CULEX - a JRPG tournament [Spring/Summer 2022]

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The Ununtiable Twine
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CULEX - a JRPG tournament [Spring/Summer 2022]

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

It appears that you have been tapped as having the potential to be the world's strongest answerers of Japanese RPG tossups. En garde! It is with utmost pleasure that I announce that CULEX, my fabled JRPG tournament that many figured would never be written, has been completed!

Content is written by myself and Drew Scheeler, the latter who wrote two questions per packet, including one Pokemon question per packet and one miscellaneous question per packet. Most tossups are 7-8 line tossups (size 10 TNR), with some tossups shorter than that and some tossups longer than that. This set has power marks. The set will not have superpowers, except for the "Superboss" tossups which will appear in all non-Finals packets. Finals packets will consist of 21 power-marked questions. There are no bonuses in this set.

Content – while I don't have a prescribed distribution in mind, you should expect answerlines to consist mostly of the following, with a good chunk of common links (as they tend to be easier to clue and are more answerable in general):
  • consoles, games, series, items (lumped into a "miscellaneous" category)
  • geography/towns/architecture (approximately 3 per packet, although the number of tossups per packet ranges from 2 to 4)
  • religion (as it turns out there are at most a handful of these in the whole set)
  • common links (there are quite a few of these)
  • baddies (minimum 1 per packet)
  • events (most packets have 1)
  • characters (approximately 3 per packet, although the number of tossups per packet ranges from 2 to 4)
I did not write any music tossups for this set, however there will be an auditory packet which will be played to determine seeding.

The back end of this tournament is more difficult than the front end by design, although there will certainly be some tough answerlines scattered throughout the packets, moreso toward the end of the tournament.

There are many instances of multiple specific things being tossed up from very notable games. To quote a guy: answerlines tend to focus on significa as opposed to trivia, although there are exceptions to the rule. Throughout the writing process, I made an effort to write multiple tossups on exceptional games, and a few of those games may have 3 tossups of space dedicated to them (and even 4 in one or two instances). I opted to expand the answerline space in the direction of games more people have played as opposed to writing multiple tossups on games that aren't necessarily in that category. For example, I may have written 3 tossups for select Final Fantasy games but I wouldn't dedicate two tossups of answerline space to something like Ar Tonelico: Melody of {pick one of Elemia/MetaFalica}, or even one for that matter.

Tossup answerlines come from all generations, and indeed, common links may be cross-generational. Certainly, several wonderful JRPGs have come out / been remade or have become more accessible since the last JRPG tournament, ACFNATIONALS, was played. How many games am I cluing? Quite a few. I haven't kept an exact tally but I would assume that this number is at least a couple hundred by now. [Update: quite a few more games were clued since I made this claim.]

Strategy, action, and first-person RPGs are all fair game for this event.

Bias - I'm a millennial. I don't think there's much I can do to get rid of a bias toward older games without it affecting the quality of the tournament, alas. Additionally, there is no plan to clue any of those generic Kemco RPGs you can buy on the eShop. I tend to like RPGs from all generations, except for the early 2010s, as that period nearly killed the artform in my opinion, although games from that time period will be represented in some form. I also don't play a ton of Atlus games, although they have some representation in what has been written of the set. I like Square Enix and you probably do, too. I apologize if your favorite series wasn't clued as much as you would have liked it to have been, or even at all. As a rule, I tried to stick to writing about games that I've played at some point as that makes for better cluing. Of course, I didn't clue the entire thing from memory and so I hope the additional clues I gathered will serve to make the questions more interesting.

Pricing – Perhaps dependent on the mirror, but the main site of this tournament will cost $12 per player to play.

Team size recommendation – I think 2 person teams could handle the prelim packets reasonably well, but due to the depth and breadth required in later rounds, CULEX will feature 3 person teams.

Signup sheet – this will be made available on the announcement thread for the tournament.

Mirrors - to request a mirror please contact me at husbandofsamus at gmail dot com.
Last edited by The Ununtiable Twine on Mon Jan 31, 2022 1:01 am, edited 49 times in total.
Jake Sundberg
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The Ununtiable Twine
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Re: CULEX - a JRPG tournament [2021]

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

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Jake Sundberg
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