Where does one find games like this these days?

[play xenogears]

That is, high effort, niche indie projects. Looked at this Nextfest thing but Steam is so bursting with same-y crap that may as well be bot generated these days I barely found anything interesting or soulful at all so far.

Anybody got any blogs/sites/forums that cover this kind of thing still?

[play xenogears]

New crappy UI has the edit button not working for me right now so I'll add one I know of myself: 5ch has a doujin games board, if you can read Japanese at least. I know I saw an Astlibra thread there once.

[Kituss]

I didn't come on this board to shill haha but I've got a curator page that's pretty much this if you're interested, super niche & great indie games. It's not super active at the moment because I'm not finding much stuff that's high quality enough tho! https://store.steampowered.com/curator/40624114-Hidden-Indie-Gems

I recommend giving a try to Zelle in particular because it's got the same vibe to me (not the same kind of game at all tho), but please have a look at the list, there's some cool underground stuff on it!

[play xenogears]

Looks like some good picks, I'll follow ya.

[Kituss]

That wasn't my intention but I appreciate it! It's more like a list of cool niche games I like to share and Steam curation is an easy way to do that.
One blog I glance at sometimes is Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster ; name's a bit strange, but the writer knows their stuff and spends time talking about old RPGs and niche Japanese-exclusive stuff. Sound like it might be good for you?

If we're talking about Astlibra adjacent games, there's nothing much quite like it except from the Ys games, sorta, but that's far from niche... I'd love to find some other games in that vein - not done with it yet, I'm only starting chapter 4, but it's oozing charm and passion which is the kind of indie game I live for!

[play xenogears]

I swear there used to be a lot more blogs and other sites around indie/doujin games. It seems a lot of them just kind of died or were abandoned. I hate the modern internet, I think even DoujinStyle is primarily discord-based now, iirc the forums were killed off unless I'm misremembering.

This Kimimi blog seems solid, some real niche stuff. If you're interested in niche, unique games by the way, one that got translated over the last two years that I don't see anybody talking about is Napple Tale. Just a random recommendation, very cool dreamcast game with a soundtrack by Yoko Kanno.

As for Astlibra similar games, I'm a big Ys fan already. Been meaning to replay the earlier ones and then play the newer ones I have yet to. I've seen people compare the game to Faxanadu as well, and one of my favorite indie devs, Scumhead, made a Faxanadu inspired game that's also on steam and itchio, Darxanadon. I know another really cool japanese indie sidescrolling game but uh... it's porn. And definitely not for everyone.

Similar to Ys 3, there's Popful Mail, also by Falcom. I recommend the Sega-CD version with the unworking designs patch to restore the original balance.

Some other unrelated japanese indies I've played that feel like real passionate projects: Mecha Ritz, Dezatopia (both shmups), Monmusu Gladiator (combination of a deckbuilder and Monster Rancher-lite) and the now pretty well known One Way Heroics. I'm also waiting on Elin's Inn, the new game by the madman behind Elona. Oh and there's also Bunny Must Die/Chelsea and the Seven Devils, a fun but tough metroidvania with a Street Fighter 3rd Strike parry. You can't buy it on steam anymore, but there's a remastered version on switch and I think PS4, or you can find the original doujin release on DoujinStyle.

[Kituss]

Forums being killed and replaced by Discord is such a bad direction for the internet to take... I didn't even know DoujinStyle used to be for something else than music, that's why I go there nowadays.

Thanks for the recs, I've checked out some of them and they're super solid. I can see myself giving Popful Mail a try soonish. I played Bunny Must Die waaaay back then and I'm a big fan of what Scumhead does as well, what a coincidence haha!

IMO the Japanese indie game scene is definitely still producing some gems but so many of them are not localized and get basically no recognition abroad. You could say the same about indies everywhere ofc but Japanese games have a specific charm that I miss a lot and it's even tougher to find hidden gems from there.

[play xenogears]

Yeah, I know there's still good doujin games being made out there, it's just a pain to find them. Shumps are the most common I still see around, and the odd RPGmaker game. There's also the odd platformer, like those Hanabi games with the fox character that I haven't played yet.

I think they do have some freeware game sites in japanese, and I'm pretty sure that's where a good chunk of the ones that get popular and get localized start. I may be misremembering but I think the original Astlibra was hosted on one of those sites, and won some kind of competition which led to Revision.

There's also dlsite, I suppose, but I have the impression that's mostly porn (though I know some SFW games are on there, like Monster Girls and the Mysterious Adventure which is a pretty damn good Mystery Dungeon game, also on steam).