/vr/ - Retro Games

Ore no Shikabane wo Koete Yuke (roughly translates to "Over My Dead Body") is one of the most original and in my opinion best RPGs for the PSX. It combines traditional, turn-based RPG combat with a generations system that has been explored in games such as SaGa Frontier and Fire Emblem 4. A demon has placed a curse on you, which makes you age 50 years every year; this gives you, in practice, two years to live. Your descendants will suffer from the same curse.

Gameplay is split between a family-raising sim where you sire children, raise them, and manage your household (the basic unit of time for this part is one month), and RPG combat, where you take a party of four into a labyrinthine dungeon on a mission to kill the demon who cursed you. The whole game has an almost poetically tragic feel to it, knowing that all your children and their children will only know a brief life of strife as they try to free your bloodline. It has gorgeous, traditional-style character and enemy designs that evoke an Okami RPG.

It got an enhanced port for the PSP, but it also stayed in Japan. This port was advertised with two very poignant commercials in Japan: http://youtu.be/Cq3cqsPw_Iw