Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[Twizman]

Purgatory Mode is a difficulty romhack.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I didn't realize Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu were part of the Dragon Slayer universe according to mobygames and other sites.

Now i'm checking out roms. I first got Legacy of the wizard from a bargain .50 cent bin in a pawn shop along with schezzerade (sp). Barely touched them in liu of 2-play mario bros and xenephobe. Finally started to play them oh god like 20 years ago or more. No manual, no guide so i had no clue what i was doing esp in Legacy.

 

[The Decline]

Metal Max Returns is a fantastic game. Travel the world, hunt bounties, and mod your tanks/vehicles without worrying about any forced narrative.

 

[Puukko]

I finished Final Fantasy XII: TZA with the Struggle for Freedom difficulty mod. Finished as in, I am happy with the amount of optional side content I did, though I initially planned on beating more of the end game bosses. I left a few VII rank hunts, 3 espers and the superbosses because after 85h+ I didn't really feel like investing hours upon hours into preparation.

I'll get the mod stuff out of the way first. I initially read that the TZA version made the game way too easy so I found this mod and if you want the tl;dr, I recommend it. It changes many aspects of the game, including items, spells, abilities and most importantly enemies by beefing up random enemies considerably. It also adjusts bosses though not to such a heavy extent from my understanding. The first proper dungeon was the most brutal of its sort I have ever faced. After that, random enemies became somewhat easier and kept at that for the remainder of the game while bosses became the primary roadblocks. Optional bosses like the non-story espers were the best balanced in my opinion though the main story did have a few really difficult ones like the ancient dragon and his AIDS status effect spam. The later main story bosses became rather easy however and imbalanced at times. It became a trend for bosses to gain a lot of defense at low HP in addition to "fuck you" abilities and sometimes phys/magic immunities that you had to survive through. This caused some bosses to become too bottom-heavy in my opinion, when the last 20% could take as long as the first 80% of their HP. The superbosses and later espers seem to get really intricate, but again, too much preparation for my taste would be required to attempt (and find) them.

The gambit system allows for fairly in-depth AI commands though one-clause if-then statements inevitably cannot handle every situation, so you've got to input a fair amount of manual commands still. I can see some people really liking the combat while others might be very much put off by it due to this. Having maintenance gambits go off during boss fights where you really don't need libra, random regens or first aids being cast means you quite often need to adjust in the middle of a fight. What I was not a huge fan of were the physical technicks. Whereas mages had a whole slew of spells to build gambits around, 90% of physical attacks were just auto attacks for me. I had some interesting ones like Numerology which dealt a flat % damage to all enemies which was a life saver once or twice, but some trash enemies were immune so I'd have to disable the gambit for those, etc... the simplest aoe physical attack technick was likewise hidden in some late game area so I never got it myself after an early game guest character had it. Thus, my physical attackers had 1-2 active gambits while my mages all had a dozen for abusing weaknesses and so forth.

Now, the game's greatest strength is the amount of side content. Said content is very combat focused with just a handful of non-combat side quests strewn about, and those usually serve to unlock areas to do some Hunt or optional esper. There's over 40 Hunts, 13 espers of which 8ish are optional and very difficult to find, a couple dozen main story bosses and then the superbosses, so if you like hunting bosses, you're in for a treat. I know I'm personally a fan of games with good boss fights, but like I said above, I don't really go for the super difficult ones that require a lot of preparation. I can only imagine going in on a boss blind and then figuring out that his instant death move literally kills targets whose levels are prime numbers.

I'll briefly touch on the changes made in the HD version. The most important of these is the speedup function which speeds the game up by x2/x4 on the fly. I ended up playing on x2 for the majority of the game, with x4 reserved for backtracking and regular speed for bosses. The combat speed can be adjusted in the settings though to my understanding this has some effect on the balance so I never fiddled with it too much, but at normal speed it is rather slow and keeping it at that speed for regular fights only really serves to pad your gametime. Visually the game could almost pass for a newer title. The CGI cutscenes still look good and put Star Wars to shame with their fighter pilot scenes. The texture work is alright though definitely fairly low in quality by modern standards if you take a second to look around, but on the go I never paid attention, and the PS2 original looked much muddier on that front. There's this rather heavy motion blur effect that looks unlike anything I've seen in other games that makes the game less sharp on the move. You get used to it, but in screenshots it's really visible.

The story deals less with the characters and more on the inter-nation war taking place. You've got the Empire(tm) looking to conquer new lands and harness some material passed from the gods. The big baddie is a fedora tipper who has had enough of said gods and talks smooth to the public, stabs people in the back for power in private. Some of the cast have family on the opposite side which serves as a nice plot point, namely Basch and his brother. The game deals with matters of treason, class differences and other political intrigue which I found interesting for the most part. My only real issue would be that the pacing felt off a lot of the time and that many characters could have used more screentime, of which there was plenty since it is a long game, but the Judges kind of muddled together into one for me, and I couldn't keep track of the various nations at play besides the obvious Empire and Rabanastre. Mr. Fabulous Baddie also kind of just disappeared for a good 15-20 hours in there, being only mentioned by name for a good while after the initial introduction.

Overall though, I am glad I picked this as my first proper FF game to finish. I don't know which one I'll play next - perhaps VIII, IX, X or Tactics Ogre/Vagrant Story as related titles.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I finished Final Fantasy XII: TZA with the Struggle for Freedom difficulty mod.

Quick question; when I played the original version a billion years ago, I got fed up with the Mist Knacks being able to just one shot bosses if you got decent RNG. Was this fixed? Because it basically made all the party building irrelevant.

 

[Puukko]

I finished Final Fantasy XII: TZA with the Struggle for Freedom difficulty mod.

Quick question; when I played the original version a billion years ago, I got fed up with the Mist Knacks being able to just one shot bosses if you got decent RNG. Was this fixed? Because it basically made all the party building irrelevant.

I never did nearly enough damage with those to one shot bosses but they definitely were vital on a few, like Fury (death bunny in the necrohol who starts wrecking your shit at low hp) and the last boss (to maximize damage inbetween phys/magic immunities).

 

[Puukko]

Emulating Strange Journey Redux which has zero problems on Citra. This is the 3DS remake of the DS original with an extra dungeon featuring yet another Atlus female(tm), some new demons, added songs, new endings, voice acting and needlessly redrawn portraits.

The game's a proper blobber and the main difference you'll notice straight away is that it doesn't use press turns where you get extra turns for exploiting weaknesses, rather you and your demons perform combo attacks if your alignments match. I'm a fan of press turns but this serves as a change of pace, I suppose. Early on it's really important to match those alignments but it gets somewhat less important over time. I'm playing on expert which has gotten a tad easy after being really challenging early on. You can impose restrictions on yourself of course, such as not using the new commander apps, but I've opted to just not use the one that prevents game over upon MC KO. I'd like to try impossible, but that's NG+ only. One trend I'm not a fan of is that enemy demons seem to be consistently underleveled and I have made attempts not to grind. I enter a new area at 38 and some ways into it at lvl 40 it starts giving me lvl 32 enemies. I've got an app that prevents low level encounters (I assume by 5- levels) and it blocks the majority of battles in this current area. Really odd design decision in my opinion.

Demon fusion has some key changes too. You don't get to pick and choose what skills the resulting demon inherits, but what you can do is use demon sources to give them some really nice skills. Enemy demons in this need to be analyzed by defeating them multiple times - the first time they're encountered, they're literally glitchy blobs with zero information given to you, and after that you get to see what demon it actually was that you just beat, with their stats being revealed as you increase the detection level. The only way to max that is by using the demon in battle and at max rank they give you their source with skills related to that demon you can then pass on in fusions. I really quite like the system, but I'd still like to have some control over what skills are inherited outside those sources.

The extra dungeon comes with plenty of good loot, including forma to be used in gear and app development, new demons to fuse and so on. It's also where the devs went "fuck you" in their dungeon design and implemented the ideas they were afraid to put in the main dungeons, like massive amounts of slippery tiles, traps and so on. I just set the game to 150%, put on some music, blocked low lvl encounters and pushed through the first three of six dungeons in maybe 2½ hours. Here's the second half of the first level:

The soundtrack is great, though orchestrated OSTs do have a tendency to lose their luster as grandiosity works best when employed sparingly. Won't say anything about the story yet, just that I am likely going for the new neutral ending.

 

[Grauken]

Is it worth it even if you played through the original?

 

[Puukko]

Is it worth it even if you played through the original?

That I really don't know how to answer as I haven't played the original. Supposedly the new endings are a lot better than the originals (you can still get both) but I don't know if the extra content is enough to justify replaying the game unless you're feeling like it already.

 

[thesecret1]

I finished Labyrinth of Refrain and enjoyed it a lot - I like it when blobbers don't have random encounters and have an interesting story, and there was quite a lot of content to dig into both in terms of dungeon delving and party building. Are there any games similar to this? I tried Mary Skelter, but the random encounters kind of killed it for me.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

I finished Labyrinth of Refrain and enjoyed it a lot - I like it when blobbers don't have random encounters and have an interesting story, and there was quite a lot of content to dig into both in terms of dungeon delving and party building. Are there any games similar to this? I tried Mary Skelter, but the random encounters kind of killed it for me.

I haven't played Labyrinth of Refrain, but there's Paper Sorcerer:



Make sure to play on 1980's difficulty mode.

 

[Puukko]

SMT Soul Hackers has a number of interesting mechanics I haven't seen in other games in the series, which is a bit of a shame since this is a 20+ year old game at this point. Demons have lots of variables to them, with some reacting differently to moon phases and personalities affecting how they behave in battle. I am not sure if I like this aspect though, as my kind-type demons might as well be pure healbots since they refuse half of attack commands. Recruitment has nice flavor to it though it does feel quite RNG a lot of the time. There's lots of designs that didn't really appear after this era but the visuals are the weakest yet with human portraits being rather ugly. The shading used looked particularly bad in IV where a lot of the artwork was reused. NES/SNES era art has a much more pleasant watercolor style while 2000 onward uses Kaneko's trademark style so this PS1/Saturn era got the short end of the stick.
Music is... interesting, one review derisively described it as being performed on a digital chainsaw which is an apt description. There's some good stuff in there, but less so than most games.

The setting is aggressively 90s cyberpunk and the story has potential though strong characterization is best sought elsewhere.

 

[Sigourn]

I posted this on General Gaming but this would be a better place.

Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei
Megami Tensei 2

The best part of playing games in a given series in chronological order is that you get to see the improvements. The worst part is seeing the decay.

The original Megami Tensei is a dungeon crawler for the most part. Sometimes you will find NPCs and safe zones, but other than that the gameplay is about travelling around big, mazelike dungeons, though it is my opinion that the existence of an automap and the lack of genuine challenges (other than enemies being stronger than you) make this a dungeon crawler that shouldn't appeal to western fans of dungeon crawlers.

By comparison, Megami Tensei 2 mixes story and dungeon crawling to a great degree. The dungeons are much smaller, and are dungeons in name only, as they consists of buildings and underground tunnels as opposed to the temple-like structures of Megami Tensei 1. There's also far more interaction with NPCs and a more story-based tone to it, though so far the story could be described as a "strong" beginning, followed up by quests of sorts that make the story progress. Unlike the original, Megami Tensei 2 is a post-apocalyptic game which lets you visit many real-life locations, even if "real life" means "in name only", as so far I've came across only one recognizable landmark.

I have my issues with this game, issues I had with its predecessor. In Megami Tensei 1 & 2, getting genuinely stronger is a matter of fusing the different demons you are able to recruit during fights. At the beginning of the game, you have a party limit of seven demons. Eventually demon fusion is made slower and slower as you refuse to get rid of your stronger demons, meaning you fuse at a snail pace as you must fuse a demon, opening a party slot, before recruiting another demon. Because a fusion can't result in a demon that is higher leveled than you, you need to level up in other to fuse stronger demons. But the level ups themselves don't feel rewarding unless said level ups allow you to unlock a stronger fusion.

The demon recruiting process is a hit and miss. Without knowing the underlying mechanics, it feels very random at times. This is somewhat paradoxical, as the system encourages the idea that "demons are individuals", and yet you are unable to recruit two demons of the same kind. Other than that, it's a fun (if tedious, when trying to recruit a particular demon) process, where you can offer money, magnetite (that which demons run on; should you lose all your magnetite, which is earned in combat, your demons will lose health with every step you take), or jewels to recruit these demons.

I appreciate the evolution towards a more traditional JRPG structure, with the ability to visit proper towns (even then, "proper" is an exaggeration, as these towns usually consist of about 4 NPCs giving you some info on your quest or the setting of the game). There are certainly story set pieces, which were (almost) completely lacking in Megami Tensei 1. I'm not even halfway through the game and I've seen more interesting things than in my over-halfway playthrough of Megami Tensei 1.

 

[Sigourn]

Shin Megami Tensei

This was the first game where Atlus made the Megami Tensei IP their own. There are some considerable changes regarding the setting, but overall the basic "structure" from the first two games is still intact: the world undergoes apocalypse, and it is up to the player to choose their path (Law, Neutral, Chaos). The gameplay sees some improvements. The first is that buffs become more important. The second is that demon negotiation appears to be more predictable. The third is that you can progress further into the game without the need to autistically fusing your demons every step of the way. There are some downsides which are so only because the Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei remakes released after SMT1 and SMT2: namely, you need to enter a few menus before seeing the Automap (in the remakes, it's just the press of a single button); the map doesn't mark the locations of Healers and the Cathedral of Shadows. Other than that, the gameplay is basically the same. Like MT2, dungeon crawling is much more toned down. Again, I consider it to be an improvement as MT1 was a dungeon crawler in size only, with none of the things that make genuine dungeon crawlers interesting (traps, secrets, puzzles, etc.).

The story can be complicated to keep track of, and the very beginning of the game is somewhat obscure in its advancement: there doesn't seem to be any logic to it, and it basically relies on talking to everyone whenever you get the chance in order to trigger story-related events. Thankfully the starting area is small enough to not make this a chore. Demon designs are much improved from those of MT1 and MT2, here I believe the designs were definitely canonized for future SMT titles. The iconography is top notch. As a non-religious person, I appreciate Christianity for its cool imagery (and I'm taking the Law path because the idea of serving an actual God is cool).

I do get the feeling this game is easier than MT1 and MT2, but I also acknowledge tedious =/= difficult, and that's exactly what MT1 and MT2 were for the most part.

 

[Puukko]

Having only played 5 before, I've put some dozen hours into Persona 2: Innocent Sin so far and I am really liking it. This is a duology that only got a western release with the PSP remakes... well, the first part did anyway, as Eternal Punishment never got brought over in true Atlus fashion, and the fan translation is on hold. Luckily the PSX version of that did get fan translated, meaning after having played the first part on PSP with all the improvements, I'll have to go back to the PSX version. Ah well.

I'll get the bad out of the way first, and that is the lack of difficulty. Apparently, the originals were never hard to begin with, and the PSP remakes got made even easier. The hard difficulty is comparable to a mild medium difficulty in other RPGs, if that. The auto battling system in this is quite robust, allowing you to easily repeat commands, which you will be doing against random encounters and sometimes against bosses. My only deaths so far were against undead soldiers and their kamikaze moves. I'll be genuinely surprised if I ever get a game over.

The setting is 90s Japanese high school, but it goes into the supernatural way faster and way more openly than the later games. Rumors becoming literally true if they're believed enough, students being sucked of their souls and immediately forgotten, a curse spreading throughout the school that mangles the faces of everyone wearing the school's emblem. The cast of characters is uh, colorful in that there doesn't seem to be a single well adjusted person in this world, everybody's got a quirk or three. I already know the real identity of the antagonist, but that hasn't really soured my experiences with other games before, I'm still interested in seeing the story.

Spoiler

This game's designs were heavily inspired by fashion magazines (https://imgur.com/a/2zvhL here's a gallery with art from all the games, P2 stuff about 1/3 and 2/3 through) but you don't get to see that in game as it is all sprite based. I'm also impressed how many new demons I'm encountering, even with 10 of these games under my belt, about half the enemies are new to me, if not more.

Spoiler

The combat is pretty standard but the game has probably the most attack types of any game in the series. There's five different types of physical attacks, water, earth and nuclear attacks on top of the usual elements and so on. I don't even know all of their interactions yet. Negotiations are in depth as well, since demons have multiple personality types and each party member has unique tools for handling them.

The music is good too, but that's a given.

 

[Swigen]

I’m apparently only 15% done with Persona 5 and the thought of playing one more hour just makes me wanna take a nap. Can’t believe they’re adding more shit to this game. They should release a Director’s CUT cut where they chop the fuckin’ thing in half. Persona 4 had waaaaaay better pacing, even with the shit dungeons.

 

[Sigourn]

I’m apparently only 15% done with Persona 5 and the thought of playing one more hour just makes me wanna take a nap. Can’t believe they’re adding more shit to this game. They should release a Director’s CUT cut where they chop the fuckin’ thing in half. Persona 4 had waaaaaay better pacing, even with the shit dungeons.

That bad, huh? My experience with Persona is "playing" Persona 4 for an hour or two before giving up because it was nothing but conversations. I will give the franchise a proper try in the future.

Right now I'm really enjoying Shin Megami Tensei, the pacing is fantastic and to be honest I don't know how it is I found this game so hard in the past. I believe I must have died no more than three times, and the first one was because I thought there were no serious penalties to dying in this game (Kyuuyaku remakes let you keep your advancement at the expense of forking over half your cash, so I expected it to be the same here). I really recommend this game. It has some cool story elements as well.

 

[Puukko]

I’m apparently only 15% done with Persona 5 and the thought of playing one more hour just makes me wanna take a nap. Can’t believe they’re adding more shit to this game. They should release a Director’s CUT cut where they chop the fuckin’ thing in half. Persona 4 had waaaaaay better pacing, even with the shit dungeons.

Pacing is apparently what they're fixing, adding content while not making the game any lengthier. I remember 5 the least fondly, and this is one of the reasons.

 

[mushaden]

I hope I don't have many more guest characters in Final Fantasy Tactics now that I've finished chapter 1. Delita was pretty much fodder and it's always more interesting when you can control all of your units

 

[Ysaye]

I didn't realize Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu were part of the Dragon Slayer universe according to mobygames and other sites.

Now i'm checking out roms. I first got Legacy of the wizard from a bargain .50 cent bin in a pawn shop along with schezzerade (sp). Barely touched them in liu of 2-play mario bros and xenephobe. Finally started to play them oh god like 20 years ago or more. No manual, no guide so i had no clue what i was doing esp in Legacy.

Legacy is Dragon Slayer 4 rebranded for the Western market. Technically of lot of falcom games come from this lineage including more recently the Trails series and Tokyo Xanadu....

 

[Puukko]

Halfway through Persona 2 IS and the story went absolutely off the rails into scifi and conspiracy territory, but in a good and entertaining way. And I actually care about these characters and the plot twists!

Really, this short cutscene is all you need:



I complained about the difficulty earlier, and while the game is still on the easy side, it's gotten a tad more difficult and doesn't fall into the same trap as many other RPGs where the difficulty can't keep up with player power creep. I'm also underleveled, mostly by accident as the game seems to expect you to grind a fair bit. I beat a lvl 38 boss with a lvl 26 party and now at lvl 28 the random enemies are in the 32-35 range. I just got the freebie upgraded Personas and this game is certainly tuned on the lower side as far as player damage output goes. This is further affected by the rather heavily weighted stat gains your party gets (only MC's distribution can be decided) where Lisa for example gains tons of agi but her attack stats are crap and I don't think she has the support arsenal to make the best out of going first, but I don't know all the skills her new Persona will learn yet. That's one system I don't know if I like or not, new Personas have to be leveled in battle to unlock all their skills so each time you get a new one you're heavily handicapped for a few fights and it takes a decent while to high max rank by which point you may already be looking at a new Persona to get. The number of available Personas is way lower than the number of demons in the game and in all honesty you can beat the game never using anything except the handout ones.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I suppose developers at certain times figure sales would be better if the game was easier to complete? Maybe? I like the entire Megami Tensei franchise (those that i've seen in english via translation or otherwise). I'd like to find an English translation of the early books.

 

[Sigourn]

DRAGON QUEST V: The Hand of the Heavenly Bride

So far I've played most of Dragon Quest, some Dragon Quest III, and I'm playing this game now. DQ1 is awfully grindy and repetitive; DQ3 I will revisit in the future. With DQV I've begun to rethink what I get out of "JRPGs" as something that's worth separating from WRPGs, and that is the sense of adventure and the "images" you get to see on your travels. The game's cover somewhat spoils what the game is about and so does the subtitle, but I pay no attention to that. I haven't had to resort to guides at all, as the game is relatively intuitive. There was only one moment that had me stumped, but mostly because I didn't bother doing something I should have (and because of that, I take it, I'm underpowered for the section of the game I'm currently playing through).

Spoiler

The moment in question was visiting a town at night to see that "shop that only opens at night", which lets you buy a caravan and enables the game's monster recruiting mechanic. Not having done so, I found myself having to level up very weak monsters.

There isn't much for me to complain about.

1. The inventory system is annoying. It clutters up way too quickly, then again, it's certainly possible I'm at fault for the reasons I mentioned in the spoiler earlier.
2. Combat can be somewhat boring, but I prefer boring over tedious.
3. For those of us who play the SFC release with a fan translation, it does come with its issues. But none that have made it remotely impossible for me to figure out what to do next. Just minor spelling annoyances and somewhat weird prompts ("Yes/No" to questions that should be answered that way...).

As for the positives, I can mention:

1. The monster recruiting mechanic is nice and seeing your fellas walk behind you is pretty cool. It does make you wonder why GameFreak (of Pokémon fame) are such lazy bastards. It's also free of the honestly annoying monster recruiting mechanics of Megami Tensei: there's a chance a monster may walk up to you after battle and ask to join. As simple as it gets.
   
2. The graphics are charming and very pleasing to the eye. I'd say moreso than those of Dragon Quest VI and the III remake which uses VI's engine.
3. The music is no different than the graphics. Really, these two make the otherwise boring battles fun to get through.
   
4. The story has its nice moments to it. Nothing incredible, but the locales are great.
   
5. The encounter rate is just right.
6. No need to actively grind.
7. Playing as adult Gohan raised by Piccolo is great.

 

[Jinn]

Been playing Star Ocean (SNES 1996) seriously for the first time recently. I had tried it a couple of times in the past after the fan translation came out, but usually stopped after an hour or two. However, my love of classic Tri-Ace titles such as Star Ocean: Second Story and Valkyrie Profile made me decide to see it through to the end. What I found was an excellent - yet obviously flawed - JRPG experience taking many cues from western RPGs. Also one of the most aesthetically beautiful games I've played from the era.

While exploration and progression initially appears to be quite linear, it's quickly revealed to have a fair amount of flexibility and lack of hand-holding. With the ability to recruit a total of eight characters to your team per playthrough, and a total of 12 recruitable characters, each effecting a playthrough in unique ways, this game boasts one of the most impressive amount of replayability in a SNES era JRPG to date, besides the likes of Romancing SaGa. Add in the robust skill system that includes everything from abilities such as identify, painting, smithing, alchemy, and cooking, and you find something you've never really seen in an SNES era JRPG. These are all things that we saw in Second Story in a much more refined system, but what amazes me is that it came out when it did.

The battle system has a plethora of problems, such as lack of control of your entire party, inability to move your character on the battlefield independent of attack commands, and sometimes bafflingly foolish AI. Somehow it remains fun and contributes to the overall challenge of the experience.

The story is nothing to write home about, but the world itself and the unique scenario it presents keeps me entertained well enough. Being particularly invested in and seeing the origins of the characters Ronyx (Ronixis in the fan translation) and Iria - as they are the parents of Clyde from Second Story - is a treat.

Music is fantastic and one of Motoi Sakuraba's finest JRPG works.

Again, the game is flawed, but it's admirable to see the intentions of the Tri-Ace on their first independent foray. I'd like so share some screenshots of my playthrough and urge all of you to give the game a try if you're a fan of Tri-Ace games.

 

[CryptRat]

SNES visuals are so good.