In response to some of the things you said about FE: Three Houses, Koei Tecmo was actually asked to help with Three Houses because Nintendo was pleased with their work on FE Warriors and felt they needed help in bringing Fire Emblem to Switch after years of it being a handheld only series - the last console FEs were Path of Radiance on Gamecube and Radiant Dawn, which was a first-year Wii title and didn't look any different than PoR graphically. They also hired a lot of professional artists for character design, and I felt that the characters translated well on the Switch. K-T not only helped a lot with the game engine, they were responsible for a lot of the scenario itself.
I also did want to address my opinions on the early 2010s that were mentioned in the podcast. For me, they were indeed a dry time and things only seemed to be progressing in ways that I didn't like. 7th gen was actually a huge disappointment to me after the PS2 and Gamecube era, which had accustomed me to much-loved games like Dragon Quest VIII, Final Fantasy XII, Okami, Tales of Symphonia, and the two Gamecube Zeldas. Bioware's game design has always bounced off of me pretty hard, and the Bioshock games always had an interesting premise but a disappointing execution. I had high hopes for Infinite, which didn't deliver on so much of what was promised during development (for instance, Levine really hyped up the Boys of Silence as unique and dangerous enemies that would stalk you. They ended up being nothing more than security cameras in one small area. I somehow expected Columbia to be more open world, and it ended up almost as linear as FFXIII). I did, however, love Fallout 3 and especially New Vegas, so NV was one of those "few and far between" games, Even there, Bethesda managed to screw it up by denying Obsidian a much-needed cash bonus because NV fell one point short of an 85 metacritic score and ensuring that future Fallout games would not feature Obsidian's rich role-playing mechanics. Instead we got Fallout 4, which played more like Borderlands than NV or even FO3 although the settlement mechanic was interesting in a SimCityish way, and the less said about Fallout 76 the better. The PS3/360/Wii generation was my least favorite generation of consoles since the NES, and I was thinking about giving up on video games by the end of it. A lot of it did have to do with the lack of good Japanese games, but I do play a fair number of Western games if they hit the right notes for me - see Fallout: NV, Witcher 3, Mortal Kombat, Doom. Of those four, two of them were products of the Switch/PS4/X1 generation, while MK is still going strong since its reboot in 2011. The games that did come out were mostly not doing it for me, and what Japan was giving us was mostly low-budget games like Time and Eternity, Record of Agarest War, and Catherine, which, while interesting, isn't exactly Persona or SMT. Ni no Kuni (a masterpiece I loved enough to re-buy it for Switch), A Link Between Worlds, Dragon's Crown, and Fire Emblem: Awakening saved video games for me, but all four of those games came out in 2013, right before the PS4 and X1 were launched. Like you said, it's a matter of taste.
Anyway, sorry about the huge dissertation I just submitted here.
Top Three Video Game Corps
3. Interstel Coporation (Starflight) - The premise was that Interstel provided you with a spaceship, but it was somehow not a government-backed enterprise despite the fact that you'd think the government of Arth would make space exploration a number one priority, especially when the game's main conflict was revealed shortly after starting it. Interstel claimed it was too poor to provide anything beyond a bare-bones ship, so you were expected to earn the money to both upgrade your ship beyond a basic model and train your entire crew through mining, trading, and recommending colony worlds. Still, they were probably one of the least evil video game corporations.
2. Vault-Tec - Vault-Tec is probably the most damning indictment of the military-industrial complex I've ever seen in a video game. Vault 112 and Vault 87 were some of the most messed up places I'd ever seen in video games. The Fallout Bible and the Penny Arcade comic One Man and a Crate of Puppets had a lot of other messed-up Vault experiments. I'm pretty sure I would have signed up for Vault 69. No special reason, Vault 69 just sounds like a cool place where nothing messed up could possibly ever happen, and a decent place to while away 20 years while waiting for the earth to become habitable again. See, I'm not even quoting Family Guy this time.
1. Shinra Electric Power Company - When I think of evil mega-corps, Shinra comes to mind immediately. They were really more evil than Sephiroth himself was - they created him, and they did all kinds of horrible things in the name of pleasing their shareholders like ugly medical experiments and manufacturing WMDs. And although Shinra's certain inspiration was TEPCO, the ubiquitous Japanese utility company, at the time FF7 came out there was also increasing concerns in the United States and growing legal action against two American mega-corporations, Microsoft and Walmart, over unfair business practices and in Walmart's case, careless expansions that left rural regions in the US economically devastated when the stores were shut down after underperforming. FF7 was the perfect game for its time period theme-wise.
I wish Megan McDuffee would write a theme song for me, LOL.
