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What are some games you have come across when digging deep into obscure territory that have left you surprisingly satisfied? Pic rel I found on Steam after digging deep recently. It's a remake/reimagining of the first game in some Korean mobile game franchise(that I've never heard of). It starts out with that mobile game life-simmy feel but quickly balloons into something bigger and it ended up being one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. And no one is talking about it anywhere so I feel like a lottery winner just for finding it. Need more games like that.
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>>608
well, you might want to define "obscure", because there are people who think xenoblade, mother, and shin megami tensei are ""obscure"" while there are games on steam that have like 5 downloads and jp-only games that are only on the ps vita that only 10 people have played
to answer the question seriously
the Mary Skelter series is really cool, but not a lot of people really talk about it, at best you'll see it get mentioned in passing in dungeon-crawling threads on 4/v/...
it's a series of first person dungeon crawlers with turn-based combat (think classic SMT or Etrian Odyssey), but made by the Hyperdimension Neptunia developers, so there's a huge emphasis on the (majority) female cast, who're all based on different fairytales. in battles, you have to manages the girls' mental state, represented by a bloodstain meter by their health bar; the darker the blood color, the more likely they'll go insane during battle when the gauge fills up, at which point you no longer have control over their actions for the remainder of that battle unless certain requirements are met. you can restore their sanity by sacrificing some of the protagonist's blood, but if the protagonist runs out of blood, he's out for the rest of the battle as well with no way to bring him back. this resource management makes boss fights really hectic and fun.
Mary Skelter 2 is especially really good imo; the gameplay balance is at its best in that one (the two versions of the first game both have their own slight issues which make both games too punishing, and the third game has a steep difficulty curve in the beginning imo) and it has one of my favorite stories in a game 
also, the games' soundtracks are really good.
https://youtu.be/kVkNByesJSY?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/GzaMFTHalB4?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/VB7BXyDih54?feature=shared
i could make this post so much longer. Compile Heart's entire repertoire is underappreciated in general. if JRPGs are supposedly more appreciated now than they were in the 2000s or 2010s, i'm really not seeing it outside of a handful of series getting overinflated importance.
i also really wanted to mention Go Hell Go and Tsurugihime, but neither of those are out yet, so i wasn't sure if that would be cheating.
it's a good excuse to look back at the past year and reminisce. i also like seeing what games other people have played over the past year. what games have hikarifriends been playing the past year? any recommendations? (it doesn't have to be console, also, those just happened to be the screenshots i had)
and I should have done a separate thread for this question, but nye. Don't kill me, admin. Please 
and every time i see a video essay on a new one, or someone tries to recommend me one, i always end up either not being interested in it (fear and hunger, for example, strikes me as babby's first ""dark""/horror game, and is also not fun at all) or i give it a try and it's not fun (see: fear and hunger, but also i tried out Black Souls because someone said it was admittedly vaguely similar to another game series i liked, and...it's dark souls but with the shitty rpgmaker active time battle system, so it's doubly not fun, though admittedly someone who's more into dark souls might get more out of that one. i'm starting to hate how popular souls games became, but that's another subject...)
i still do hold a reverence for yume nikki, though, and probably always will. that might be one of my favorite games ever, or at least it has one of my favorite atmospheres of any game.
