My wife loves games with that sort of gameplay loop, where you have a main gameplay style/loop within a world of people and places you get to know for both flavor and gameplay benefits. Persona is a series and SDV a game that we have put a lot of time into together. She was talking about playing P4 again, but I crave novelty. What are some other fun games with a little community for us to get to know?
Fire Emblem has relationships you can maintain, as do Mass Effect/Dragon Age though to a somewhat less gameplay impacting scope
Graveyard Keeper
Recently released Lakeburg Legacy. It’s a small realm simulation: you build various workshops, allocate workers, gather resources, produce items to fill the need of the population.
And in the same time, each citizen had a love life, you can find them partners, chose talking subjects for their first date, decide if they should mary or not, some of them will break up after cheating on their partner…
Thats a neat concept, but it hasn’t made it to Playstation yet. I’ll keep an eye on it, though. It sounds like a great compromise between my love of watching my little dudes do stuff and her love of getting to know a little township.
I missed this point, sorry. I hope it will be released on other plateforms, including Playstation.
Wylde Flowers on Apple Arcade! I believe it also just came to Switch as well. Similar to Stardew Valley, but with a little more magic and voice acting. :)
Tokyo Xanadu and Trails of Cold Steel both follow a Persona-ish way of being RPGs mixed with socializing with party members and their community. I particularly find their social aspects stronger than Persona because they’re tied to the main story, meaning characters will often having interactions that are based on main events and not completely divorced from their plot/character developments, as well as having a more colorful cast of side characters.
Cold Steel is a fairly long series though - By itself its 4 games long, but its also part of a much larger universe and has some crossovers with other Trails games. I played the first 2, which are a somewhat self-contained story, without much issue but AFAIK they get denser from there on.
Xanadu is a more action-y game, in the vein of Ys, if you’ve played those, instead of being turn-based.
The Yakuza series also has some very strong characterization and side activities involving multiple characters, as well as a multitude of minigames. Like A Dragon (or Yakuza 7) is a soft reboot with a new main cast and also follows a more traditional turn-based RPG mechanic, highly recommended.
Oohh. I really like the look of Tokyo Xanadu. It kinda looks like the Persona formula with action gameplay, which isn’t necessarily bad. I can enjoy a good formula game. As long as the content is high quality, a familiar vessel is comforting. And if anything, action is preferable to long battles. She is not big on turn based and definitely isn’t getting through a long game with extended turn based battles. Persona was an exception because you could use elements to hurry most battles the fuck up xd
