Season 63 Rankings: preliminary round

[superaielman]

RULES
Choose TWO games/Forgotten Warriors. You must choose two, and can not choose more than two. This is to provide some balance- some people will yes most ideas, some will no most ideas. Picking out the best helps window down what to rank.

RULES REGARDING (single) FORGOTTEN WARRIORS: They do not take up a slot, if they're from a ranked game. They still need to beat out the second place game for nominations to get to the next stage.

Don't:

Suggest a game for ranking for humor/trolling/for the hell of it. Please put some effort into your suggestions and pick the best games for the DL overall. Save the comic failure for board tournaments.

What makes a good rankable game?

* games that are well-played within our group, and hence will get good vote numbers
* games which are well-played outside of our group, and hence will attract newbies
* games with well-developed or memorable characters
* games with interesting duellers battle-wise

Feel free to ask any questions about the process here.


This topic will be opened sunday morning.

I'm changing the little blurbs this season. With the new writeup system, we can have all writeups for a game done before the characters get a match. I strongly encourage people to claim and do them ahead of time.

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Art: Easy to find
Accessability: Good (Wii)
Notes: Good sales, okay enough playership in the group.  Being Wii only hurts some, of course.

Tales of Vesperia
Art: Easy to find for PC's
Accessability: Good (360)
Notes: See FE10. There are some concerns about specific rankings (Repede, some of the bosses), but it's one of the better ideas this time on merit.

Soul Nomad
Art: Easy to find
Accessability: Good (PS2)
Notes: Fairly interesting cast and pure playership is likely better than FE10/ToV, but it's a niche title.

Star Ocean 1
Art: easy to find
Accessabilty: Good (PSP+SNES)
Notes: Interest in this seems to have died off, as has playership. Has the split between games.

Dragon Quest 5
Art: Easy to find
Accessability: Good (DS+SNES)
Notes: See SO1, though the split there is pretty minor.

Final Fantasy 13
Art: easy to find
Accessability: Good (PS3+360)
Notes: In group playership is pretty weak on this one, though it isn't the gaping mass of apathy that FF12 was.

Valkyrie Profile DS
Art: Easy to find
Accessability Good (DS)
Notes: I'll avoid editorializing and note that it has pretty good in group playership. A lot of the game isn't rankable due to the splitpath nature and some muddiness with boss forms, though. Wyl has some votesplit potential.

Pokemon DS
Art: Easy to find
Accessability: Good
Notes: Pokemon, but a notable step down from gen 3 for drawing. Not sure what to feel about this one, as the starters/legendaries package is not especially strong.

Mana Khemia 2
Art: Easy to find
Accesability: Good
Notes: Playership for this one has stopped pretty cold since the last ranking period. Likely not ready.

Feel free to suggest any ideas not listed here.

[superaielman]

ToV- It's okay enough to make the second stage.
FF13

Others:

SN- Love it as a game, just don't think it's a great DL idea.
SO1/DQ5- Small casts that are mostly met wtih apathy. DQ5 feels like the better of the ideas. (Rank slime knight)
FF13- I wouldn't mind ranking this, since it's at least got a little playership in the group and is better received than FF12. Doubt it's ready this time though.
VPDS- Loathe it as a game, don't think it's a great DL idea. Most of the cast isn't rankable and the main character has a bad case of interp split.
Pokemon DS: I'm rather against ranking more starters/legendaries. It doesn't help that I've heard next to nothing good about the group we'd get from this gen either.
MK2-See my notes. It just stopped gaining players, oddly. Kind of the opposite of MK1 in that regard.

[Dhyerwolf]

Limited Time, so just posting quick thoughts first

Rank:

SN- Most of it's issues have come up before and not had issues with DL meshing (OB has most of the same).
MK 2- Kind of a filler slot here to me. Will expand (and potentially change later)

I'll note that for FE 10, writership is...specularly bad
Top 5 Writers go like this I believe:
Dhyer- 48 (No FE 10)
Tai- 19 (No FE 10)
Sopko- 17 (No FE 10)
Super- 14
Gate- 8 (No FE 10)
That's FE 10 looking at 20% writer ability

[Dark Holy Elf]

FE10 - Pretty big demand from last time. To Dhyer, writers aren't especially concerning since writeups are one-shot these days; I'm personally quite willing to volunteer right now to do half the game's writeups and whip people into getting the other half.

RBY - Filler vote since I'm varying degrees of unhappy with everything else. This could easily be argued into something else.

I'll consider supporting ToV if there's a promise not to rank Repede, may consider SN but I think that has some interp issues, may consider MK2 but I think that has bad playership, etc. VPDS has approximately 2 problem-free ranks so it can burn.

[Pyro]

I'll cast my vote for...

Tales of Vesperia: I'm a fan and I want to start bringing in next-gen games.

Final Fantasy 13: I'm not as much of a fan and it needs some more puzzling out for how most people view the cast in the DL, but we ould use a new mainstream FF game.

Other thoughts:

FE10: The next best one I'd suggest. Lots of interesting folks including bosses.

Soul Nomad: I'm not hugely concerned with this. I might support it, but this doesn't exactly inspire me and I don't think it would add much.

MK2: It has a bunch of interesting duelers, but I think the game is too niche for ranking? Well, I'm a fan of it so I can't really speak against it.

Dragon Quest 5: Madche and Perrin ^_^

[Cmdr_King]

Gate's played FE10.
Actually, hell, let's look here.  Using Dhyer's list and my data from a while back (so not 100% up to date)

FE10- Super, Gate
ToV- Gate, Super
SN- Gate, Dhyer, Super
SO1- Gate, Dhyer
DQV- Gate, Super
VPDS- Gate, Dhyer, Super
MK2- Dhyer, Gate

With Gen 4 data being in the previous list I don't seem to have (from memory, Gate and Super) and FFXIII coming out after taking this data.  I know Dhyer's played ToV at least partly since then, and Sopko may... have picked up VPDS?  I don't think so though.  He's played HGSS but not DPP I believe.  Tai didn't participate in this data, but I believe he's only played DQV or Soul Nomad if anything from this list.

[Tide]

Not particularly thrilled on the choices in general. My votes are for:

ToV - It has good internal playership if nothing else, which is a pretty big factor nowadays. PCs also have a fair bit of diversity (good) and as Pyro mentioned, it's a next gen console RPG. Helps that internal opinion of the game is fairly high too.
FE10 - For a FE game, the main cast that we should be ranking is diverse enough. I think it also manages to avoid any massive votesplitting issues too (we didn't rank FE9 Elincia, did we?), so that's another plus in its favor. This is also the second game that seems to have good internal playership and opinion on it, so it gets the second mention.

Others
Soul Nomad - No comment. I gather its a pretty cool game, but a massive interp issue that puts other interp issues to shame.

Star Ocean 1 - Seems back pedalling. Also very little hype internally and I don't think it'll make any rounds externally if we still cared about that either.

Dragon Quest 5 - See above.

Final Fantasy 13 - Probably my third choice. It's a FF, and although opinions are divided over it, at the very least it should not be overly complicated to decide how the cast pans out. The fact that it may not have enough players currently is the hold back.

Valkyrie Profile DS - Think playership is dead as hell on this one. Lack of decent opinions (I count mainly Djinn and Capt. K) on it also means lack of future playership. Repeated playthroughs are also probably a bit of a turn off on this.

Pokemon DS - Fourth choice. I don't think its a particular strong choice. But the new ranks I don't think add anything spectacular or things we haven't seen. Pokemon is also much more of a meh choice when it comes to voting/do you care about this dueller y/n situations.

Mana Khemia 2 - I like this game and we have all the groundwork, but the dying playership + old gen + 2 playthroughs are all strikes against it. I wouldn't mind if we ranked it, but it's the fifth rung on the priority ladder for me.

[VySaika]

Soul Nomad and FE10 for my picks.

Other things I would vote for are ToV and Pokemon RBY popular pokes. I'd also be down for DQ5(Slimeknight!).

[Dhyerwolf]

FE10 - Pretty big demand from last time. To Dhyer, writers aren't especially concerning since writeups are one-shot these days; I'm personally quite willing to volunteer right now to do half the game's writeups and whip people into getting the other half.

Noooooo, writers are a crazy big issue. Big enough that we constantly have trouble getting Week 1 up in 3 weeks, and in Season 62, it took 3 weeks before people actually claimed any writeups.

Granted, I'm also super against FE 10 ranking because I know there are no notes that I'll decently agree on! (No EXP splits, no AS scaling)

SN...interp issues are already in the DL excluding Revya. It's otherwise OB with FE counters.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Noooooo, writers are a crazy big issue. Big enough that we constantly have trouble getting Week 1 up in 3 weeks, and in Season 62, it took 3 weeks before people actually claimed any writeups.

Which speaks volumes to people not caring about many of these matches or duellers, but that's really about it. However, you don't have to worry about this FE10, for the reason I just said (and, idly, in the past hour I've had two people volunteer to me to help with FE10 writeups). Heck, if you rank FE10, you'll gain a writer, since I don't intend to do any writing otherwise! So these concerns are really totally unwarranted.

The cast not having a stat topic you're happy with is valid enough, although a much more personal reason. I'll probably work on a FE10 equal exp topic at some point but I'm not really in a rush to do so because of the major time crunch involved.

[SageAcrin]

Mostly consider the list fairly even on what's good/not for group coverage for once(and external barely matters at this stage/all of them are about evenly good or bad at it anyways, though FE10 has an edge there.).

So, for the first time in memory, I can pretty much just vote off my personal preference for what I'd like to see in as duellers. huh. how about that.

Dragon Quest 5-Generally happy with nice standard DQ4-style duellers, also just about the only character I'd want to rank on general fanboyism is DQ5's PC Slime(That it's also an interesting dueller that most people will get, albiet not it's full potential, helps.). S-E release that got a fair deal of sales and has a decent amount of internal between the SNES/DS versions if I'm not mistake? Very little split between them, vote-wise? Yeah works.

FE10- Meeeeh I feel like this is more important for rerankings. Having said that I still say it should have been ranked with FE9. A fair deal of the new people are questionably cared about(Don't rank, say, Vika. Please.) but whichever.

Mostly don't care much about it(FE characters really do play too similarly, and as we're hitting up the fourth cast, well, there's getting to be some DL overlap to say the least.), but at the same time it provides FE9 characters actually interesting/strong duelling forms that FE doesn't get anywhere else. (That is to say, I feel like FE may be oversaturated at this point but the way to handle that would be to trim a less interesting FE like 8.)

Pre-post Edit: Having said that I'm open to arguments on the writing end. I've heard an awful lot of people make the "I'll write for it!" claim down the years. If it's just Elfboy he could get sick or something. If there's not multiple people at least willing to chip in I'mma toss this vote for RBY instead.

And another pre-post Edit: Okay this conversation moves too fast but that sounds answered. Would feel better if people would post in here saying they're willing though.

Other ideas(In order of how much I like them to how little; Again I don't think there's much of a ranking validity gap.):

SO1: Same as DQ5 but too much split instead of very little. I'm not saying it can't be made workable, and I'm tempted, but.
SN: Good game big interp headache. Another game I'm tempted on but can't really justify.
Pokemon RBY: Almost voted this. Not as interested as some things but unlike them I tend to think it makes interesting non-headache duellers.
Pokemon DS: Didn't get many players internally. Pokemon games often don't until ranked for some reason. Having said that, that's something better saved for when people can get it cheaper(After Gen 5's release), or emulate it, even if it were a valid way of handling things. It's good otherwise(well outside of usual Pokemon issues), but yeah.
VPDS: Headache, boring duellers, stalled playership, fuck it. One of the few ideas I don't really support much, not that I'd cry if I saw it got it.
Mana Khemia 2: I dunno why I'm not interested in this. I'm just not. It sounds okay? Um. I dunno.
ToV: Can't play it. As an overall idea...most people are not going to buy both next generation systems and I gather Vesperia PS3 still hasn't gotten ported. As such I actually think it is in many ways the worst idea on here, and the fact that it has some nasty interp issues(I consider ranking-dividing interp issues the only real ones. ToV manages a spectacular one I gather.) doesn't help. But hey *I* want to play it more than...
FFXIII: meh. As an overall idea it has the dual-system coverage that helps quite a lot and produces interesting duellers but it feels too soon. Give it a major system price drop year.

[OblivionKnight]

My votes (and comments):

Soul Nomad and the World Eaters
Not sure what people view as interpretation issues.  The game is OB+Disgaea - we have both ranked, and no one has ever had a major issue with the rankability of Ogre Battle (although!  this could be due to extreme apathy >_>).  The game has interesting characters, both combat-wise and character-wise.  Memorable, powerful - and this includes bosses too.  It strikes me as the type of game we're really looking for, and is, in most circles I've been around, decently popular.  In regards to writing, I've been meaning to get back into write-ups - granted, I've been under the impression we've done standardized ones already, so I need to have this clarified a bit >_>  Nonetheless, I want to write again, as I am one of the few who can write for everything.

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Next generation system, which is a plus!  Well-received, good ranks, decent popularity overall...seems like the strongest one left.  Not much to say overall - see FE9 comments, mostly >_>.  Lack of a specific stat topic interpretation is a very personal problem, easily solved by making one's own.

The other games...

Tales of Vesperia
Behind FE10, but still great.  Honestly will definitely be on my list next time.  Probably need to run through the bosses, though >_>  Lots of important ones to rank!

Star Ocean 1
Not a bad rank, honestly.  Just less important than others.

Dragon Quest 5
Above SO1, and pretty good overall.


The others are workable, but for 2 ranking periods from now as considerations.  Also need to add XS3 and a couple other ones to that list of ideas.

[Dhyerwolf]

Lack of a specific stat topic interpretation is a very personal problem, easily solved by making one's own.

Mail me your Wii and I'm all over it!

[OblivionKnight]

Ask my sister, as she has it right now!  I can at least send the game!  Borrow Andy's Wii or something >_>

[Lance]

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Tales of Vesperia

[Luther Lansfeld]

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Tales of Vesperia

[Hunter Sopko]

I picked up VP:DS, MK2 and SN. Plan on playing MK2 relatively soon, but... not really thinking anything is really rankable this time around, which says a lot considering I LOVE having more stuff ranked.

EDIT: I guess I'd still support perennial question marks Prier and Sora as FWs.

[DjinnAndTonic]

CURRENT VOTES:
Soul Nomad
Tales of Vesperia


Soul Nomad
I would support a relatively small ranking here. I like Revya personally, but if people are -really- worried that she's going to get summoning hype, then I can pass on that. I'd skip some of less notable PCs like the cherubs, but maybe throw some support to Endorph for popularity, and Shauna, Raksha, and Thuris for some boss representation.
That's Danette, Vitali, Juno, Grunzford, Odie, Layna, Tricia, and maybe Galahad (yeah, he's always around, but he just feels so minor and probably the most boring of the duelists?). So... 9 PCs and 3 bosses are the high-end numbers for what we would rank here. If people feel the bosses are too weird to interp and that Endorph, Galahad, and Layna are too minor, we're looking at like 6 ranks.

FE10
As much as I'd rather be voting for ToV here, OK makes the point that ToV's stat topic doesn't have any boss notes. And really there are some bosses from ToV that I'd like to see ranked, so I don't think it's quite ready. FE10 is a solid option that's been wanting to be ranked for a long time, so I'll be happy to throw my support to it now that it seems ready. Don't support ranking a lot of new people from this, but somewhere around the 10-13 range is okay. Also wouldn't mind culling some FE7/8, but I never mind that.
FE10 is great, I just like ToV's duelists a lot more.

Other stuff:
FF13: Feels like we really should rank this just to have a modern Final Fantasy in the mix. I like some of the duelists, but I'm mildly annoyed that they'll never get to use their summons due to how the cost works.
VPDS: ;_; It's lonely being the only one who appreciates this game.
ToV: Stat topic isn't ready, but I'm happy the rest is. EDIT: OK GO DO A BOSS STAT TOPIC!
MK2: I'll play this eventually!
SO1/DQ5: Apathy~
Gen4: Piplup!
Gen1 FW pack: Next session sounds good.
WA of Oz: Because we need more Godlike PCs.
FW: Prier (LPT): MOAR NIPPON-ICHI! Her chance was missed, I fear. But she's always been a favorite of mine.
FW: Sora (KH1): Really big name series that has zero representation in the DL still bugs me. Also, despite like 6 games, I think his KH1 form is still the best duelist?
FW: Jack Russel (RS): Idun was playing it, maybe it merits being mentioned?
FW pack: SaGa Frontier: Hey, Elfboy made that awesome topic, I think it's time to give it another shot. Nusakan, Mesarthim, Lute, Riki, Meilin, and Liza are pretty fun duelists. Well, Okay, Lute is just on there because he's a PoV character.

[dude789]

Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn
Soul Nomad

[Nitori]

Glorious Soul Nomad
Glorious FF13

[Lord Ephraim]

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn Final Fantasy 13
Tales of Vesperia

Not supporting old gen anymore, especially rarity games like Soul Nomad (MK2 is at least available at NISA's store)

As for pokemon.....

NO MORE POKEMON

[superaielman]

Switching my RBY vote (Will edit this when I get home, can't on this machine) to FF13. It's at least a new gen game, is okay enough on playership and is a small rank, likely.

[Dhyerwolf]

Not supporting old gen anymore, especially rarity games like Soul Nomad (MK2 is at least available at NISA's store)

I don't understand this. Soul Nomad came out a month before FE 10. So you're saying that by being on the most widely played RPG system, it's a worse rank, because relative age certainly isn't the issue. MK 2 was also two years after Soul Nomad (Although I can't find either on NISA's online site, SN is quite easy to buy a variety of other places).

[SnowFire]

Not really a fan of Soul Nomad or MK2, seems like the time has passed on them.  Ranking more PS2 obscura seems like going backwards.  Of the two MK2 seems a stronger rank since it doesn't have major interp issues at least.

Anyway, selfish votes would be for games I've played / am playing:
Final Fantasy 13
Dragon Quest V

Though considering that DQV interest seems to have died down some, I'd be in favor of a smallish rank of DQV.

I'm also in favor of ranking FE10 and ToV, despite not playing them.  That would at least be ranking some stuff from the current gen.

If we ranked more Pokemon, having played at least some of Pokemon Pearl, I'd be in favor of a Staraptor FW - I imagine that almost anyone who played Gen 4 got a Starly early when there were few options, and it's excellent throughout the game, so in some ways it's probably better than a starter.  I've mentioned it before, but the only "classic" Pokemon FW I think should be ranked is Magikarp, because it's iconic and easily voted on.

Can't really comment on SO1 or VPDS, except that the meh reaction to VPDS has scared me off from playing it despite it being on a system I own.

[Cmdr_King]

Soul Nomad & The World Eaters and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.

Oldest games with any sort of support, and honestly among games that already have votes in this topic only FFXIII is notably weaker than the others, so ranking based on age seems like a decent tiebreak.  Help of course that I've played all of the non-FFXIII games (and at least own that, even if I can't continue it currently) and none of them really produce outstanding duellers... well, MK2 bosses are pretty badass but ANYWAY.