I hate jRPGs and I wanna hate-try some

[Abu Antar]

cvv Whatever happened with this?

 

[cvv]

cvv Whatever happened with this?

My first BG3 run took longer than expected (130+ hours, that's over a month IRL with my limited game time) but I finished just yesterday, posted about it on Codex. Now that's wrapped up I'm starting Eritrean Odyssey sometimes next week. Will post sitreps as per usual.

 

[cvv]

Aight so my EO3 run has started, first off, game offers a handful relatively tolerable avatars, even a few men! So that's good news. Second, the music is a joke, more like an elevator muzac. Terrible. Third, I actually like the 2D art a lot, the characters are really well done, even tho all the little girls in armor aren't exactly my cup of sake. What a refreshing experience, playing a game by artists who know what they're doing. The actual 3D graphics isn't exactly cutting edge but nobody cares.

A lot of shit is very new or unusual for me, for example the controls are a pain to get used to, as expected from a Japanese game played with a K&M. Just now I spent a good minute trying to figure out how to exit the game lel. I also read up on a few build tips coz I really don't have the time to spend 20 hours on bricking my chars and rerolling. Chardev seems just perfect for me, not overly complicated, not too simple. Combat is fun even tho with only 2+ hours in the game my toolbox is very limited for now. The only gripe I have is I can't see the turn order (or can I?) which is p. annoying, especially with planning my heal turns. Moreover I'm not enamored by the idea of having to draw my own map, I grew way too lazy for that in the last 20 years but we'll see, maybe I'll get used to it.

I've really just scratched the surface but the overall first impressions are very positive, I'm definitely sticking with the game. It was a good call trying to ease me into jRPGs with EO. Although after 130+ hours I've just spent in another party based, turn based RPG (BG3) I might put it off for a few weeks and clean my palate with some akshun, probably Stalker or emulated Bloodborne. But I'm definitely finishing this one and already looking forward to SMT3.

 

[Starner]

Aight so my EO3 run has started, first off, game offers a handful relatively tolerable avatars, even a few men! So that's good news. Second, the music is a joke, more like an elevator muzac. Terrible. Third, I actually like the 2D art a lot, the characters are really well done, even tho all the little girls in armor aren't exactly my cup of sake. What a refreshing experience, playing a game by artists who know what they're doing. The actual 3D graphics isn't exactly cutting edge but nobody cares.

A lot of shit is very new or unusual for me, for example the controls are a pain to get used to, as expected from a Japanese game played with a K&M. Just now I spent a good minute trying to figure out how to exit the game lel. I also read up on a few build tips coz I really don't have the time to spend 20 hours on bricking my chars and rerolling. Chardev seems just perfect for me, not overly complicated, not too simple. Combat is fun even tho with only 2+ hours in the game my toolbox is very limited for now. The only gripe I have is I can't see the turn order (or can I?) which is p. annoying, especially with planning my heal turns. Moreover I'm not enamored by the idea of having to draw my own map, I grew way too lazy for that in the last 20 years but we'll see, maybe I'll get used to it.

I've really just scratched the surface but the overall first impressions are very positive, I'm definitely sticking with the game. It was a good call trying to ease me into jRPGs with EO. Although after 130+ hours I've just spent in another party based, turn based RPG (BG3) I might put it off for a few weeks and clean my palate with some akshun, probably Stalker or emulated Bloodborne. But I'm definitely finishing this one and already looking forward to SMT3.

I'm excited to hear your future updates! EO can feel like heavy gaming at times so a palette cleanse makes sense. Hopefully you dig SMT3 because that entire series is a masterpiece. Especially the SNES era ones.

 

[dutchwench]

It seems like the discussion's died down with most of the recs boiling down to some good ass classics, but there's one game here I didn't find any mention of which makes me sad, which, in turn, makes me feel like I have to make other people sad. This is kind of fair, since this game doesn't adhere to certain key points from OP's post, but I hope that what I have to say about this game will regardless be of interest to people who either like jRPGs or are looking for that special one to make them stop hating the genre.
Labyrinth of Refrain/Labyrinth of Galleria is a mini-series (only two games so far as you see) with gameplay inspired by both Etrian Odyssey and Disgaea (the developer's main series). Which is to say, it's a number-heavy grind-heavy blobber. One of the main features here is the pretty unique party creation and management system. You don't have characters per se: they're just puppets reanimated by your protagonist. This means that your attitude to them can be fairly pragmatic, as instead of getting attached to muh cute characters you're supposed to eventually 'fuse' them off to create a stronger puppet. You get to select how these puppets look like: while the high amount of cute girls compared with a vaguely lolicon-ish artstyle may put some off, there's nothing stopping you from making serious dude parties provided the puppet class has said serious dude artwork (there are exceptions - as you might expect, the jester is not a 40 year old war veteran with bulging muscles).
You then organize these puppets into small squads called covens - special formations that determine the amount of free puppet slots and give abilities and stats. This is where the game starts entering crack addiction induced insanity territory, as most covens have from 2 to 4 slots. Considering how 5 is the max amount of covens you can have, you will most likely end up having a total of 15 controllable characters - mages, archers, rogues and flamboyant rogues, plate-armored tanks, and unknown creatures wielding large hammers.
Compared to Shin Megami Tensei or even the series that propelled this developer to fame, Disgaea, the combat in Labyrinth is much simpler. There are no elemental weaknesses, tactics are subservient to numbers as your defensive frontliners need dodge and block items with good procs, and the late-game is a race towards brewing the strongest hammer-wielding Ubermensch Supersoldaten outfitted with skills to guarantee that every single half-naked fat ass succubus (accurate description of one of the enemies) is going to have her head fatally and tragically separated from her body on turn one. However, the high amount of battles, crazy dreamlike levels, charming music, and a somewhat involved coven system that lets you to pick borderline retarded formations created out of the nigh-infinite amount of stockpiled puppets and still somehow make them work is, in my opinion, enough to recommend it to those who have even a little bit of interest in jRPGs.
I'm a big fan of the writing in these games. The fact that some enjoyers of anime lesbians denounced the second game's director as a lesbian hater is, I think, enough to let you know what kind of tone it has. For games that look like a fairytale come alive, with your party travelling through enchanted forests and not-so-subtly-Alice in the Wonderland-inspired micro-castles and hell brothels, there's a fair amount of dark stuff, and not the subtle kind either. In the first game, the clearly sadistic slapstick comedy dynamic between the two principal characters - the witch and her underage pupil - sets the tone almost instantly in that regard. I believe the main story features a fair amount of tropes, but they are usually either simply deconstructed for shock value or borderline trampled upon, with the second game turning it up to 11. There's also a gay man who kills women (might actually be seen as progressive in the West today). It's great. Some tropes are respected though, the cool ones in my opinion, like life is cool even despite the insane amounts of suffering and all that classic Japanimation Evangelion shit.
Labyrinth of Galleria has a kind of retarded pricetag on Steam right now. If I managed to ignite the interest in someone, consider sampling the much cheaper first game to see if you like this kind of gameplay and story.

 

[Elttharion]

Snip

Is the second game yuri too?

 

[dutchwench]

Is the second game yuri too?

Even more than the previous one, with the game focusing on the antics between the two principal characters as opposed to an old witch bossing the underage assistant around and paying her by hitting her on the head.

 

[Elttharion]

Is the second game yuri too?

Even more than the previous one, with the game focusing on the antics between the two principal characters as opposed to an old witch bossing the underage assistant around and paying her by hitting her on the head.

Easy skip them, yuri is absolutely haram

 

[Suicidal]

The only gripe I have is I can't see the turn order (or can I?) which is p. annoying, especially with planning my heal turns.

To my knowledge you cannot, but I think it's determined by agility so characters with higher AGI will act first, I don't think there is any sort of random initiative roll so it's quite deterministic in that regard. Also individual abilities can have initiative modifiers but I think they say it in the tooltip when this is the case, although vaguely.

Moreover I'm not enamored by the idea of having to draw my own map, I grew way too lazy for that in the last 20 years but we'll see, maybe I'll get used to it.

There should be an auto-map option in the game you can enable. Can't comment on how well it actually performs its function cause I always play without it.

I also read up on a few build tips coz I really don't have the time to spend 20 hours on bricking my chars and rerolling.

I don't think you can fuck up your party to such an extent that you will be unable to beat the main story unless you do obviously retarded shit like 5 monk party (maybe even that can work, who knows). If you're not above looking up info for the game I recommend this site https://www.intothelabyrinth.net/etrianodyssey3/skillsim/ to plan your builds because it explicitly lists all values for different skills BUT BE WARNED you will quickly see which skills are the most effective for each class because they're not very well balanced and some skills can do 5x the damage of other similar skills of a character and you'd have no way of knowing that if you relied only on in game descriptions so use at your own discretion.

 

[Nutmeg]

Second, the music is a joke, more like an elevator muzac. Terrible

It was composed Yuzo Koshiro and it was deliberately arranged to have an FM synth like sound. If you think it's crap, you have bad taste in game music IMO.