>>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.
