i unironically think the best part of golden sun was the button that lets you read everyone's mind and i'm genuinely irritated that no other game has bothered to do it
@kat Ys II had something sort of similar: you could get magic that turns you into a monster, and then talk to literally any monster in the game and they all have unique dialog
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@kat and they all have names too, at least in the remakes
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@kat the dialog is frequently somewhat amusing too
a lot of them talk about trying to find that Adol guy (the player character), some of them are slacking off and ask you not to tell their boss that they were there, some of them just want to go home
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@kat look i just really like ys 1 and 2 and will take any excuse to inform people about the things we like about them
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@Felthry honestly i've never even heard of them haha
@kat it's a pretty good game and also a game of some historical significance, being arguably the first story-based video game--and it actually has a *good* story too, with actual character development and NPCs who are significant to the story at more than one point in the plot
it's also been remade like a million times so you can get it on steam nowadays for like $5, highly recommend
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@Felthry the first story-based video game? like, ever?
@kat yeah--it came after final fantasy 1 and dragon quest 1 but in both of those cases i'd argue that the story is kind of not integrated into the game the way it is in Ys; the player characters aren't really *characters* in the story, they're just the means with which you interact with the game (the FF and DQ series both got better about this in their second entries, but Ys was before either of those)
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@kat mm, computer adventure games didn't really cross my mind here
we don't know enough about such games to say anything much about them but ys at least has the distinction of being arguably the first graphical game with conventional controls (by modern standards, you know dpad and buttons) to be story-focused
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@Felthry hmm, i wonder if roguelikes with graphical tilesets started being a thing by 1989
@kat definitely not ones with story as integrated as that of Ys, roguelikes have never really had that much focus on story
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@Felthry iunno, it's just really hard to point at any specific game as "this is definitely the first time this ever happened, ever" haha
@kat well that's why I said "arguably" in that initial post
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@kat also ys was 1987, not 89
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@Felthry hard to say haha, once you put enough categories together the question is basically "was another game already this exact game before this game existed"
@kat it is at least a point you could argue, and one that we probably would argue, but you could just as well argue otherwise and i don't think it would be wrong
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@Felthry i get what you're getting at, but also: