newtmonkey

Just completed Shard of Spring. It's very basic, but surprisingly fun with some good combat and dungeon delving. Worth a play for fans of Ultima III.

No!

Finally completed FF5 after a year or two of on and off playing. I've completed FF1-7 now, and I'd rank it toward the top of the series overall.

Ys III was much shorter than I remember. PCE version blows the SNES version away in every aspect except parallax scrolling, with noticeably better hit detection—it actually plays like a decent action game. Great soundtrack.

Just finished Ys I/II on PCE. Great music, fun boss fights, but lots of big empty mazes bring it down toward the end.

Just finished Phantasie. Great game, especially for 1985!

Just finished Lurking Immortui now. Awesome game, highly recommended for fans of Ultima III-V.

It's really great imo, but only if you are into the 8-bit JRPGs (or perhaps the more exploration-focused parts of FF5/6). The story is basically non-existent, it's definitely a throwback to DQ3, just completely wide open for exploration.

I definitely recommend choosing the airship as your artifact, as it allows you to go pretty much anywhere in the game right from the start. Having said that, the first time I tried it, it didn't hook me at all either. Second try took about an hour for it to interest me.

But I also love Dragon Quest 2/3 and the nonlinear parts of FF5/6, so ymmv.

I am going with Pyro in DS3 (first time through was greatsword melee). Tons of fun and it gets overpowered from midgame. I mentioned this in the DS3 thread, but I could not believe how trivial Pontiff Sulyvahn and the Dancer were with Pyro. It's like a different game.

My biggest surprise with a pyromancer is how much it can trivialize Midir. You can take him down in just a couple of minutes, while usually it's the longest and grindiest fight in the game.

I didn't do much of the DLC the first time through, so it's good to hear I can trivialize that fight too haha.

Personally, I love everything from Demon's Souls to Sekiro. I can see where each entry fails, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying what it gets right. They are part of the very short list of games I enjoyed enough to try ironman runs.

Bloodborne is an incredibly good game, but it's painful to play on such a shitty hardware. With hacks it maintains 60 FPS most of the time on the PS5, but the drops to 20-30 in the most crowded areas are like knives in the eyes.

Well, we can only hope that Bloodborne somehow gets ported to PC one of these days (so that I can actually play it, and you can enjoy it on better hardware). Once I finish Lords of the Fallen (it's okay) I'll probably tackle Sekiro next.

I think the only things preventing it from becoming a REAL genre-defining success are a couple of very absurd design choices that can only be explained with Owlcat's inexperience. I still can't believe they left in the game stuff like Entangle lasting for multiple IRL minutes even outside of combat.

Also at least according to Tacgnol the adventure module is fucking shit in the second half, and Owlcat had to do one hell of patching it up so it made sense. Which explains the rapid decline of quality in the second half of the game, as ressources get stretched thin.

Yeah they made quite a bit of effort to fill in plot holes and generally expand the narrative. One of the big criticisms of the AP is that Nyrissa gets fuck all characterisation or presence until the final book. Owlcat tried to give her more presence throughout the entire AP.

!unsubscribe

I like the junction system and the backgrounds haha. There's really not much to recommend about it, but I want to finish all the FF games from 1-9, and all I have left to complete is 5, 8, and 9.

It has so much potential, but the game is constantly tripping over it's own feet. Junctioning would be pretty cool, if not for the amount of spells junctioned influencing your stats that much. That makes casting a junctioned spell actively stupid in almost all cases, and turns the game into a boring auto attack slog.
The backgrounds are nice tho.

Agreed. It's too bad they never revisited the junction system. Imagine a nonlinear game where you could go explore the world to hunt down powerful spells to junction to stats, etc. It's shame such an interesting system was stuck in such a ridiculous game.

faggot

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/members/newtmonkey.17175/#profile-post-48396

No, I will ignore and unignore you as often as I like.

The Dark Heart of Uukrul is definitely somewhere on the very top of the list of games I never even try but need to play.

It's a great great with a very tight design, but maybe a bit too much focused on puzzles (at the expense of combat and character development) for me. It's still a lot of fun, so I hope to complete it this year.

how many of these do you actually enjoy

Listed in my profile now? All of them are enjoyable.

Yeah I almost assumed as such. Even the modern generic "hard" JRPGs like SaGa and SMT are several notches below Isometric rpgs on max difficulty when it comes to challenge. Even mild shit like PoE on max is harder than any JRPG.

I guess it has always been this way then, with western blobbers being the pinnacle of difficulty usually.

Eh, I think that is overstated, played DW2 on the NES a couple of years ago and don't remember it being particularly hard

Many JRPG fans are brain damaged, there is no other explanation. All you need to do is read GameFAQS boards and also the FAQs to realize this. A lot of these people enjoy spending hours and hours grinding easy combats so they can sail through the game "to enjoy the story" lol.

Just don't cry when you finish DQ2.

I finished it when I was a kid, replaying it now

I finished this earlier today and instead of crying I had a glass of cognac.