Ah so it's like a ripoff of Barkley shut up and jam, that's pretty cool.

Explain.

I'm pretty sure I began work on my game before they even announced Barkley 2 and Shaq Fu RPG 2 was a party-based, action-RPG that I released last year around this time. Unless you consider mouse-based combat a ripoff of Barkley RPG (which is really the only addition I made to the battle-system), I don't really follow you. If anything, it's a ripoff of Diablo 2.

I'm not sure if you're just being ironic, but I take great offense to that.

Also, the majority of Shaq Fu RPG was completed between 2002 - 2005 and included well-known trolls around Gamefaqs/the Shaq Fu Genesis board. In fact, I had to waybackmachine Shaqfu.org in order to recover content from a lost demo from 2004. This game takes place on the Second World--just like my two previous games did and share the same goofy lore without using lame homophobic jokes every two seconds.

They're both games

Hrmm...well, this is really getting to me and I may need some constructive criticism on the setting/gameplay elements of BRRPG. The last thing I want is for my game to be perceived as a rip-off of Barkley:SUAJG. If anyone has suggestions, it would help a lot. I really don't want to stop work on this game because I have literally put thousands of hours into it.

The game isn't cyber-punk and the only "dystopian" area of the game is Stellopolis. The rest of the game (outside of Rigaria--which is a fantasy sci-fi mix like my previous games) takes place in a desert. My game is heavily inspired by Fallout 1 - 2.

A large part of the reason way I didn't recirculate Shaq Fu RPG for years was because of all of the hype Barkley 1 got. Shaq Fu RPG was actually passed around my high school after the dissolution of the SFA and some of my real life friends thought I worked on Barkley which fetched me up (but I got over it once I played Barkley: Gaiden and it actually ended up being really funny).

If the mouse-based combat seems too similar to Barkley 2, I guess I could remove it but it would really hinder gameplay. I would have included it in SFRPG: 2, but it was nearly impossible to do properly in RPG Maker XP--being a tile-based engine by default. The same goes for the dialog trees--those who played SFRPG 2 would know that I attempted to do them during the faction quest-lines but again, it was difficult to do in RPG Maker and took way too much time. The game is just as focused on melee combat as it is on ranged combat. I just think it's boring so I haven't uploaded any videos of it.

Perhaps I'm always doomed to be viewed as a Barkley rip-off. The irony of that really bothers me, by the way.

i'm working on a game set in a steampunk dystopian future

Well, I'm not quite sure what I want to do with BRRPG but I do know that as the game stands now, if I was to remove all references to "Rigs" and Sergey, it would just be another generic action-RPG with AD&D influences. The game takes itself pretty seriously and doesn't really contain any overt jokes. I won't do that, of course, but I think I'll wait until I get some inspiration before starting up work on it again. All of Engine001's "JRPG" default dialog is being removed because I want the player to roleplay and actively participate in the story. The JRPG style dialog was only really included because I was still familiarizing myself with the engine and didn't know how to create my own custom dialog system yet.

If I possessed the same experience a year ago, I wouldn't even be making BRRPG in Engine001. I'd be using Unity.

But concerning my old games Shaq Fu RPG and the sequel, I've removed them since I believe that the handful of WINNERS and old gamefaqs lurkers that wanted to play them have already done so. They're the only ones who would understand it, anyway. SFRPG is a part of my childhood that I remember fondly and it's time to let it rest for good.