track record of this sort of thing.
And then learning that A: Neptunia is probably the best thing they ever made B: They are a relatively ancient developer, that has never actually gotten better
After completing the video the only two people I can imagine willingly creating this game is either a TURBO-NERD, the king of geeks, someone who is so deep in the woods of dungeon crawl rpg's he decided to make a game that just had ALL OF THE SYSTEMS, just stuffing the game with every idea he had with zero thought given to how all the systems were gonna interact... OR the very opposite, a ULTRA-JOCK who so hated nerds that they decided to learn everything nerds like so they could create a honey-trap that would draw number-crunching nerds in and _demolish_ them. Not sure which of these persons are required to invent a game where you have to stuff your limited inventory full of junk to protect your necessary level-up and healing items from enemy attacks... but it has to be one of them, no other person could conjure such evil.
Or third a money laundering scheme were they were only required to make a "game" that looked playable and let the devs put any bullshit they can think of
I played Blackstone back in the day. It was one of only a tiny number of Xbox games released in the US with a bright anime aesthetic on the box, like so many of those cool ps1/ps2 rpgs! It was thoroughly mediocre.
The graphics and sound of this game really reminds me of those budget multiple puzzle game packs of the late 90s and early 2000s for PC. Basically one step up from flash. I feel the same way about hoshi wo miru hito, so bad it's fascinating.
How is it that I lived my entire life without ever hearing about the Legendary Kusoge, but now I've run into references to it twice in a week? Now I'm actually tempted to try the damn thing just for the experience.
@@jasonblalock4429 If youre interested in it and don't want to experience it yourself, Bad Game Hall of Fame recently did a longplay on it. It was very fun to watch imo.
One of my aunts had one of those packs, but there was also a top-down beat 'em up similar to classic Gauntlet full of extremely shiny pre-rendered graphics. The main character was a bald man in a T-shirt named Buapha, who threw mallets (the rate of fire upgrade powerup had him shout HAMMER UP). I remember the health refills being Chinese takeout and while I don't remember what their effect was, another powerup was a pair of jeans called the PANTS OF POWER.
This game have some ideas that i could had when i was a kid imaging game mechanics for a game like "yeah this random save spot could be something cool as in real life where you have only a few safe spots in a dangerous place". It's beautiful
I still find amazing the obsesion of japan with "towers", "roguelikes" and "hard AF". It's like they have this competition to make the hardest roguelike, set in a tower ofc; so when adding sensible difficult mechanics to their games reaches a point of diminishing returns for gameplay experience, they start throwing in the bullshit mechanics; although idea factory here took it to another level from the start. That gotta be an acheivement... I guess. Thanks for the cool video Mr. Stranger.
Shadow Tower on PS1 is the quicker I got a game over in a Fromsoftware game. It's a first person Dungeon crawler and you start the game on stairs with no rails . Also remember kids Fromsoftware was also known for making some of the worst JRPGs of all time. Nobody liked Kings Feild back in the day. It's possible Neptunia could be called a classic in 20 years. You know that Bloodbore PS1 demake? If Bloodborde came out in the 90s it would be called one of the worst games on the PS1. Look up reviews of their RPGs pre Demons Souls.
@@Chelaxim Shadow Tower is messy, I'll grant you. Having recently played and beaten King's Field I-III, I can definitely see their appeal. They are highly unique experiences with a lot of high points to go with them. They're not masterpieces, but they're solid (also we need to take into account when those were made, 94,95,96, respectively).
Tower of Druaga was one of the first big RPGs (ok it's not really an RPG, it's more like Zelda) in Japan. Super long and cryptic, but thrived on the community aspect of figuring it all out. Probably where that influence comes from.
Honestly idea factory is a perfect name for them, since they just they endlessly produce games with some of the most baffeling design choices humanly possible
Have you played Azure Dreams before? The GBC version, specifically. That game didn't have *that* much content either, but I felt that the gameplay loop was satisfying enough (go in tower, find treasure/weapons/eggs, leave, sell treasure, hatch eggs etc.) that it was still a very fun game. More importantly though, you could tell the devs clearly thought about how to work the mechanics of a roguelike into a more typical rpg-like narrative format/context. One great example imo is how the typical "item hoarding" issue is rather naturally solved, because you only have a limited inventory, and the higher you go in the tower the higher-valued treasure you're likely to find. Even if your monster is only 10hp lower than max, you're going to use that healing herb because you need the inventory slot for the valuable piece of treasure you just found. Additionally, even if your monster is at max hp, feeding it a healing item increases its max hp by 1, so it's clear to me the devs thought the systems through and tried to have some synergy between the more "permanent" rpg elements and the more "transient" roguelike elements. There's nothing worse than when you have a regular RPG with roguelike elements bolted on e.g. Final Fantasy, except all the dungeons are randomly-generated. Never was a fan of that, it feels lazy and imo the two styles - JRPG and roguelike - aren't actually as complementary as one might think, and it takes some work to combine them in a satisfying way.
I really enjoyed that game, and I was trying to think of it's name. I played it on PS. I never beat it because that tower is ridiculously hard, but I liked improving the town and the townsfolk respecting me more and more as I improved the town. I should try and play it again or watch someone else play it.
so they spun off of Data East? I'm sure that explains plenty. also started to lose count of the times I exclaimed 'WHY WOULD YOU DO IT THAT WAY?!' when describing something... I can totally see where the nickname Idea F***tory comes from, hahahaha.
Well, Data East did make some pretty good games (Atomic Runner on the Mega Drive is outstanding), though they were pretty hit and miss. Idea Factory are miss and miss: Loads of JRPGS with really stodgy gameplay that's simply designed to waste your time, and in the case of the Neptunia series, the payoff is basically getting repeated panty shots of underage anime girls. That's really all Idea Factory have to offer.
I mean Data East gave us one of the most famous twists (for western audiences) a decade before another game did it and became popular. I’m not going to spoiler either, but it blew my mind when I learned it.
16:32 "If the food level is higher than your characters level, then it makes them sick" LMAO this game has a picky eater stat and tummy ache mechanics that rules
this looks like something I would play while being sick and dont understanding if Im winning or not, it happen once with air management 96, played that thing for 14 straight hours with a strong fever, so yeah this game feels similar
I only know of Idea Factory from Neptunia (and I think Monster Monpiece, which was alright-ish). Neptunia is actually a fairly fun series, and the characters can be funny on occasion. They're not bad at all per-se, but my biggest gripe is how assets are reused in the remakes. I think it's unfair to call those games bad if the whole complaint is based on how repetitive they are, because they reworked the battle system later on as opposed to the original PS3 games and then re-released 1-3 with a rehaul of the graphics, music and battle system as well as the cutscene styles (3D models vs moving 2D ones). That boosted the accessibility of the games as they were easily ported to other systems compared to how expensive the originals were used at the time.
By making a series of games based on mostly underage anime girls who innocently flash their panties on a regular basis. They've found a niche and that's the audience they've been catering to for the last decade or so.
I have to admit, the idea of an RPG with hundreds of classes chosen at random sounds kind of fun, even if some of them really bad. There's no excuse for it to be hundress of hours of level grinding though.
@zenksren8206 yeah you know what, Ronde at least has gameplay. Also forgot it was on Saturn and not PS1, so Ronde gets to win this round for whatever that's worth.
Man, these pre-rendered graphics, and the text just kind of floating around, this looks like it should be on the 3D0. Kind of reminds me of a slightly saner Death Crimson. I'm getting kind of obsessed with this kind of 90s outsider art video game aesthetic.
Eeeyikes. Thanks to an old Hardcore Gaming 101 article, I had known about Idea Factory's dire reputation in their home country, but I had never truly plunged into their output (didn't see anything that jumped out to me). I had vaguely heard of Hyperdimension Neptunia beforehand. It's a cute concept that reminds me of "Sega Hard Girls" (in fact, the two even had a crossover)...shame the game itself apparently isn't that great. I loved the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, so I was wondering "how could they snafu a roguelike?" Turns out, they can snafu it pretty badly. Some of the design choices you mention are utterly baffling. I mean, randomizing save points?! Somewhere in Japan, there has to be a person who couldn't attend to important business due to playing for hours and not finding a single save point. Does Spectral Tower have the largest dungeon in any roguelike? 10,000 floors...man. How commercially successful are Idea Factory's games, anyway? Spectral Tower having sequels implies that the game was successful enough to warrant sequels, or that Idea Factory simply got enough money to produce them. Part of me suspects it's the decent artwork their titles boast, even though the style isn't my cup of tea. One last note: I seem to remember Takahashi Meijin making a cameo in one of their games...somehow.
It's worth mentioning that their output in Japan was massive... they were cranking out at least 4-5 games on average each year. Even if those games sold only 10-20k each time, it would have been likely enough for them to keep going. Probably that's what they were banking on.
@@mariusamber3237 The core Neptune games are pure grind. That's their big problem. They're twice as long as they need to be, with literally cut-and-pasted dungeons and mechanics that absolutely require grinding for both XP and crafting items. Which is a shame because they'd be decently fun junk food RPGs if they weren't so utterly tedious. The only way I can get anywhere in an IF game is by watching movies or RUclips on a second screen.
*Coughs nervously having only known Idea Factory only for their Otomate division* I didn't even know they had such a bad reputation since I never touched any of their RPGs. Like....the concept of the game sounds cool, but they ruined it with stupid mechanics. I've played Mystery Dungeon games, so I've suffered through 100 floor dungeons before...but 10,000 with these mechanics? Hell no.
Holy crap, seeing this on my feed and you opening up talking about Idea Factory right after I closed out of a Neptunia game gave me the funniest whiplash. Neptunia games certainly aren't good (barring the latest mainline entry which actually holds its own as a game) but like you said, there's a strange charm to its concept and meta humor that can sometimes carry the game, even if the actual gameplay leaves much to be desired. I actually just remembered that Neptunia also parodies the name of Spectral Tower in some of its entries, featuring an area called the Neptral Tower, usually used as a spot for an item collection minigame of sorts.
This really feels like it's one of those games the devs made just because they thought they could, without real regard to whether playing it would be fun or not. "Wow! Ten thousand floors!!" like... yeah? And there are maybe 10 variations. Wow. The same floor one thousand times, great.
You know, I REALLY hate how after that HG101 article everyone called them Idea F*** when I had heard no reference to them being a bad company prior to that article. Truth is I have a soft spot for them. I did indeed buy Black Stone and much of their Western output...though I've also been driven nuts by the fact that their most interesting games rarely got US releases. Namely their Grand Strategy games. You know, the ones where you conquer the world? Like Dragon Force? Heck, Spectral Force pretty much WAS a lower budget Dragon Force clone. But no, somehow we mostly got the blander grid-based ones...except for Spectral Force Genesis. You wanna talk about f-ing a good idea? Spectral Force Genesis was basically like Dragon Force but on DS with the touch screen used to command your army on the bottom screen while swarms of 2D sprites fought on a 3D battlefield on the top screen! BRILLIANT! Just one problem: You could only do what you are told to do that turn. So you can only Battle on a Battle Turn, Trade on a Trade Turn, and Reinforce on a Reinforce Turn and so on...and the turns are completely random. IT WAS SO CLOSE TO A GOOD GAME! I got Mist of Chaos on PS3 too. Korean version showed up at the local import shop. Bought it. My army had a crab, a penguin, and a maid in it. THAT. That is why I love Idea Factory! They have so many games with massive casts of weird characters! Heck they even got a bad fighting game that people weirdly like called Spectral VS Generation and most of those characters are in the bad dub classic Chaos Wars which is ALSO Idea Factory...where they somehow crossed over with Gun Grave and Shadow Hearts?! Speaking of bad dubs, I have the US DVD of the Spectral Force anime sitting next to me. ADV released it. I found it at a used record store for $6. But if there's one game I CAN vouch for, it's Neptunia. While the FIRST game was terrible, they actually LISTENED and the second game is pretty good aside from the awful protagonist and by the third game? Neptunia V? Legitimately enjoyable game. The combat system is actually really neat, it's like a fusion of Quest 64 and Xenosaga! It's also amusing because being a joke game, they actually make fun of how bad the first game was and the protagonist of the second game has a sub-plot about trying to be a less boring protagonist! It has been off and on since then. V-II removing the movement circles was a terrible idea and Neptunia VS Senran Kagura is abysmal but I am REALLY hyped for the next game. Get this: the next Neptunia is about travelling back in time to save the Atari Jaguar (and 3DO and Apple Pippin)! Idea Factory is making a game about saving the Atari Jaguar! It's PERFECT! It IS quite impressive that they're still in business. JUST put out a My Life As A Villainess game on Switch, too! But, somehow, I am glad. Perhaps I need to do more research on this company and do a tribute to their madness.
The Mary Skelter games are the only Iffy products that I'd recommend to other people as genuinely being good. (As opposed to junk food, jank fun, etc.) And even then, that requires someone be into Mary Skelter's very strange Venn diagram of influences. "Moe fairy tale girls being tortured in a Lovecraftian RPG dungeon" is kind of a hard sell.
@@jasonblalock4429 Literally just ordered Mary Skelter 2 off Amazon because NOW I'm curious and want to dive deeper and Mary Skelter and Death's End Re:Quest 1 seem to be the most well liked Idea Factory games...both of which are Compile Heart so I'm thinking Compile Heart might be the best thing to ever happen to these guys! I hope I can find a cheap copy of Arc of Alchemist one day. I wanna play it but I hear it's legendarily terrible.
@@jasonblalock4429 I've only played the first Mary Skelter and that's not a game I'd recommend to anybody, either. The concept and artwork are good, the music is great, but the actual game is typical, low effort Idea Factory shovelware: Endless palette-swapped enemies, incredibly formulaic gameplay and a lot of grinding for the sake of grinding. It's a shame in this case because with a bit more effort this could actually have been a legitimately good game.
The engine is good enough. Someone could make a Romhack of this to turn it into a fun game. Such a Romhack will come someday after people have exhausted every other possibility, because when the PS10 is released people will realize that PS1 was pretty close to the beginning of console gaming history and there's not actually that many RPGs from the PS1 era for game historians in the future to look back on.
Spectral Tower is a perfect storm of terrible videogame design. How on Earth did the developers get approval to make a sequel? Also, it is really cool to see a RndStranger video get picked up by the algorithm. Great work, as always.
god, those menu character portraits. i don't like shitting on another artist's work, but all i can say is that seeing some of these drawings in a console game, presumably sold on real shelves in real stores in real life, makes me feel more confident about my own
Gotta love the dedication here. They started making bad games, and by god, they're not gonna stop making bad games. Weaker creators would falter and maybe at least consider making something actually *good* for once, or maybe just calling it quits, but Idea Factory started by considering carefully how to make the worst fucking design decisions possible, and adopted this as their sole driving philosophy of game creation. That is true dedication.
Worst part is... Some of their games actually have some interesting ideas, that just isn't there most of the time. Being bogged down by questionable design choices or simply rushed development.
"Eevee... Treecko... You have now become a renowed rescue team, who have helped so many lost Pokémon out in the wild reaches of the land" "Hahah, thanks... Couldn't have done it without my partner!" "This means... I think... Yes, you are now ready. It will truly test your mettle and prowess as a rescue team." "We are more than ready, bring it on!" "It is a mythical place known as the Spectral Tower..."
Thank you for this video, because I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about this company otherwise! I have a feeling that this will be one of the better performing videos. It's crowd pleasing: It describes a terrible, unheard of JRPG, is under just 20 minutes, and it's amusing. I bet when I share this one, more of my friends will be clicking on it than usual.
Genuine question... Where do you share Rnd's videos that they may be clicked on? I share them with people when I want to explain some Famicom game I'm neurospicily obsessing over, in fact I found Famidaily when I was trying to challenge a speedruner to try to speedrun Super Monkey Daibouken. 😁
This game sounds funnier and funnier the more you describe it. If I could play this on my phone instead of a GATCHA game if it was translated. Also, I appreciate the title of this video not being the least bit clickbait.
As someone that played a lot of Neptunia, I agree. The latest effort was... actually good. The games before that, pretty much should be only bought as a budget game. However, nowadays, there are so many fantastic games on Steam to where you should probably consider other games. Never games had so many reused levels. In the latter games, the game was performant at first, but when you go to one of the newer levels, the FPS dip was huge. Inverted levels, and so many level revisiting. There's the Compile Heart curve, which is rough. All of the sudden, you'll hit a dungeon where the monsters will feel incredibly difficult. If you grind a few levels though, it isn't bad. If you spend a little extra time grinding here and there, also not too bad. However, how were you supposed to know this before the Internet? How is a casual player going to deal with this? Probably rage quit. I always saw Neptunia as blowing their budget on amazing VAs and artwork
I’m trying to make an Excel spreadsheet of all JRPGs, and explaining what the general reception/what is worth playing, and knowing Idea Factory is a bad company will be a big help for sorting good and bad games Also having games exclusively for Xbox 360? Did they have Ninja Gaiden’s Itagaki working with them or something?
For awhile during the 360 era, Microsoft was actively bankrolling niche Japanese devs to try and improve their console’s relevance in the East. Besides a few exclusive JRPGs, this also resulted in the console getting a ton of shoot-em-up/bullet hell releases.
@@sjake8308The 360 predated the PS3 and Wii so that's why some of those games are 360 exclucive and while Record of Agarest War and Zero were on both PS3 and 360 Record of Agarest War 2 was only PS3. Neptunia Sisters Vs Sisters is the first Idea Factory game to come to Xbox in 15 years. Idea Factory has more games on the Playstation Vita alone than every Xbox combined.
@@ChelaximAah agarest another game that is just bad. Lets make the combat really bland, getting true ending stingy af, also make the game really grindy and dont give xp sharing so it means most of the character roster will never be used. good game design.
The algorithm blessed me today. I thought I was prepared for a bad game. I thought I knew bad ps1 games as I have dug and found many bad ones (popular bad ones such as Bubsy 3d, hooters road trip, Spawn, Criticom, Vip). Then watched a guy named Sean Seanson (which introduced me to more horrifically bad games like Dreams, Ubik and Iznogood) But this? Oh God this? I didnt even KNOW what Idea Factory was! It as if I scraped the bottom of a barrel and hit some magical switch; which in turn, lead to another enclosed basement full of barrels... If you somehow talk about more of these games (I dont see too many reviews of these types of games tbh), I'd watch them all. Loved this one. Appreciate the work!
5:15 TL;DR- you fight 5 towers, and the actual spectral tower- tower #4- has 1,000 floors. In a rogue like. Tower #5 has 10,000. The rest of this is just a post mortem on every other failure this game has which makes even the diehard rogue like enjoyers not want to do all that.
Thanks to this video I finally understand what the hell Iffy was talking about when she was talking about a tower that has a lot of floors in some of the Neptunia games.
I'd love to see more deep dives on obscure and terrible PS1 RPGs, getting to see the most ridiculously awful specimens of the genre on a console that's largely defined by the standout quality of its RPG library would be a treat.
I kinda recognized the name Idea Factory... then I saw the red monster at 1:10 and immediately remembered the monster that had the same appearance from Chaos Wars with the infamous "Keee." scream which sounded like someone screaming "Aaahhh!" in pain. Then I saw Chaos Wars was developed by Idea Factory and published by them in Japan. Seems like that seemly poor level of quality was in more of their games than I remember. Then... I tried to look up that monster game from Idea Factory at 1:10 ("Monster Complete World") and found out Spectral Tower was the first (or at least second) game they published.
Randomly generated save spots may in fact be the worst thing ever put in a game.
Still better than micro transactions.
@@DKNguyen3.1415I guess, both still suck ass
Ubisoft/EA be like: "You know what? Let's combine these two!"@@DKNguyen3.1415
@@HeavyMetalAlicorn So save point locations as loot box rewards? GTFO.
@@DKNguyen3.1415At least these are optional, while the other isn't and you have to deal with it.
Micro Transactions aren't a good thing though.
Well, it's not like they're called Good Idea Factory.
Well that’s why they are known as idea fuu-
Or the bad.
Just... ideas
Kusoge Factory?
Shut up.
Their games nowadays are perfectly fine.
5:52 This sounds painfully like the kind of game I imagined up in my mind when I was a kid. "And then after that tower, there's another tower with a THOUSAND floors! And then after that tower, there's another tower with TEN THOUSAND FLOORS! Oh man, I'm such a genius! Why hasn't anyone ever made a game like this before?!"
Sounds like a lovely kid 😭
Sounds about right
“Do you think God stays in heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he’s created?”
I once dreamed I was some kind of swordfighter that gained 100 hp, 100 mp, 10 attack, 20 speed... And a single defense point per level up.
And that's supposed to be the main character and also the only human in the setting.
@@JoelHernandez-tz3vk If you want a hard game, that'd probably be it.
11:45 The hilarious audacity of having "The Spell that Kills You Instantly" as a core feature of every spellcaster's base kit. Amazing.
That's actually based on very old school design, it's just that the implementation here is especially bad.
@@sjake8308 Starting the player with a loaded gun that only works if you fire the bullet through their own head is generally pretty bad implementation, yeah.
@@The5lacker Unless it's Persona 3
Ultima always made you search for it...
It's not even Kamikaze, you just loose even if it kills lmao
The fact that this game has less item and enemy variety than the original Rogue is another nail in the coffin for this game.
Cait sith twins 😅😂
Reject modernity. Return to Rogue.
@@wiegraf9009 to quote The 1975, "modernity has failed us", but in the spirit of rogue, It does not in fact "love it if we made it"
A game in which you play as Cait Sith for 450 Hours, and your only attack is "Dice", is boundless madness
🤣🤣🤣
Ouch that hurts.
Isn't that just dnd for a martial class?
Unlimited saga made slot reels do everything include open chests lol so many traps. I also think of the tediousness from shining in the darkness lol especially traversing town on a first person rail.
@@KWHere2At least in D&D you get to pick your class
I saw this thumbnail at random and thought "Surely whatever this guy is talking about isn't that bad" and then you immediately open up with "Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory" and I immediately started cackling.
Same here!
Their pre-Neptunia: Rebirth releases are legitimately awful. Nowadays? Their games range from mediocre to surprisingly good. I am enjoying the Death End Re;Quest series right now but while the gameplay isn't flawless, the narrative from the creator of Corpse Party? It's good stuff.
Yup, same
Hey, they release pretty good visual novels
I mean spectral soul is decent
So, a rougelike that's 450 hours long, where the ability to save only comes up randomly? That alone is a terrible combination.
To people complaining about more popular Roguelite games:
*YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE!*
What do you mean, being able to save every 5 or so floors in a roguelike is awesome even if you can't save in between dungeons. I'll gladly take it instead of no save opportunities at all in 99 floor dungeons of Pokémon MD games where you die a few floors away from the goal and have to restart from the beginning...
@@Diwasho OUCH
@@Diwasho you can save in some of those Pokémon Mystery dungeon games but I forgot which ones. But this game isn’t better than MD. Going through 1000 floors and not being able to save because rng wasn’t in your favor (random save) is worse than 99.
Also the game in this video is pure rng. Imagine not being able to heal because it’s rng and when you can it damaged you because your level is not high enough. And losing heals because the enemy stole them!
I love how you didn’t call this just straight up “the worst rpg” and said it is “one of the worst rpgs” leaving room just in case someone makes a game worse than this, I love that optimism 😂
I mean... Hoshi wo miru hito, the legendary kusoge exists, so...
Worse or not, it was a PS1 Classic released digitally on PS3/PSP in Japan. Game probably did good lol.
Hell, there was a even a sequel.
@@Manic_Panic Yeah, as far as I know it has the status of "so bad that is actually good" lol
Also if you get that one weirdo in the comments who grew up on it and swears that it's great.
@@imyojimboandiusehacks8878 seems like the kind of game to hit a guilty pleasure in a lot of people. Still sounds trash, though.
This game feels like something vault tech would come up with in order to study the psychological effects of meaningless busywork on people.
"The Myth of Sisyphus: The Game"! :D
Someone somewhere in the wasteland has probably cobbled together the silicon and vacuum tubes of 1000 PipBoys to decompress and open a file they found on a pre-war storage drive, only to discover that it was Spectral Tower.
So this is what those references in Neptunia to 10,000 floors were about. Makes a lot more sense now.
It makes Idea Factory seem even more deranged. If I were a developer of Spectral Tower, I would try to get it off my resume by any means and forget about it forever, but it looks like those psychos are proud of it (since they reference it). Insane.
@@4ndr00med4 Or maybe it means that they are able to laugh at themselves and don't feel the need to hide their past.
Also the 10,000 floor tower concept makes a lot more sense in the way that they (or rather Compile Heart) used it in Neptunia games as you only see that many floors in the Stella's Dungeon minigame in Neptunia Re;Birth2 and Re;Birth3. Because it's designed to progress in the background and the game checks how much progress was made by checking the system clock (progress happens even when the system isn't on, which makes sense given that both games were originally released for the PS Vita) it's actually realistic to complete the 10,000 floor tower unlike in this game.
@@4ndr00med4 It's just a bad videogame, no need to take it so seriously. So melodramatic, honestly.
Even being "bad" kind of depends on your perspective. It's a low-budget game with some odd design decisions, but otherwise made well enough. Decent presentation, core gameplay is fundamentally sound, runs well, it isn't shovelware. The egregious length-to-content ratio notwithstanding, this looks pretty average for PS1 era shelf filler tbh, which from other comments seems to be how this developer operates on average: Make a tiny game worth of content and then stretch it thin like your life depends on it. I guess that's one way to hustle.
Besides, if you make trash, you might as well laugh about it. Even good devs make bad/underperforming games and make fun of themselves afterwards.
@AVesselOfFlesh Hey I'll gladly participate in any tarring and feathering of the game, don't get me wrong. Roasting things is fun.
It's just, the idea that this is a game you should be deeply ashamed of ever being involved in, and that not having it on your resume is somehow better than just listing it among the things you worked on, it seems a wee bit silly doesn't it. The game's not a grift, it's not a bootleg. Game's bad, but an attempt was made. It's kinda like the PS1 equivalent to a mediocre flash game.
I tend to hear the advice that you should, in essence, be proud of every project you worked on (within reason of course). It's all expertise gained, it's all a means of showing off, every finished project is a goal. They don't have to be your headliners, but it's very hard for "I also made this thing" to make you look worse.
On a more personal note, I think it's a bummer that the belief that you shouldn't be allowed to show off something unless it's your absolute best seems to be so common, these days. Shunning your perceived failures is a bad and insecure mindset to have. Flawed works can be interesting in their own right. A work that was too afraid of being flawed is often just really safe and bland.
@@4ndr00med4 Referencing to their older bad games doesn't mean they're praising it. They could be even laughing at themselves
The idea of completing a tower going into another then dying only to realize you have to redo the previously completed tower is agonizing.
It's the reason I rage quit Final Fantasy 2 after dying in Pandemonium.
Thats why i stopped playing final fantasy 3
The final dungeon is such a bunch of bullshit only for you to get to the final boss and be killed in 2 turns and just like that you lost at least an hour and a half of your life
Wow. As someone with a real love/hate relationship with Iffy, this is fascinating. Their basic design style of "too little content spread across too much game padded out even further with mandatory grinding" goes all the way back to the beginning! They're certainly committed to their niche, I'll give 'em that.
Idea Factory/Compile Heart needs to have thier visual novel team to help out with their JRPG side.
I thought paddind and mandatory grinding were staples of the JRPG genre
@southanime, you've been playing the wrong JRPGs
@@southanime Not the good ones. Really, grind-heavy RPGs went out of style 20+ years ago. It's rare for a company today to still hold onto that design. (Unless they're Korean.)
@@jasonblalock4429 The issue with the Idea Factory games I've played isn't that they're grind heavy, it's that there's not much of a payoff for all the grinding and grinding itself is especially dull because of how frequently the assets are recycled.
Games like these are so interesting to me. These super niche Japanese only games from the 90's that nearly no one knows about. The top google result for this game is simply an entry on PSX Datacenter (which also mistakenly assumes the game only features 3 dungeons lol). No wikipedia article, no forum posts, CERTAINLY no fan translation, this game is basically nonexistent in the cultural zeitgeist and that fascinates me so much.
Reminds me of Fire Heroes (PS2 firefighting game). You cant find any kind of wiki or even forum discussion but thankfully it was released internationally and thus theres LP of it on RUclips.
Funnily enough there is definitely Japanese games that are hugely popular but don't have their own page, although I don't remember the game.
Too much text to convey that this is an obscure media
A Torrent for a GBA Emulator I tried about 10 years ago had Japanese games that were quite interesting to me.
One I think was called Killer Dice, and it had two versions, Pokemon style!
I found no GameFAQ so I had to translate the Katakana and learn more words to figure out how to play...
There isn’t even a Japanese Wikipedia article for this game, lol.
Although there appears to be quite a few results for the game in Japanese, including auction sites. Most Japanese-only games have little to no presence in the English-speaking side of the internet, so this isn’t strange.
oh that's why i got food poisoning at the hot dog stand, my food level wasn't high enough
Enemies targeting your inventory is a diabolical 'f**k you' from the devs, damn
There once was a game called "Torneko no Daibouken - Fushigi no Dungeon" which had an enemy who would PERMANENTLY REDUCE YOUR STATS with no way to recover them besides dieing and starting over again AS HIS BASIC ATTACK!!!
@@robertwildschwein7207and i though the demons stealing your levels in the first megami tensei game was bad
@@robertwildschwein7207 i feel like a enemy with that attack COULD work , but you must be really good balancing the game , because not even Fear and Hunger has such a bullshit mechanic
@@robertwildschwein7207 Diablo 1 had an enemy or two that would drain 1 Max HP permanently when they hit you.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Demon's Soul had a boss that could drain levels from you, however it is both intended to be the final boss, and you could just grind your levels back.
There's a reason IF is known as the "Landmine Company" in my country. Whether a game from them is playable or not is a literal gamble, because the basic concept of "balance" simply doesn't exist in most of their games. When the HD Neptunia series are the best games they ever came up with, you can tell the quality of their lesser-known titles...
Speaking of Neptunia, they actually parodied this game as one of the minigame dungeons called Neptral Tower, also with 10000 floors. At least said minigame was made as an "idle RPG," not an actual dungeon...
Look at the original PS3 Neptunia. It's peak IF. The entire tutorial can be unwinnable if you don't succeed the RNG checks to heal, because of course healing is a luck check on top of needing to be low HP to do anything. You can increase the odds of it, but the tutorial has you at a flat 50% chance to minorly heal if you're below 50% hp iirc. So you can just die if it fails enough times.
Compa, the nurse character, is a party member throughout the entire game unless you get DLC characters or very late game get the other nations' CPUs. Compa, the nurse character, never gains the ability to heal. Not a single move. It's all up to the RNG checks.
Not that the game's hard. It's quite the opposite, outside of the very beginning testing your luck you will almost never die. Once you unlock Neptune's HDD form, as far as I recall there's no cost nor penalty for activating it. You can just turn it on at the start of the fight and use her huge attack Neptune Break, every single turn the rest of the fight. It trivializes the entire game, which is good since it means less relying on RNG, but it has the small side effect called the entire game is boring since you crush everything very easily and there is nothing appealing in the rest of the game.
Even the writing is trash compared to any later Neptunia game, so you'll likely groan if it gets any reaction out of you. Like the OG's example of a joke is the 3 main girls standing, stoic-faced, going "Look, there are blue hedgehogs. They are going downhill. They are then going into a panchiko parlor. Hm, I wonder if that means anything." or "Oh look, it's a man in a green space armor. There is a halo in the sky above him. Hm, a green armored man associated with a Halo..." Not even artwork, just randomly vaguely describing a franchise and the scene ends. It's almost impressive how bad it is that it makes the later, generic Neptunia games seem well designed.
@@chaptap8376 The PS3 original version felt as if they couldn't decide whether to make it a pure visual novel. The rudimentary RPG elements seem to be tacked on at the last minute.
The game might have been better as a VN, since the development time and budget could be much better used to flesh out the story and improve the visuals.
This has very strong "Tech demo that got greenlit for a release" energy
Word.
This game truly doesn't deserve such good box art
i’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to make every aspect of their game as frustrating as possible like this. imagine losing all your progress in the 10000 floor dungeon because you couldn’t find a save statue 😭 the only positive thing i have to say about it is that the monster designs are cute
I'd argue that even the "cute monsters" is a bad thing, since the MC designs are pretty "blegh," and it makes the cute enemies more annoying because it makes me wish I was playing as them instead.
Japanese gamers seem to have a much higher tolerance for frustrating nonsense. For example, they consider Tower of Druaga to be a beloved franchise instead of a cruel prank somewhere on the level of Desert Bus.
@@billvolk4236 Tower of Druaga is great though. Genuinely my favorite arcade game.
@@billvolk4236 Ironically, Nightmare of Druaga: Fushigino Dungeon happens to be one of the best rogue-like RPG dungeon crawlers out there. It does everything this game doesn't. Also it's super hard, impossible post-game dungeon is only 300 floors.
Counter point: tower of druaga is awesome @@billvolk4236
I feel like they wanted to make an anti-game
every bad decision feels 100% intentional and damn did they create the perfect anti-game
Desert Bus is still better imo
@@juannaym8488 I was going to make a snarky comparison between these two games but then typing it out I realized just how right you are. Desert Bus can't be topped
I wound up getting my hands on Spectral Forces: Genesis for the DS a long, long time ago from a bargain bin at our local Walmart. It's this weird and not very good strategy game, but it had this feel to it like it was taking place in a well-established world that you had NO business being in, full of characters the game thinks you SHOULD know but definitely don't. This was a peek into a rabbit hole I'd pretty much forgotten about.
neverland is very much a hole to fall in
I tried it from a ROM Torrent long ago.
Almost got it from GameSpot but I ended up buying something else and next time it was gone...
Spectral Tower is honestly impressive
I thought the 100 floor dungeons in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a slog
I thought I'd NEVER finish Tower of Fate because of the difficulty
I'm not even sure if I ever tried to play Toriko's Dungeon translated
But this absolutely takes the cake
A 10,000 floor dungeon might as well be an infinite one
and with a game with as many broken systems as this, it might as well be purgatory.
I think we may have found the tenth circle of Hell! 😆
At least with PMD you get more story and bang for your buck!
Hell, even the Millennium Dungeon in Shiren 3 (1,000 floors!) isn't as bad as this game
What is Tower of Fate?
@@heroesoftomorrow3488maybe they were referring to destiny tower, the ultimate 100 floor dungeon of pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of sky.
“Inspired by the legend of Sisyphus.”
I'm sure you're exaggera-
"Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory"
- you are probably not exaggerating.
Idea Factory is a glib name for a studio that literally does nothing but pump out variations on the same game ten times a year with occasionally new still art for 'cutscenes' and narrative that is 90% VN style talking heads. At one point the Neptunia games seemed inviting because of their sheer level of sheen, but having played several of them I now realize this company is like a romance novel publisher.
Nowadays that's true, but it was less true in the 90s / early 00s
Striking fools gold with Neptunia is what solidified their style.
tbh tho. in the otome scene they're well liked for their releases. compared to aksys the other company that primarily localizes otome games people like the releases from idea factory more. idea factory does nice limited editions while aksys usually just does a cd.
although i think they are just a localizing company.
It says a lot when the Neptunia spinoffs are most innovative, because they are made by third party devs. They aren't always the best (like with Producing Perfection and U: Action Unleashed) but they are the only ones that doesn't feel like a total copypaste.
That's Compile Heart, not Idea Factory.
Granted, CH is a subsidiary under IF but IF themselves haven't made a proper game in like over a decade. They instead focus on Otome, where they are actually pretty successful and liked.
I mean that was the same concept behind the Warhol Factory
A 10,000 floor tower reminds me of when the South Park kids tried to build a tower to get to Heaven so Kenny could help them win a candy contest
The thing that gets me most is how slick and epic the characters look on the box art, even the comic in the manual looks pretty neat, but then in the actual game they look janky and ugly.
And perhaps the saddest part is that there are elements of what clearly could be a very good game, but they just absolutely ruined it.
Almost makes me wanna make a "rip-off" that's actually playable.
just emulate pmd lol
The classic ol' "Batman Forever for SNES" treatment, eh? :D
Azure Dreams would be a better choice, hell, Torneko probably came out before this game and that's a better Rougelike as well.
Phantom Edifice
I’ve read enough manwha to know that someone is going to complete the 100000th floor of the terrible game and get sucked into the game world…
"Oh, I know this world. This is the game that I won in my previous life"
"Real? So how to get through this?"
"Oh, this part is pure RNG"
yeah obscrue games like this are always cursed somehow lol
@@ViteaificationThere's a reason they're so obscure. It's because noone wants to remember.
I *LOVE* this video. It's the perfect balance of spite and receipts, explained in a calm voice with just enough venom. I would absolutely watch more videos like this
There was actually an arcade crossover fighting game that crossed over Spectral Tower and Generations Of Chaos called Spectral X Generations. It was actually pretty good.
Only because IGS made it
@@zenksren8206 I know. The absolute chads behind Dodonpachi 2: Bee Storm.
@Nathan-rb3qp It seems to me that game came out on ps2, at least here in EU, iirc. Maybe the one i'm referring to wasn't the game you think of, but a sequel.
Forgot a *this, sorry
@@alessandrobaggi6129 Nah that's the game. Spectral VS Generations got a PS2 port.
So with this being the first game they ever released, and with their track record so far? How is it that this company never faced bankruptcy
their games are extremely simple and reuse everything
for example Neptunia has used the same gameplay, assets, models and engine for years
and other games they have made have also reused these elements as well
so each game only needs to sell a couple thousand copies to be profitable and that's IF/CH's strength, local sales are all that matters and international ones is pure profit
@@Sigismund697damn
Beyond being cheap, they also had a tendency to luck into making stuff that was fascinating (fun characters and/or interesting ideas) despite the weak mechanics, Neptune was just the peak of that. Also worth noting that IF got a *lot* better about a decade ago when NIS's execs went mad and started doing really evil stuff to with employees (shuffling them around then claiming this meant they only had to pay them as though they were new employees) and they picked up a lot of talent.
@@kanrakucheese oh I heard about that
apparently is why Disgaea 6 was such a mess and there was a huge exodus of employees
Seems like they got a bit of that IJN “magic” and managed to get their grubby paws on some hot IP.
Roguelike with 10K floors was bad enough but having each battle be a Face-to-face with enemies and not in-dungeon battles like Rogue just saps the soul out of me. Now you know why japan ranks so high in depression.
By looking at the speedrun of this game, reading the Spectral Tower Strategy Wiki, and playing the game a bit myself, I noticed a few anomalies regarding this video:
* werewolves actually do exist in the game, both as a player class and as an enemy type
* there are four different set pieces, each with one recolored variation (moldy attic, wooden mine, stalagmite cave and brick cave), and the game appears to change from one set piece to another, and only Spectral Tower and Last Tower do have all eight of them
* some enemies do indeed home in you, if you are within their perimeters, like Thief, Assassin and Item Hunter
* you get multiple attempts to run away from battle, as long as your character has that special move, and the enemy hasn't either sealed it away from you, or got you cursed or smitten, after you failed to flee the first time
* being turned a pig disables you from interacting with almost everything (including the goddess statues), but you can still fight enemies normally (somehow, and as seen in the footage), get the key and unlock the door to the exit stairs, and eat any edible item without regard to their food levels, and not suffer any tummy ache penalties
* Fairy Rod guides you to keys, floor exits, and boss monsters, too
* Warp Rod can take you up to the maximum of sixty floors (again, as seen in the speedrun), and can also be used multiple times, unless Warp Rod breaks after one use, in which it does have a high chance to, but is still ain't guaranteed
Just to make sure that we all are on the same page.
I don't know that ive seen an accurate video game doc or essay in years. Half these kids didn't exist when the thing came out they are talking about. The other half doesn't put in the work
@@CokeZorro And then there are the acoustic 0.1% who get everything right and make 10+ hour essays on every minutea.
If you want to put a 10k-story tower as a bonus or side-thing, go for it
Don't make me suffer it to beat your marginally functional game
Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is
"Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is"
Yoko Taro: "And I took that personally."
You are the one making you suffer if you choose to play an Idea Fuck game, nobody else.
It'd be like if you had to get to the top of that really long bonus dungeon in Parasite Eve before you fought Eve
He said "hell" just like Bob Ross used to say it.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter I don't even need to Google it, Dark Souls?
Something real weird about knowing IDEA FACTORY from the Neptunia games and how mediocre of the games are but then finding out that they've got a track record of this sort of thing.
And then learning that
A: Neptunia is probably the best thing they ever made
B: They are a relatively ancient developer, that has never actually gotten better
After completing the video the only two people I can imagine willingly creating this game is either a TURBO-NERD, the king of geeks, someone who is so deep in the woods of dungeon crawl rpg's he decided to make a game that just had ALL OF THE SYSTEMS, just stuffing the game with every idea he had with zero thought given to how all the systems were gonna interact...
OR the very opposite, a ULTRA-JOCK who so hated nerds that they decided to learn everything nerds like so they could create a honey-trap that would draw number-crunching nerds in and _demolish_ them. Not sure which of these persons are required to invent a game where you have to stuff your limited inventory full of junk to protect your necessary level-up and healing items from enemy attacks... but it has to be one of them, no other person could conjure such evil.
Or third a money laundering scheme were they were only required to make a "game" that looked playable and let the devs put any bullshit they can think of
I played Blackstone back in the day. It was one of only a tiny number of Xbox games released in the US with a bright anime aesthetic on the box, like so many of those cool ps1/ps2 rpgs!
It was thoroughly mediocre.
I remember getting stuck in that game as the next level never unlocked around level 20, even tried with multiple characters
The graphics and sound of this game really reminds me of those budget multiple puzzle game packs of the late 90s and early 2000s for PC. Basically one step up from flash. I feel the same way about hoshi wo miru hito, so bad it's fascinating.
How is it that I lived my entire life without ever hearing about the Legendary Kusoge, but now I've run into references to it twice in a week? Now I'm actually tempted to try the damn thing just for the experience.
It is quite the experience.
@@jasonblalock4429 If youre interested in it and don't want to experience it yourself, Bad Game Hall of Fame recently did a longplay on it. It was very fun to watch imo.
Simple 1500 vol. 1: Spectral Tower
One of my aunts had one of those packs, but there was also a top-down beat 'em up similar to classic Gauntlet full of extremely shiny pre-rendered graphics. The main character was a bald man in a T-shirt named Buapha, who threw mallets (the rate of fire upgrade powerup had him shout HAMMER UP). I remember the health refills being Chinese takeout and while I don't remember what their effect was, another powerup was a pair of jeans called the PANTS OF POWER.
This game actually seems kinda fun but only as a desert bus style test of attrition between friends lmao
This game have some ideas that i could had when i was a kid imaging game mechanics for a game like "yeah this random save spot could be something cool as in real life where you have only a few safe spots in a dangerous place".
It's beautiful
I still find amazing the obsesion of japan with "towers", "roguelikes" and "hard AF".
It's like they have this competition to make the hardest roguelike, set in a tower ofc; so when adding sensible difficult mechanics to their games reaches a point of diminishing returns for gameplay experience, they start throwing in the bullshit mechanics; although idea factory here took it to another level from the start. That gotta be an acheivement... I guess.
Thanks for the cool video Mr. Stranger.
Shadow Tower on PS1 is the quicker I got a game over in a Fromsoftware game. It's a first person Dungeon crawler and you start the game on stairs with no rails .
Also remember kids Fromsoftware was also known for making some of the worst JRPGs of all time.
Nobody liked Kings Feild back in the day. It's possible Neptunia could be called a classic in 20 years.
You know that Bloodbore PS1 demake? If Bloodborde came out in the 90s it would be called one of the worst games on the PS1.
Look up reviews of their RPGs pre Demons Souls.
It's because Japanese society is the endboss of anxiety and depression disorders
@@Chelaxim Shadow Tower is messy, I'll grant you. Having recently played and beaten King's Field I-III, I can definitely see their appeal. They are highly unique experiences with a lot of high points to go with them. They're not masterpieces, but they're solid (also we need to take into account when those were made, 94,95,96, respectively).
"Hard towers", very Freudian indeed
Tower of Druaga was one of the first big RPGs (ok it's not really an RPG, it's more like Zelda) in Japan. Super long and cryptic, but thrived on the community aspect of figuring it all out. Probably where that influence comes from.
Honestly idea factory is a perfect name for them, since they just they endlessly produce games with some of the most baffeling design choices humanly possible
Have you played Azure Dreams before? The GBC version, specifically. That game didn't have *that* much content either, but I felt that the gameplay loop was satisfying enough (go in tower, find treasure/weapons/eggs, leave, sell treasure, hatch eggs etc.) that it was still a very fun game. More importantly though, you could tell the devs clearly thought about how to work the mechanics of a roguelike into a more typical rpg-like narrative format/context. One great example imo is how the typical "item hoarding" issue is rather naturally solved, because you only have a limited inventory, and the higher you go in the tower the higher-valued treasure you're likely to find. Even if your monster is only 10hp lower than max, you're going to use that healing herb because you need the inventory slot for the valuable piece of treasure you just found. Additionally, even if your monster is at max hp, feeding it a healing item increases its max hp by 1, so it's clear to me the devs thought the systems through and tried to have some synergy between the more "permanent" rpg elements and the more "transient" roguelike elements. There's nothing worse than when you have a regular RPG with roguelike elements bolted on e.g. Final Fantasy, except all the dungeons are randomly-generated. Never was a fan of that, it feels lazy and imo the two styles - JRPG and roguelike - aren't actually as complementary as one might think, and it takes some work to combine them in a satisfying way.
I really enjoyed that game, and I was trying to think of it's name. I played it on PS. I never beat it because that tower is ridiculously hard, but I liked improving the town and the townsfolk respecting me more and more as I improved the town. I should try and play it again or watch someone else play it.
As a Neptunia fan, the concept of Idea Factory making a bad game... is the least surprising thing I've ever heard.
Thank god we got gems like Fairy Fencer, Mugen Souls, and ofc Neptunia that balanced out Idea Factory's issues.
Imagine getting Isekaid into this game.
i think we call that Hell
+ being immortal and revive everytime you die. You practically got hell.
I Rather get isekaid into the fear and hunger dungeon s at that point
This is like fear and hunger if it wasn’t fun
so they spun off of Data East? I'm sure that explains plenty. also started to lose count of the times I exclaimed 'WHY WOULD YOU DO IT THAT WAY?!' when describing something... I can totally see where the nickname Idea F***tory comes from, hahahaha.
Plus some ex j force
Well, Data East did make some pretty good games (Atomic Runner on the Mega Drive is outstanding), though they were pretty hit and miss. Idea Factory are miss and miss: Loads of JRPGS with really stodgy gameplay that's simply designed to waste your time, and in the case of the Neptunia series, the payoff is basically getting repeated panty shots of underage anime girls. That's really all Idea Factory have to offer.
@@sjake8308 oh yeah that's fair I do like bad dudes!
I mean Data East gave us one of the most famous twists (for western audiences) a decade before another game did it and became popular. I’m not going to spoiler either, but it blew my mind when I learned it.
Data East was a good developer. They also had their own RPG series for a time (Glory of Heracles) that was pretty good
16:32
"If the food level is higher than your characters level, then it makes them sick"
LMAO this game has a picky eater stat and tummy ache mechanics that rules
Stardew Valley has this now. Some monsters make you nauseated and ginger clears up your tummy ache.
“Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory.”
Me: Oh nooooo
this looks like something I would play while being sick and dont understanding if Im winning or not, it happen once with air management 96, played that thing for 14 straight hours with a strong fever, so yeah this game feels similar
Heard a bit of Neptunia in the past, didn't know a terrible company was behind it all the time.
I only know of Idea Factory from Neptunia (and I think Monster Monpiece, which was alright-ish). Neptunia is actually a fairly fun series, and the characters can be funny on occasion. They're not bad at all per-se, but my biggest gripe is how assets are reused in the remakes. I think it's unfair to call those games bad if the whole complaint is based on how repetitive they are, because they reworked the battle system later on as opposed to the original PS3 games and then re-released 1-3 with a rehaul of the graphics, music and battle system as well as the cutscene styles (3D models vs moving 2D ones). That boosted the accessibility of the games as they were easily ported to other systems compared to how expensive the originals were used at the time.
You've earned my subscription... But only if you do an entire series on Idea Factory's entire catalog.
Calm down there Satan
most of it is just eather ok or vns for girls
Please don't, there's enough hit pieces on them from high-horsed JRPG reviewers already.
But there's actually good JP only stuff on PS1 nobody has heard of (like Flight Plan's output).
@shadowmaksim such youtubers as?
How does a game company last long where they are well known for making bad games while also still being able to stay afloat?
Bile fascination, possibly?
Otmate
By making a series of games based on mostly underage anime girls who innocently flash their panties on a regular basis. They've found a niche and that's the audience they've been catering to for the last decade or so.
@@sjake8308thanks. That makes sense. If there’s one thing Japan knows how to do is appeal to a niche audience that pays a lot of money.
Making their games cheaper than oxygen.
No, seriously, that's as good a recipe for success as anything else.
I have to admit, the idea of an RPG with hundreds of classes chosen at random sounds kind of fun, even if some of them really bad. There's no excuse for it to be hundress of hours of level grinding though.
God these graphics are on par with Ronde, and strangely I don't know which game is worse.
Ronde at least has more than 2 frames of animation for its battle sprites
@zenksren8206 yeah you know what, Ronde at least has gameplay. Also forgot it was on Saturn and not PS1, so Ronde gets to win this round for whatever that's worth.
How utterly wild. Thank you for sharing this masterpiece with us.
The cut away at the end was hilarious :D
Man, these pre-rendered graphics, and the text just kind of floating around, this looks like it should be on the 3D0. Kind of reminds me of a slightly saner Death Crimson. I'm getting kind of obsessed with this kind of 90s outsider art video game aesthetic.
Lots of games with this style on the Saturn.
It is way past the time we got a documentary about Idea Factory 😂
I'm not totally unconvinced this was purposefully made as an instrument of torture
I like how the adventure’s name is “NNNNNNNNNN”
There was also hhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Eeeyikes. Thanks to an old Hardcore Gaming 101 article, I had known about Idea Factory's dire reputation in their home country, but I had never truly plunged into their output (didn't see anything that jumped out to me). I had vaguely heard of Hyperdimension Neptunia beforehand. It's a cute concept that reminds me of "Sega Hard Girls" (in fact, the two even had a crossover)...shame the game itself apparently isn't that great.
I loved the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, so I was wondering "how could they snafu a roguelike?" Turns out, they can snafu it pretty badly. Some of the design choices you mention are utterly baffling. I mean, randomizing save points?! Somewhere in Japan, there has to be a person who couldn't attend to important business due to playing for hours and not finding a single save point. Does Spectral Tower have the largest dungeon in any roguelike? 10,000 floors...man.
How commercially successful are Idea Factory's games, anyway? Spectral Tower having sequels implies that the game was successful enough to warrant sequels, or that Idea Factory simply got enough money to produce them. Part of me suspects it's the decent artwork their titles boast, even though the style isn't my cup of tea.
One last note: I seem to remember Takahashi Meijin making a cameo in one of their games...somehow.
It's worth mentioning that their output in Japan was massive... they were cranking out at least 4-5 games on average each year. Even if those games sold only 10-20k each time, it would have been likely enough for them to keep going. Probably that's what they were banking on.
When you're making this stuff on the cheap, it doesn't have to sell like Dragon Quest to do well.
Neptune one is bad but the remake is okay
@@sparkly9294 Bingo.
@@mariusamber3237 The core Neptune games are pure grind. That's their big problem. They're twice as long as they need to be, with literally cut-and-pasted dungeons and mechanics that absolutely require grinding for both XP and crafting items. Which is a shame because they'd be decently fun junk food RPGs if they weren't so utterly tedious.
The only way I can get anywhere in an IF game is by watching movies or RUclips on a second screen.
I don't think I could handle something this basic for any longer than 4 hours. I can't believe the audacity for them to draf it out to 450+ hours.
Geez you've got the patience of a saint. I think I would switch it off after 30 minutes.
I thought the worst (JRPGs) would go to monster seed. A pokemon/ Digimon knockoff with the grosses monster design.
Sounds rough, but I really like the visual presentation and aesthetic.
*Coughs nervously having only known Idea Factory only for their Otomate division*
I didn't even know they had such a bad reputation since I never touched any of their RPGs. Like....the concept of the game sounds cool, but they ruined it with stupid mechanics. I've played Mystery Dungeon games, so I've suffered through 100 floor dungeons before...but 10,000 with these mechanics? Hell no.
Holy crap, seeing this on my feed and you opening up talking about Idea Factory right after I closed out of a Neptunia game gave me the funniest whiplash. Neptunia games certainly aren't good (barring the latest mainline entry which actually holds its own as a game) but like you said, there's a strange charm to its concept and meta humor that can sometimes carry the game, even if the actual gameplay leaves much to be desired.
I actually just remembered that Neptunia also parodies the name of Spectral Tower in some of its entries, featuring an area called the Neptral Tower, usually used as a spot for an item collection minigame of sorts.
After watching this......i already feel like I've played it for 400hrs.
Imagine getting this as a present back in those days with no internet completely blind those poor kids
This really feels like it's one of those games the devs made just because they thought they could, without real regard to whether playing it would be fun or not. "Wow! Ten thousand floors!!" like... yeah? And there are maybe 10 variations. Wow. The same floor one thousand times, great.
You know, I REALLY hate how after that HG101 article everyone called them Idea F*** when I had heard no reference to them being a bad company prior to that article. Truth is I have a soft spot for them. I did indeed buy Black Stone and much of their Western output...though I've also been driven nuts by the fact that their most interesting games rarely got US releases. Namely their Grand Strategy games. You know, the ones where you conquer the world? Like Dragon Force? Heck, Spectral Force pretty much WAS a lower budget Dragon Force clone. But no, somehow we mostly got the blander grid-based ones...except for Spectral Force Genesis.
You wanna talk about f-ing a good idea? Spectral Force Genesis was basically like Dragon Force but on DS with the touch screen used to command your army on the bottom screen while swarms of 2D sprites fought on a 3D battlefield on the top screen! BRILLIANT! Just one problem: You could only do what you are told to do that turn. So you can only Battle on a Battle Turn, Trade on a Trade Turn, and Reinforce on a Reinforce Turn and so on...and the turns are completely random. IT WAS SO CLOSE TO A GOOD GAME!
I got Mist of Chaos on PS3 too. Korean version showed up at the local import shop. Bought it. My army had a crab, a penguin, and a maid in it. THAT. That is why I love Idea Factory! They have so many games with massive casts of weird characters! Heck they even got a bad fighting game that people weirdly like called Spectral VS Generation and most of those characters are in the bad dub classic Chaos Wars which is ALSO Idea Factory...where they somehow crossed over with Gun Grave and Shadow Hearts?!
Speaking of bad dubs, I have the US DVD of the Spectral Force anime sitting next to me. ADV released it. I found it at a used record store for $6.
But if there's one game I CAN vouch for, it's Neptunia. While the FIRST game was terrible, they actually LISTENED and the second game is pretty good aside from the awful protagonist and by the third game? Neptunia V? Legitimately enjoyable game. The combat system is actually really neat, it's like a fusion of Quest 64 and Xenosaga! It's also amusing because being a joke game, they actually make fun of how bad the first game was and the protagonist of the second game has a sub-plot about trying to be a less boring protagonist! It has been off and on since then. V-II removing the movement circles was a terrible idea and Neptunia VS Senran Kagura is abysmal but I am REALLY hyped for the next game. Get this: the next Neptunia is about travelling back in time to save the Atari Jaguar (and 3DO and Apple Pippin)! Idea Factory is making a game about saving the Atari Jaguar! It's PERFECT!
It IS quite impressive that they're still in business. JUST put out a My Life As A Villainess game on Switch, too! But, somehow, I am glad. Perhaps I need to do more research on this company and do a tribute to their madness.
The Mary Skelter games are the only Iffy products that I'd recommend to other people as genuinely being good. (As opposed to junk food, jank fun, etc.) And even then, that requires someone be into Mary Skelter's very strange Venn diagram of influences. "Moe fairy tale girls being tortured in a Lovecraftian RPG dungeon" is kind of a hard sell.
Why does your description of Mary Skelter kinda sound like BLACKSOULS?
@@jasonblalock4429 Literally just ordered Mary Skelter 2 off Amazon because NOW I'm curious and want to dive deeper and Mary Skelter and Death's End Re:Quest 1 seem to be the most well liked Idea Factory games...both of which are Compile Heart so I'm thinking Compile Heart might be the best thing to ever happen to these guys!
I hope I can find a cheap copy of Arc of Alchemist one day. I wanna play it but I hear it's legendarily terrible.
@@jasonblalock4429 I've only played the first Mary Skelter and that's not a game I'd recommend to anybody, either. The concept and artwork are good, the music is great, but the actual game is typical, low effort Idea Factory shovelware: Endless palette-swapped enemies, incredibly formulaic gameplay and a lot of grinding for the sake of grinding. It's a shame in this case because with a bit more effort this could actually have been a legitimately good game.
@@jasonblalock4429They have good VNs.
The engine is good enough. Someone could make a Romhack of this to turn it into a fun game. Such a Romhack will come someday after people have exhausted every other possibility, because when the PS10 is released people will realize that PS1 was pretty close to the beginning of console gaming history and there's not actually that many RPGs from the PS1 era for game historians in the future to look back on.
Spectral Tower is a perfect storm of terrible videogame design. How on Earth did the developers get approval to make a sequel? Also, it is really cool to see a RndStranger video get picked up by the algorithm. Great work, as always.
god, those menu character portraits. i don't like shitting on another artist's work, but all i can say is that seeing some of these drawings in a console game, presumably sold on real shelves in real stores in real life, makes me feel more confident about my own
Gotta love the dedication here. They started making bad games, and by god, they're not gonna stop making bad games. Weaker creators would falter and maybe at least consider making something actually *good* for once, or maybe just calling it quits, but Idea Factory started by considering carefully how to make the worst fucking design decisions possible, and adopted this as their sole driving philosophy of game creation. That is true dedication.
dedication to the art of slop
@@xord6286 Talk about the Japanese reincarnation of LJN... :D
Worst part is... Some of their games actually have some interesting ideas, that just isn't there most of the time. Being bogged down by questionable design choices or simply rushed development.
0:38
I am 99% sure this is footage of the remake, "Neptunia ReBirth" which by all accounts is after Idea Factory started making good games
Hey, idea factory slander, count me in!
It isn't slander if it's true! 😆
This game sounds like a nightmare
"Eevee... Treecko... You have now become a renowed rescue team, who have helped so many lost Pokémon out in the wild reaches of the land"
"Hahah, thanks... Couldn't have done it without my partner!"
"This means... I think... Yes, you are now ready. It will truly test your mettle and prowess as a rescue team."
"We are more than ready, bring it on!"
"It is a mythical place known as the Spectral Tower..."
Thank you for this video, because I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about this company otherwise! I have a feeling that this will be one of the better performing videos. It's crowd pleasing: It describes a terrible, unheard of JRPG, is under just 20 minutes, and it's amusing. I bet when I share this one, more of my friends will be clicking on it than usual.
Genuine question... Where do you share Rnd's videos that they may be clicked on? I share them with people when I want to explain some Famicom game I'm neurospicily obsessing over, in fact I found Famidaily when I was trying to challenge a speedruner to try to speedrun Super Monkey Daibouken. 😁
@@EriChanTheRetroGamerNerd basically anywhere. Discord, twitter, bluesky...
Well you’re right because after only one day it already has higher views than every Famidaily but one.
This video got you like a thousand subs? Bout time people realize the greatness of a random stranger!
This game sounds funnier and funnier the more you describe it. If I could play this on my phone instead of a GATCHA game if it was translated.
Also, I appreciate the title of this video not being the least bit clickbait.
The nice cover art would have fooled me into buying this, if it ever got released outside of Japan LOL
That ending made me howl. Well-played.
The escalation in the tower sizes got me cracking up, sounds like something a modern F2P garbage mobile game would pull off
idea factory gotta learn we don’t want a single IDEA coming out of their FACTORY 🔥🔥
Jesus Christ this game sounds like Purgatory. Just a neverending spiral of pain and suffering.
And yet Idea Factory is still in business and turning 30 this year. What a weird industry.
It’s even more strange that they made bad games while also making specifically JRPGs for Xbox 360 in Japan. How do you survive doing that?
@@thomasffrench3639 You can't lose too much money on a game if you commit as few resources as possible when pooping them onto the market.
@@sjake8308that must be so low, because even low budget is probably the cost of all sales of an Xbox 360 in Japan
@@thomasffrench3639Low budgets, I'm pretty sure Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey was a net negative for Mistwalker.
Low dev costs with high return
As someone that played a lot of Neptunia, I agree. The latest effort was... actually good. The games before that, pretty much should be only bought as a budget game. However, nowadays, there are so many fantastic games on Steam to where you should probably consider other games. Never games had so many reused levels. In the latter games, the game was performant at first, but when you go to one of the newer levels, the FPS dip was huge. Inverted levels, and so many level revisiting.
There's the Compile Heart curve, which is rough. All of the sudden, you'll hit a dungeon where the monsters will feel incredibly difficult. If you grind a few levels though, it isn't bad. If you spend a little extra time grinding here and there, also not too bad. However, how were you supposed to know this before the Internet? How is a casual player going to deal with this? Probably rage quit.
I always saw Neptunia as blowing their budget on amazing VAs and artwork
I’m trying to make an Excel spreadsheet of all JRPGs, and explaining what the general reception/what is worth playing, and knowing Idea Factory is a bad company will be a big help for sorting good and bad games
Also having games exclusively for Xbox 360? Did they have Ninja Gaiden’s Itagaki working with them or something?
I would expect that Microsoft paid them for exclusivity for whatever reason, as it would be insane for Idea Factory to do this otherwise.
For awhile during the 360 era, Microsoft was actively bankrolling niche Japanese devs to try and improve their console’s relevance in the East. Besides a few exclusive JRPGs, this also resulted in the console getting a ton of shoot-em-up/bullet hell releases.
@@sjake8308The 360 predated the PS3 and Wii so that's why some of those games are 360 exclucive and while Record of Agarest War and Zero were on both PS3 and 360 Record of Agarest War 2 was only PS3. Neptunia Sisters Vs Sisters is the first Idea Factory game to come to Xbox in 15 years.
Idea Factory has more games on the Playstation Vita alone than every Xbox combined.
@@ChelaximAah agarest another game that is just bad. Lets make the combat really bland, getting true ending stingy af, also make the game really grindy and dont give xp sharing so it means most of the character roster will never be used. good game design.
the issue is they WERE INSAIN they made games on VCD for GODS SAKE@@sjake8308
The algorithm blessed me today.
I thought I was prepared for a bad game. I thought I knew bad ps1 games as I have dug and found many bad ones (popular bad ones such as Bubsy 3d, hooters road trip, Spawn, Criticom, Vip). Then watched a guy named Sean Seanson (which introduced me to more horrifically bad games like Dreams, Ubik and Iznogood) But this? Oh God this? I didnt even KNOW what Idea Factory was!
It as if I scraped the bottom of a barrel and hit some magical switch; which in turn, lead to another enclosed basement full of barrels...
If you somehow talk about more of these games (I dont see too many reviews of these types of games tbh), I'd watch them all.
Loved this one. Appreciate the work!
And I though the 3651 floors tower in Labyrinth of Galleria was a bit much 😅
5:15 TL;DR- you fight 5 towers, and the actual spectral tower- tower #4- has 1,000 floors. In a rogue like. Tower #5 has 10,000.
The rest of this is just a post mortem on every other failure this game has which makes even the diehard rogue like enjoyers not want to do all that.
Thanks to this video I finally understand what the hell Iffy was talking about when she was talking about a tower that has a lot of floors in some of the Neptunia games.
oh shit bad idea factory strikes again
“It’s called Idea Factory. You may have heard of them.”
Me: yeah, they make dating sims
“They make RPGs.”
Me: that is what I said. RPGs, of course.
I'd love to see more deep dives on obscure and terrible PS1 RPGs, getting to see the most ridiculously awful specimens of the genre on a console that's largely defined by the standout quality of its RPG library would be a treat.
I kinda recognized the name Idea Factory... then I saw the red monster at 1:10 and immediately remembered the monster that had the same appearance from Chaos Wars with the infamous "Keee." scream which sounded like someone screaming "Aaahhh!" in pain. Then I saw Chaos Wars was developed by Idea Factory and published by them in Japan.
Seems like that seemly poor level of quality was in more of their games than I remember.
Then... I tried to look up that monster game from Idea Factory at 1:10 ("Monster Complete World") and found out Spectral Tower was the first (or at least second) game they published.
Chaos Wars is a crossover featuring characters from the Spectral series.
Chaos Wars was such glorious garbage.