The overall vibe of Blessfrey will be warm, fun, upbeat, pop, and stylish with pink colors. I need to find some pervasive motiff, especially one that symbolizes home for Helia.
The initial inspiration for Blessfrey comes from those dollhouse mods in Oblivion that bring modern comforts like motorcycles, potato chips, and steamy bathroom mirrors into a world with steel armor, spider daedra and awesome swords. It's closely related to the isekai trend, even though many of these mods predate the anime releases of all those 小説家になろう series (Re:Zero, Drugstore in Another World, Restaurant to Another World, In Another World with My Smartphone, etc).
I have a list of the exact mods somewhere, but these are the few off the top of my head:
The other goofiest place I've seen this juxtaposition pop up is that frame of some Avengers movie where the heroes are just hanging out at a normal restaurant. Some Quora guy claims the scene was popular, and I'll take his word for it. The overly dramatic, max stakes stuff isn't always as interesting as seeing what these fantasy people do during their down-time. My husband always thinks it's really funny to imagine the big bad of various series doing something really normal like eating ice cream.
I like those 'group of kids save the world' shows like Code Lyoko, Winx Club, and W.I.T.C.H and would like to emulate that balance of otherworld exploration and heroics against hanging out and maintaining responsibilities at school and home.
Persona falls under that, too, but its life management sim, social links, and dungeon-crawling are so interlocked that I don't think you can take just one part of the formula without it feeling flat. For game system inspiration, I'd most like to follow Neverwinter Nights 2's influence system. Your dialog choices and game actions impact your relationship with a given companion, tracked as an integer score. This changes their dialog and how they'll act in critical story scenes. You can't play the middle ground without offending the extreme companions, so you must choose stances. You can even upset several companions so badly, they'll leave you or betray you. The influence system suits a nonlinear game with multiple outcomes well.
It also ties into romance, but the only male romance option is a middle-aged adulterous fedora-tipping cradle-robbing creep who can barely remember your alignment, much less anything else about your personality, so ew. The other half-romance option is the epitome of the bad boy trope, no thanks. Don't know how NWN2 romance is handled and don't want to lol. Generally, I wouldn't mind adding dating to Blessfrey, but I think it's unnatural how it's treated as the climax of a long friendship in most games. I wouldn't be surprised if most dates are made outside of a friend group, especially if you include couples who only hung out a few times before dating. I didn't meet my husband through my friends either. It's also bordering on too serious for teens. The couples in my high school lasted a few weeks tops with rare exceptions.
I grew up in the South, so I spent a lot of time in church, playing neighborhood games, and listening to grownups gossip about local politics, local myths, Cherokee legends. It'd be nostalgic to distill some of my childhood into a game, thorns and all. It seems like a chance to differentiate, too. I've barely seen any of my childhood Sunday School songs, clapping games, or grid paper games in media about US kids.
(Honestly, it's kind of weird. Are cartoon and teen sitcom writers on the major networks a bunch of lazy trope-copiers? I swear, they all go straight for the dumb jerk jock clique and ugly geeks when high school isn't like that. The former high school quarterbacks I've met have been a well-rounded people with soccer moms who forced them to learn an instrument. There weren't really sitcom geeks so much as kids that run like Naruto, born-in-the-wrong-century girls, quiet metalheads, etc. Am I off-base lol? The only one I've run into was the mean cheerleader clique.)
I'll list out any old games I recall here:
Concentration 64 (my favorite), Big Booty, Little Sally Walker, Telephone, Heads Up, Seven Up!, Sparkle, Bible drills, Dots and Boxes, paper fortune tellers, M.A.S.H., I Spy, Monkey in the Middle, Musical Chairs, Red Light Green Light, Simon Says, Ice Cream Soda, Skip to my Lou, A Sailor Went to Sea Sea Sea, plus all those awkward icebreaker games like Two Truths and a Lie
Younger kids play some of those, but they have their own games like
Patty Cake, London Bridge is Falling Down, Five Little Monkeys, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Rain Rain Go Away, This Little Piggy, Here are Mother's Knives and Forks, Red Rover Red Rover (absolutely hated this one), Finger Family, The Muffin Man, Row Row Row Your Boat, Eenie Minnie Minie Moe, clean up songs, Father Abraham Had Many Sons, B-I-N-G-O, He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, Jesus Loves Me, Jesus Loves the Little Children, This Little Light of Mine, Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, Duck Duck Goose, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Sharks and Minnows, Cops and Robbers, Freeze Tag, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?, Guess What Chicken Butt, One Two Buckle My Shoe, Frere Jacques, If wishes were horses, You're a Grand Ole Flag, The Ants Go Marching One by One
Honestly, people are very musical, especially when they are younger. I can find most of these online, but we regularly made up our own songs, too.