Various groups are running fan servers for Monster Hunter Frontier since it shut down in 2019. There is a translated client that mostly works. Search for “rain frontier server” for more info.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of this myself and I don’t know whether the client they distribute will give your computer encephalitis.
A few years ago Cook’s Illustrated published a recipe for turkey thigh confit. We figured, what the hell, let’s try it, if we aren’t going to do a ridiculous project like this at Thanksgiving, when will we?
It was incredible. Absolutely worth the work - the turkey comes out almost ham-like. We have done it every year since. It doesn’t scale to larger parties very well, but if you eat meat and have a small group (with 6 you won’t have leftovers), give it a try.
I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game’s plot?
A few I’ve enjoyed that aren’t mentioned elsewhere so far:
Robin McKinley, The hero and the crown. If you’ve never read this, please, just go and do so, if you read nothing else on this entire response. The Newbery Medal it got was well deserved. (And it has princesses and dragons and wizards.)
Louise Cooper, Indigo (8 short books). Sealed ancient evil, cursed protagonist on heroic journey, talking animal companion. Just lots of fun all around.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The curse of Chalion series. Maybe a little more politics than you are looking for, but the divinity/magic system works well and I appreciate that the viewpoint characters are generally kind of old and busted. She is of course better known for the (excellent) Miles Vorkosigan military space opera series.
Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A companion to wolves et seq. Exactly what it says on the tin; the catch is that the viewpoint character of the first book becomes bonded to a female wolf, which radically changes how his culture sees him.
Elizabeth Moon, The deed of Paksenarrion. Basically what you’d get if you wrote down a really good D&D campaign (but mostly for only one viewpoint character). Formulaic in spots but enjoyable and well executed.
Other replies have mentioned Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos books, which I enjoyed a lot; and David (and Leigh) Eddings, which were my first big-kid fantasy novels (as for many other other American children of the 70s and 80s). Another long series in something of the same vein as Eddings is Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar saga; I haven’t read the entries after 2000, but before that it was a lot of fun.
Into Great Silence (originally: Die große Stille), a nearly wordless 3+ hour documentary about the monks of a Carthusian monastery in France.
You should watch it because it makes one really feel, as much as a movie can, their lives of meditative devotional repetition. I was able to touch for just a moment the peace they strive to immerse themselves in.
(I also felt cold. Those habits cannot possibly be enough in winter.)
This is all going to be “great gameplay” rather than “great story”.
If you have a way to play 3DS games and a tolerance for punishment in your JRPG dungeon crawlers, the Etrian Odyssey series has some of Yuzo Koshiro’s best work.
Finally … Monster Hunter is an incredibly fun and addictive game series, and though it doesn’t center the music quite as much as a typical JRPG does, it’s got some great stuff. I particularly like the soundtrack of MH: World – although the newer game MH: Rise tried something new with its mostly choral arrangements, I think they are not quite as memorable overall.
Arena battle from Monster Hunter: World (it’s particularly impressive the way this theme, the small-monsters arena battle theme, and several of the town themes reuse the same melodies in different arrangements)
Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.
bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)
climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset
share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach
They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while you’re not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)
That is gorgeous! I do a lot of curry, tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, etc but I have never tried ramen - always thought the broth would be a huge project. But you make it look so good!
Are you older? My parents moved near Traverse City to retire, since my family has done summer vacations up there for 70+ years. The year-round population in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties now skews heavily older due to all the retirees, and also due to gentrification pricing a lot of families out.
This has mixed effects on health care in particular. On one side, a higher proportion of medical professionals work every day with the specific problems of an older population, and there are lots of relevant specialists. On the other side, availability of primary care can be difficult.
I’m surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that’s because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.
I don’t know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: “Rulers of the Wildspire”, “Dancer in the Coral Highlands”, “Roars across the Hinterlands”. You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you’re fighting something in that zone that doesn’t have its own theme - so they’d better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!
This is a story skip. Many forms of character progress in FFXIV are gated by that individual character completing the main storyline quests.
A story skip boosts the character to the beginning of the current expansion tier, so it is not possible to use this mechanic to compete with standard players on current content. I think the intended use case is alt characters (which are less necessary in FFXIV because you can play all jobs on one character, but many players still have them).