RPG MAKER GAMES OBSCURITY ICEBERG

-How is Blurred Line at Level 5 of obscure? Bluerred Line is known even in Non-English communities and, even if you count how known it is only here in RMN, it has 26k downloads. How is that obscure?

sorry friend but this is the era of Pom, which has 200k downloads and likely the single most viewed youtube video of an RM game ever (though Yume Nikki's collective videos probably take it over). For the youtuber: it was tuesday. The internet was really small pond back during ABL's time, so ABL felt like a big fish to most of us. Though idk it being lower than something like Ara Fell is weird.

Though there are measurements beyond downloads like cultural influence and long lasting appeal (lore wikis, fangames) Which stuff like Yume Nikki, LISA or OFF probably still dominates. Most people who played Pom probably don't know what RM even is and it'll be the only RM game they've played.

Another thing about this list is that merely being Japanese language only kinda shifts things a bit. I mean some of these games aren't as obscure to a Japanese player. Of course it's going to be obscure if it isn't translated or you're going out of your way to find something with 0 downloads.

The craft is I guess finding something notable that someone long enough in the scene can appreciate. Though an interesting hypothetical to consider are games only experienced RM users can enjoy. Like how SMW romhack players (probably) have a highly regarded hack that's way less popular but more advanced than Kaizo.

I knew the middle ones better... I haven't played any of the top two tiers. Although I think I left To The Moon on it's title screen for a few minutes once.

author=anyon175
Again, do your thing man, just a meme after all. But from my point of view, I have seen people recently playing Seraphic Blue and Phylomortis. Did they make a Let's Play of it? No. Did they stream or record? No. But they are kinda known and played too. Just sayin'.

I did let's play Phylomortis: Avante Garde back in 2018 if that counts:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtEWOQQDHwBx0_J7i9fMMS0KLjtTX0liA

I would say I fit like in the category of Romancing Walker, in the game I heard, in the games I play, which is very few even not RPG Maker ones, it would more surface level really. There is a decent quantity of weird and obscure games, I should say, but really there is a lot of weird and obscure made on RPG Maker, like Detectivus Scitus, the RPG Maker game in latin, and also the lists of obscure games could be really filled with the Dante RPG Maker 98 Japanese games, that really havent left the Japanese language like Nuigles. Sorry for the terrible and very late reply.

This chart is pretty arbitrary and their ranking does not jibe at all with my own equally arbitrary experience. (And if you cross reference this with the years the games I have heard of were released/played, I guess I'm kind of showing my age.)

RALPH TIER:
Heard of 3/6, played 2/6, played LISA and reviewed it before it was (in)famous so yes unironically playing the "I liked it before it was cool" card there.
ERIC TIER:
Heard of 1/6, played 0/6.
KIRKLAND BRAND SEPHIROTH TIER:
I've heard of, played, and reviewed Space Funeral. And that's it for this tier.
EVIL1 (MAGE) TIER:
Played 2/5 of these (Dungeoneer & Ara Fell) and I've heard of that Jimmy & The Pulsating Mass game but not played it--it's not a title one forgets!!
EVIL1 (ASSASSIN) TIER:
I've heard of and played the top three, not the bottom three. In my mind ABL will always be the most famous--er, not famous, let's go with noteworthy--RM game and yep, showin' my age all right.
EVIL1 (blackface but not THAT kind of blackface) TIER:
I've played the games on a diagonal line from top left to bottom right--The Way, Middens, and Imdahl--and never even heard of any of the others. Middens is...just some game I played, I get it confused with Space Funeral a lot honestly and sometimes slightly confuse both of those with LISA, but The Way and Sunset are two of my favorite video games, period, of all time, made in anything, with anything, for anything.
MONSTER1 TIER:
I have heard of none of these games.
BOTTOM TIER:
I am positive I have not remotely heard of any of these games even once. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because they're at the bottom.

Surprised not to see things like Three The Hard Way, Visions & Voices, and Love And War anywhere on the list. Or Laxius Power for that matter. If we're talking purely about notoriety, Super Columbine Massacre RPG definitely achieved a fair bit of that.

I clicked this thread because I thought it contained advice on how to move "up" the iceberg. I'm somewhere below the bottom and I'm not happy about it but I don't feel even slightly comfortable seeking attention/promoting myself...but I also feel really uncomfortable having worked, working, and planning to continue working really hard on my games if literally no one is going to play them so uh...yeah. (It'd probably help if I lurked a bit less or could commit to one username for more than a year or so before getting bored or more accurately distracted, wandering away, and then wandering back with a new name and a new game and ugh. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.)

i feel like if this was made after 2022 i'd be here asking "where's yoshi goes to tesco. where is this masterpiece of our modern age. where is this sistine chapel ceiling of gammak" so i feel like we need to update this for the new generation

author=Darken
Like how SMW romhack players (probably) have a highly regarded hack that's way less popular but more advanced than Kaizo.

Kaizo's basically a subgenre at this point and honestly I'm not sure what people consider highly regarded in terms of Standard stuff these days, since opinions just come and go.

Personally I just like the VIP collabs and this one semi-obscure hack called Romancing Mario, but Romancing's pretty small fry, and VIP's quality is very all over the place for most of the games but that's why I love em so much.

There's people who still have feels towards Talkhaus' ASMT and other hacks from that era, but I feel as charming as ASMT is, it's aged like milk. And I'm saying this as someone who is making a follow up with people in that forum and Youtube commenters who dropped by.

But most people were like extreme beginners and I feel that's why it even got finished and it's the same for this one, but I feel people have more experience with Mario games (fan and otherwise) that the beginner levels tend to flow better somehow? No idea.

sorry i went off topic oopsie

EDIT: I think SMW Gaiden and such might be considered up there, but Gaiden's difficulty is incessant that I cannot play it savestateless because I'm a baby child pisspants