That doesn't describe that area in Chrono Trigger at all. The mood is actually pretty depressing, and I thought they did a good job of setting a post-apoc atmosphere. CT doesn't qualify as a post-apoc RPG in general though.
I always got this pessimistic optimism from that game; like where you're in the Apocalypse but you know you're gonna get through it somehow.
I haven't played CT in years, but I can still hear that music. Most of the tracks in that game are excellent.
It is true that my interest is mainly in the more adult takes on it, but I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from sharing any games that avoid the more disturbing aspects of such a setting. My own personal goal related to making this thread is to continue to build up a Post-Apocalyptic JRPG playlist that I have started in LaunchBox, one that includes games for every Japanese computer, console and handheld that I have emulators configured for, which is almost all of them up to about the sixth generation of consoles.
Hey, flyingjohn! Yea that is from where I took all of the images and how I found most of the games. Some like Metal Max I already knew, but it is immensely helpful resource for finding others. The search there isn't perfect, for instance narrowing down the criteria begins to cause some games to be omitted and I'm not sure why, but for what it is it is excellent. I'm still trying to track down some FM Towns games that I can't find anywhere online that are even missing from the Neo Kobe selection, so it makes me wonder if there are any games in this style that just don't exist on Western internet sites?
Give me a pm with the names and i will see what i can find.
I'd consider Armored Core games ARPGs. Aside from a menu replacing an "in world" hub or town, why not?
Cool. I've played and enjoyed Panzer Dragoon (2) but it didn't come to mind. It's not an RPG but Panzer Dragoon Saga is.
Sorry I didn't respond to your post sooner, I intended to but then completely forgot. And given the actual definition of the word apocalyptic in the title of the thread, I don't consider these posts off-topic.
Not to be too pithy, but what would it take for you to reject your null hypothesis here vis-a-vis free will & determinism?
I truly don't know; I imagine it would require a visionary revelation of a more substantial nature than that which rendered my perspective determinist in the first place. However I find it as difficult today to conceive of what that could involve as trying to anticipate the substance of my vision would have been prior to encountering it. It isn't just an unknown, it appears to be unknowable. But I am going to have to consider this more deeply in a quiet environment, it is an intriguing question you pose.
If we can abstract valid possible worlds, then our real choice matters. We can abstract the casual relations that can occur from one or more temporal paths: imagine an existence only seeing one path (which does not describe the human condition).
The main reason why the question of free will I think has always remained a mystery is due to the necessity of faith regardless which conclusion is settled on. The moral question is one that I can assert with some confidence; I do consider the dualistic concept of right and wrong to be an intrinsic and self-evident aspect of nature and of the human condition, but only at the most fundamental binary level because the overwhelming majority of moral determinants are the products of civilization and culture. Every civilization goes through the same morphological cycles which begin and end according to the compulsory principle I described earlier, but the upper branches in codified law and the immediacy of the individual's felt moral convictions are circumstantial and highly variable. But I do accept that there are fundamental moral values that are pre-conscious, embedded in nature and are self-evident.
But why can't we think beyond binary morality on a meta-ethical level? That's the problem with either monistic or dualistic thought: it's either-or (pun intended bigtime). Triadic thinking meanwhile breaks this mold since you are not either in a monistic/gnostic illusory framework where all knowledge is unreliable (thus even that statement is unreliable), and you're not in a dualistic model limited by two dyadic options in constant dialectic tension (good and evil become eternally relative and interchangable based on which viewpoint you arbitrarily side with). But what if you can have multiple real moral goods? Under this model, your choice both matters in that it has consequence but only good outcomes based on the framing of your worldview. If all things have purpose, even bad things, then you are ultimately in the real life role of deciding between good paths in life. This assumes you have faith that in the End, you were on the right meta-path all along.
This is a very interesting kind of thinking. There is a kind of imminent eschatological undercurrent that runs through nearly all of my thought, and I find that my default mode is to equate the tenebrous urges towards annihilation that darken the walls and ceiling of my own psychic sensorium with that of the over-culture, the ebb and flow of the tides of personal temperament with the waxing and waning phases of the mercurial Anima Mundi. Only retrospectively do I become aware of this tendency, which were it to be a mote stronger or the force binding my psychic fortitude a mite weaker I'd no doubt have psychologically collapsed into schizophrenia. A step further and I'd be confounding changing weather patterns with my moods.
So would you consider yourself Manichean? Where Creation is both Good/Evil rather than the Christian view of Creation being Good but Fallen (metaphysically moving away from Good toward Non-Good).
But you do so all the time without reexamining why you take them for granted. Whether it is logic, or math or reason or consciousness or the Theory of the Mind, you make assumptions you can't prove foundationally but do find useful after making that leap of faith. You took that leap of faith when your teacher first told you you were wrong when 2+2=5 in 1st Grade. They never explained why you should have agreed to use math without demonstrating the whole of Mathematic's connections to literally every other math-like system (physics, formal logic, geometry, computing, statistics, etc.). Now it makes sense because it's coherently networked and mapped to all those other truthful systems but as it kid you took it on a matter of authority and faith from the adults/Teachers (Sometimes they get it wrong like with Pluto).
In that sense I suppose so, though I'm hesitant to wed myself to any particular view. But in essence I do view nature as both only I think that it is overwhelmingly evil with the good being a necessary compensatory feature. Maybe necessary isn't the right word, though. Maybe compulsory?
Yes that was a poor choice of words on my part, you're absolutely correct. Not only is faith the requisite basis of epistemology it is the sole mode of discernment we have recourse to at the level of first principles. Having experienced a series of concurrent false-awakenings at one point, itself one of many aberrant forms of relative unconsciousness I experience during sleep all correlated to violent hypnagogic and hypnopompic attacks involving temporary paralysis and auditory and visual hallucinations, I'm left with a sort of numinous sequela of persistent liminal uncertainty; subtle thought it is after time dimmed what was once a brilliant ferocity, at the interface between sleeping and waking I find myself mystified. Am I truly awake? What is the determinant factor beyond all doubt? Only on faith due I discern one state from the other, having the two so horrifically confounded during a sequential fall from one state seemingly into the other. Having the very bedrock of my sanity dissolved so effortlessly on one single occasion almost two decades ago while simply trying to go to sleep led me to acknowledge the faith upon which the entirety of the human experience teeters on, a very house of cards that comes crashing down at the gentlest ill wind.
Unseeing, have you read Couliano's Tree of Gnosis? Very interesting book, goes into a systemic history of gnostic/Platonic Dualist belief.
Fanged Noumena.
