Alex
Arcane
Hey there, everyone. I normally don't post much here, as JRPGs aren't much of my thing. In fact, I go so far as to say that most JRPGs aren't RPGs at all, or at least have half of their features working against any role playing aspect they may have. That said, I have seem very interesting ideas in them over the years. So, I was hoping that you guys could enlighten me about some stuff I don't know about. I am visiting my brother in Tokyo right now, and I think this might be an unique opportunity to snag something I just wouldn't be able to find back home.
Let me start by listing a few games I have already played and thought would fit my criteria. Although, if anyone replying to this thread feels a certain game would fit here, but feels it doesn't fit what I am looking for, please, feel free to post away! After all, it is better to be comprehensive than lacking.
1. Ogre Battle
This game not only has a very interesting character system, but it also manages to make the game actually feel like an RPG. It has a large job system for humans, with your attributes and alignment determining which jobs are available to you. Furthermore, each job has an upgrade version, and sometimes more than one. Certain classes are also only accessible through special items, or certain actions. For example, you can get a unit turned into a werewolf if it is defeated by one. Different classes are also able to recruit different creatures. Wizards, for example, can summon hellhounds and giants, while a doll mage may craft golems.
The game also has an interesting system for dealing with monsters. Dragons have a special place, they are able to evolve in a variety of ways, but like humans, you need to be careful with their alignment. Other monsters have much more static progressions, but they are still interesting because of their non-standard movement type. Gryphons, for example, can fly through the map, carrying friendly units on their backs, while octopuses can go through the oceans just as if they were plains.
All this ties down to the actual game and levels. Alignment, for example, is a very important stat, and is changed by how you face of enemies. Fighting against lower level enemies lowers your alignment to the side of chaos, while fighting higher level ones shifts it towards order. The enemy faced also has an effect (killing undead raise your ali, while killing clerics lowers it). As you explore different areas, you may find different items needed to upgrade certain classes, or meet differentimportant NPCs, which you may recruit or influence. All this affects your reputation, which summed with your many actions and who is left alive will determine which of the many endings you get. My only big complaint about this game is that, with this very interesting job system in place, the designers somehow thought fitting of straddling the main character with a fixed class. Also, while it is great that your alignment change is tied to how you play, the ways it work sometimes are very unintuitive, which kind of harms the game story you build in your mind.
The other "ogre" series games usually feature some of these elements as well, although I really got the impression that their scenarios, in order to be more closely knit together, foregone some of the freedom the first game allowed the player. All ogre games are divided in stages which you must complete sequentially, with some big decisions sometimes changing which stage you get. However, while the first game tied the stages together mostly by having a certain character you recruited earlier trigger a different response in certain situations, the newer gaes tried to make a more cohesive story.
2. Final Fantasies
While this series is probably one of the most guilty of killing any RPG role playing aspect with a static (and often awful) story, I still mention it because many of its games had interesting systms that allowed some character customization. The materia system from 7, the "esper" system from 6, the job system from 5, or even the GF system from 8 or the weird thing they did in 10 were interesting ways to build your character, even if many ofthese ended up being fundamentally flawed in some way or other. I think my favorite one is the job system from tactics, although I do think it is fucking stupid that important NPCs in that game are simply give special classes outside the normal ones available to regular characters.
3. Star Ocean
The first two games in this series (never played the others) had an awesome skill system in place. By spending your skill points wisely, you can open up all manner of crafting options, that create items way above what you would normally be able to buy at any given moment in the game, as well as giving you ridiculous amounts of money. While this may seem broken (and in fact, it was, a bit), it also makes for a nice way to make the game less linear. I mean, the story may progress like always, but at least the skills you can explore are much less limited by where you are in the game right now.
Other interesting aspects of this game are private actions and the action battle system. The private actions allow your PC to interact in towns with other party members and other oddities in there, and usually give you some small measure of choice as to what he does. While this usually matters little in the larger context, I still think it is nice to include a more mundane aspect to the game, and it does ffect what kind of ending you get by changing how much each character likes each other.
The battle system is actiony, and a bit similar to beat em ups. While I am not very fond of action RPGs, I think it can be a lot of fun to play around with the different kinds of attacks you can use, and try to combinate them in a way to kill the enemies without being hit.
One aspect I lament about this game though is that while the skills are important for making items, and while they do give you stats increases that are useful in battle, they have little direct effect in combat. Your characters still learn spells and special attacks just according to their levels. This is a big missed opportunity I think. They could have had item creation skills where each character could come up with new spells and skills, some of which they wouldn't have been able to use themselves. It might have been keyed to the affection system too, making that a more important aspect of the game. I understand the first game actually had one or two cases of this, where a character would write a book describing a special attack, but this was the exception, not the norm.
4. Rudora no Hihou
Obviously, I mention this because of its magic system. In order to cast spells, you would need to actually spell them. That is, write their names. You could find new spells by fighting monsters and learning it from them, or mixing some generic words with spells you already knew to make them stronger. You could also come across them by sheer luck, or just trying a few words, like "tsunami". Another game that had something similar (but not quite) was a game called "Kartia", I think, which was an strategy RPG for the PS.
5. Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger, while often cited as an example of very good JRPG, actually is very standard JRPG fare. In fact, I would say the character growth system and the amount of skills leave something to be desired. Still, I think it bears mentioning because of two facts:
First, it has an interesting battle system, with different attacks having different areas and shapes, allowing you to play around a bit to hit more or less enemies with each attack. In fact, given how important this is, it still boggles my mind that you don't have an option to move your characters in the battlefield after combat starts, or that close range attacks can almost always be used, no matter the distance.
The other aspect I found interesting is that later on, the game becomes less linear, allowing you to take side qests as you wish. But, since the game features time travle, a lot of the side quests require you to do things in the past and then in the future, such as charging the sun orb.If the game had real C&C to go along with it, it would have been amazing.
By the way, I think the combo system to have been a nice idea, but since it reuired no input from the player, and the skills each character has are already limited, it didn't feel all that important either.
6. Saga Frontier
This game had an interesting system where you would learn skills in battle if you had available skills slots as well as if you managed to pass some criteria (I am not sure, but I think your stats and equipment could open up certain skills). It actually had a good variety of different kinds of skills and characters:
Combat skills work exactly as mentioned above. Usually, human characters are the ones to learn these.
Magic skills are initially bought. However, certain quests initiate you in a magical school, allowing you to learn the rest of the spells in that school by continuously using its bought spells. Some spells would also be upgraded after you completed these quests. Each school also had its opposite, and you couldn't learn from both schools (except for Blue). Humans and mystics may both use magic, and mystics have a special school open to them.
Monster skills are learned by absorbing monsters, and have a certain effect on your stats. Monster characters can learn these skills, and change their shape and stats to match the monster they absorbed it from. Mystics can also learn these, although they don't change shape.
Robot skills can be learned by mechanical PCs in your team by downloading them from defeated enemy machines.
Besides these different skills, there are also the mentioned races, whch are customized differently. Robots, for example, have their stats and growth determined by their equipment, while monsters can't equip items at all.
All in all, this was a very interesting system, although I feel it was a bit "shallow". At least in that, outside of fighting skills, there weren't that many skills of other types to play around with, discover and try to make your characters around. That said, the different unique main characters, who usually had some unique trait to them, were a lot of fun. The game also stands out because it gives you a lot of freedom in tackling it.
7. Saga Frontier 2
This game was a bit (ok, maybe a lot) of a let down from the other games. There was much less customization, or different traits between characters. And the game was a lot more on rails, although what order you tackled the set scenarios was up to you. Still, I think it bears mentioning because of the system it uses to tell its tale. The player is able to view different events in the time line and tackle them in the order they preffer, with each even possibly opening up others. Besides the already mentioned effect of making the game linear, this also had the side effect of making shopping and customizing your characters a lot harder. Still, it was an interesting idea, and could have been great if executed without these flaws.
8. Valkyrie Profile
This is a pretty cool game, but is unfortunately a bit weighed down by common JRPG tropes, I think. In this game you can collect different characters, each with their own sets of combat moves. You use these moves in combat together seeking to create combos, which allow you to use special moves, as well as hit an enemy for a while without being hit in return.
One thing this game does that is very interesting is that, different from many japanese action RPGs, magic doesn't feel totally disjoint from the combat system. The only downside is that magic isn't really unique by characters, meaning spellcasters are pretty much interchangeable.
Another interesting point of the game is the level design, with many levels being about recruiting a specific soul or facing a specific, story related dungeon, but a few of them being completely optional fare that, sometimes, really tested your abilities.
The game also featured a system where you would send some of the souls you recruited back to Asgard, and could even read about their exploits from then on, with different souls being more or less fit to the needs of Asgard at certain times. Sending fit souls would ensure you would get a lot of money on each story stage.
Unfortunately, the game was very linear. While it did reward players who explored the world througly with a different game path and ending, it didn't really feature much C&C at all.
9. Secret of Mana
Secret of Mana featured a very standard levelling system. But one aspect of it where it shined were the many ways you could charge up your weapons and how you would attack, according to these. SoM is an action RPG, and different attacks may or may not hit enemies. So, if you use your weapon wrong, you will just end up missing. The enormous charge times for the higher level weapon attacks were kind of unusable, but they were still fun to play with, once or twice.
The combat system is also praiseworthy, I feel, even more so than its sequel. In the sequel, you always end up aiming at a nearby monster when you attack, making positioning not really important. It is just a pity that the magic system works completely outside combat.
10. Legend of Mana
This game for the playstation is really an odd one, full of interesting, but sometimes very flawed, systems. The gae has, for example, a nice crafting system where you can make a huge variety of weapons and armor, which may give you various different modifiers to attributes or even unique traits. Unfortunately, the system to design these is arcane as hell, and relies in a whole lot of trial and error to figure out. Add to that that getting enough ingredients for all that trial and error actually require a whole lot of grinding, and what could have been an awesome game feature ends up very tarnished. You can, of course, read a faw to figure out how the system works, but them, it becomesobvious how to make invencible weapons. The game could have really benefited if the properties of different items in crafting had been linked to the lore of the game world and its stories somehow.
Other systems include creating golems and magical instruments. Golems are fun to play with, but have a lot less depth than weapon crafting. Furthermore, they too require a lot of grinding to pay off. Magical instruments let you use magic in combat. Different from secret of Mana, magic here doesn't automatically strike, it needs to be aimed, and you have a bit of variety in the shapes you can produce. Unfortunately, this game fixes this flaw by creating another. Magic is just another attack here. It doesn't have any kind of interesting effects or non combat uses.
Another very interesting system is the world creation and the quest systems. As you progress in the game quests, you get different objects. You can place these objects in the map to them have access to new areas. The farther these objects are placed, the higher the level of the monsters in there. Furthermore, different areas affect the mana levels of the surrounding areas, affecting what kind of mana spirits you can find there. Finally, the quest system in this game is very open ended, with many different threads being encounterable in different places andthe followed.
11. Secret of Evermore
In terms of system, this game doesn't really do anything much differeng from Secret of Mana. But it does have two strong points, I think. First, because it has an alchemy system, it encourages the player to explore the different environmnt, without needing to resort to grinding enemies. This goes well with the second feature, which is an actual interesting exploration. There are a few neat things spread through the game world to find, such as new recipes, quirky NPCs and even bartering deals.
Another strong point is that the game's story isn't awful like a lot of the stuff in here, being good humored and quirky. However, this has nothing to do with systems. By the way, just so I am not accused of just preffering western stories, I think the same can be said about Earthbound, although a lack of any interesting systems kept me from mentioning it.
[Edit]
12. Dungeons & Dragons - Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara
While these games are very much beat em ups, I think they are the best example we have of action RPGs, blending different characters with many different special abilities with the genre. The characters in the game also have levels, gain XP and can carry different sorts of items and equipment.
If the game wasn't an arcade game, and could have had, say a bigger game world, with actual exploration and the like (and maybe a few more hours of gameplay), it could have been the perfect blend of beat em ups and JRPGs. So, I think it should be mentioned as well.
[/Edit]
Well, these are the games I can think of now. I may append to this list later if I think of any others. I would love to know about any other game you guys feel should be here, even if they don't have any kind of english translation or such. I don't particularly care if the game came from Japan either.
P.S. In before someone mentions Planescape: Torment.
Let me start by listing a few games I have already played and thought would fit my criteria. Although, if anyone replying to this thread feels a certain game would fit here, but feels it doesn't fit what I am looking for, please, feel free to post away! After all, it is better to be comprehensive than lacking.
1. Ogre Battle
This game not only has a very interesting character system, but it also manages to make the game actually feel like an RPG. It has a large job system for humans, with your attributes and alignment determining which jobs are available to you. Furthermore, each job has an upgrade version, and sometimes more than one. Certain classes are also only accessible through special items, or certain actions. For example, you can get a unit turned into a werewolf if it is defeated by one. Different classes are also able to recruit different creatures. Wizards, for example, can summon hellhounds and giants, while a doll mage may craft golems.
The game also has an interesting system for dealing with monsters. Dragons have a special place, they are able to evolve in a variety of ways, but like humans, you need to be careful with their alignment. Other monsters have much more static progressions, but they are still interesting because of their non-standard movement type. Gryphons, for example, can fly through the map, carrying friendly units on their backs, while octopuses can go through the oceans just as if they were plains.
All this ties down to the actual game and levels. Alignment, for example, is a very important stat, and is changed by how you face of enemies. Fighting against lower level enemies lowers your alignment to the side of chaos, while fighting higher level ones shifts it towards order. The enemy faced also has an effect (killing undead raise your ali, while killing clerics lowers it). As you explore different areas, you may find different items needed to upgrade certain classes, or meet differentimportant NPCs, which you may recruit or influence. All this affects your reputation, which summed with your many actions and who is left alive will determine which of the many endings you get. My only big complaint about this game is that, with this very interesting job system in place, the designers somehow thought fitting of straddling the main character with a fixed class. Also, while it is great that your alignment change is tied to how you play, the ways it work sometimes are very unintuitive, which kind of harms the game story you build in your mind.
The other "ogre" series games usually feature some of these elements as well, although I really got the impression that their scenarios, in order to be more closely knit together, foregone some of the freedom the first game allowed the player. All ogre games are divided in stages which you must complete sequentially, with some big decisions sometimes changing which stage you get. However, while the first game tied the stages together mostly by having a certain character you recruited earlier trigger a different response in certain situations, the newer gaes tried to make a more cohesive story.
2. Final Fantasies
While this series is probably one of the most guilty of killing any RPG role playing aspect with a static (and often awful) story, I still mention it because many of its games had interesting systms that allowed some character customization. The materia system from 7, the "esper" system from 6, the job system from 5, or even the GF system from 8 or the weird thing they did in 10 were interesting ways to build your character, even if many ofthese ended up being fundamentally flawed in some way or other. I think my favorite one is the job system from tactics, although I do think it is fucking stupid that important NPCs in that game are simply give special classes outside the normal ones available to regular characters.
3. Star Ocean
The first two games in this series (never played the others) had an awesome skill system in place. By spending your skill points wisely, you can open up all manner of crafting options, that create items way above what you would normally be able to buy at any given moment in the game, as well as giving you ridiculous amounts of money. While this may seem broken (and in fact, it was, a bit), it also makes for a nice way to make the game less linear. I mean, the story may progress like always, but at least the skills you can explore are much less limited by where you are in the game right now.
Other interesting aspects of this game are private actions and the action battle system. The private actions allow your PC to interact in towns with other party members and other oddities in there, and usually give you some small measure of choice as to what he does. While this usually matters little in the larger context, I still think it is nice to include a more mundane aspect to the game, and it does ffect what kind of ending you get by changing how much each character likes each other.
The battle system is actiony, and a bit similar to beat em ups. While I am not very fond of action RPGs, I think it can be a lot of fun to play around with the different kinds of attacks you can use, and try to combinate them in a way to kill the enemies without being hit.
One aspect I lament about this game though is that while the skills are important for making items, and while they do give you stats increases that are useful in battle, they have little direct effect in combat. Your characters still learn spells and special attacks just according to their levels. This is a big missed opportunity I think. They could have had item creation skills where each character could come up with new spells and skills, some of which they wouldn't have been able to use themselves. It might have been keyed to the affection system too, making that a more important aspect of the game. I understand the first game actually had one or two cases of this, where a character would write a book describing a special attack, but this was the exception, not the norm.
4. Rudora no Hihou
Obviously, I mention this because of its magic system. In order to cast spells, you would need to actually spell them. That is, write their names. You could find new spells by fighting monsters and learning it from them, or mixing some generic words with spells you already knew to make them stronger. You could also come across them by sheer luck, or just trying a few words, like "tsunami". Another game that had something similar (but not quite) was a game called "Kartia", I think, which was an strategy RPG for the PS.
5. Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger, while often cited as an example of very good JRPG, actually is very standard JRPG fare. In fact, I would say the character growth system and the amount of skills leave something to be desired. Still, I think it bears mentioning because of two facts:
First, it has an interesting battle system, with different attacks having different areas and shapes, allowing you to play around a bit to hit more or less enemies with each attack. In fact, given how important this is, it still boggles my mind that you don't have an option to move your characters in the battlefield after combat starts, or that close range attacks can almost always be used, no matter the distance.
The other aspect I found interesting is that later on, the game becomes less linear, allowing you to take side qests as you wish. But, since the game features time travle, a lot of the side quests require you to do things in the past and then in the future, such as charging the sun orb.If the game had real C&C to go along with it, it would have been amazing.
By the way, I think the combo system to have been a nice idea, but since it reuired no input from the player, and the skills each character has are already limited, it didn't feel all that important either.
6. Saga Frontier
This game had an interesting system where you would learn skills in battle if you had available skills slots as well as if you managed to pass some criteria (I am not sure, but I think your stats and equipment could open up certain skills). It actually had a good variety of different kinds of skills and characters:
Combat skills work exactly as mentioned above. Usually, human characters are the ones to learn these.
Magic skills are initially bought. However, certain quests initiate you in a magical school, allowing you to learn the rest of the spells in that school by continuously using its bought spells. Some spells would also be upgraded after you completed these quests. Each school also had its opposite, and you couldn't learn from both schools (except for Blue). Humans and mystics may both use magic, and mystics have a special school open to them.
Monster skills are learned by absorbing monsters, and have a certain effect on your stats. Monster characters can learn these skills, and change their shape and stats to match the monster they absorbed it from. Mystics can also learn these, although they don't change shape.
Robot skills can be learned by mechanical PCs in your team by downloading them from defeated enemy machines.
Besides these different skills, there are also the mentioned races, whch are customized differently. Robots, for example, have their stats and growth determined by their equipment, while monsters can't equip items at all.
All in all, this was a very interesting system, although I feel it was a bit "shallow". At least in that, outside of fighting skills, there weren't that many skills of other types to play around with, discover and try to make your characters around. That said, the different unique main characters, who usually had some unique trait to them, were a lot of fun. The game also stands out because it gives you a lot of freedom in tackling it.
7. Saga Frontier 2
This game was a bit (ok, maybe a lot) of a let down from the other games. There was much less customization, or different traits between characters. And the game was a lot more on rails, although what order you tackled the set scenarios was up to you. Still, I think it bears mentioning because of the system it uses to tell its tale. The player is able to view different events in the time line and tackle them in the order they preffer, with each even possibly opening up others. Besides the already mentioned effect of making the game linear, this also had the side effect of making shopping and customizing your characters a lot harder. Still, it was an interesting idea, and could have been great if executed without these flaws.
8. Valkyrie Profile
This is a pretty cool game, but is unfortunately a bit weighed down by common JRPG tropes, I think. In this game you can collect different characters, each with their own sets of combat moves. You use these moves in combat together seeking to create combos, which allow you to use special moves, as well as hit an enemy for a while without being hit in return.
One thing this game does that is very interesting is that, different from many japanese action RPGs, magic doesn't feel totally disjoint from the combat system. The only downside is that magic isn't really unique by characters, meaning spellcasters are pretty much interchangeable.
Another interesting point of the game is the level design, with many levels being about recruiting a specific soul or facing a specific, story related dungeon, but a few of them being completely optional fare that, sometimes, really tested your abilities.
The game also featured a system where you would send some of the souls you recruited back to Asgard, and could even read about their exploits from then on, with different souls being more or less fit to the needs of Asgard at certain times. Sending fit souls would ensure you would get a lot of money on each story stage.
Unfortunately, the game was very linear. While it did reward players who explored the world througly with a different game path and ending, it didn't really feature much C&C at all.
9. Secret of Mana
Secret of Mana featured a very standard levelling system. But one aspect of it where it shined were the many ways you could charge up your weapons and how you would attack, according to these. SoM is an action RPG, and different attacks may or may not hit enemies. So, if you use your weapon wrong, you will just end up missing. The enormous charge times for the higher level weapon attacks were kind of unusable, but they were still fun to play with, once or twice.
The combat system is also praiseworthy, I feel, even more so than its sequel. In the sequel, you always end up aiming at a nearby monster when you attack, making positioning not really important. It is just a pity that the magic system works completely outside combat.
10. Legend of Mana
This game for the playstation is really an odd one, full of interesting, but sometimes very flawed, systems. The gae has, for example, a nice crafting system where you can make a huge variety of weapons and armor, which may give you various different modifiers to attributes or even unique traits. Unfortunately, the system to design these is arcane as hell, and relies in a whole lot of trial and error to figure out. Add to that that getting enough ingredients for all that trial and error actually require a whole lot of grinding, and what could have been an awesome game feature ends up very tarnished. You can, of course, read a faw to figure out how the system works, but them, it becomesobvious how to make invencible weapons. The game could have really benefited if the properties of different items in crafting had been linked to the lore of the game world and its stories somehow.
Other systems include creating golems and magical instruments. Golems are fun to play with, but have a lot less depth than weapon crafting. Furthermore, they too require a lot of grinding to pay off. Magical instruments let you use magic in combat. Different from secret of Mana, magic here doesn't automatically strike, it needs to be aimed, and you have a bit of variety in the shapes you can produce. Unfortunately, this game fixes this flaw by creating another. Magic is just another attack here. It doesn't have any kind of interesting effects or non combat uses.
Another very interesting system is the world creation and the quest systems. As you progress in the game quests, you get different objects. You can place these objects in the map to them have access to new areas. The farther these objects are placed, the higher the level of the monsters in there. Furthermore, different areas affect the mana levels of the surrounding areas, affecting what kind of mana spirits you can find there. Finally, the quest system in this game is very open ended, with many different threads being encounterable in different places andthe followed.
11. Secret of Evermore
In terms of system, this game doesn't really do anything much differeng from Secret of Mana. But it does have two strong points, I think. First, because it has an alchemy system, it encourages the player to explore the different environmnt, without needing to resort to grinding enemies. This goes well with the second feature, which is an actual interesting exploration. There are a few neat things spread through the game world to find, such as new recipes, quirky NPCs and even bartering deals.
Another strong point is that the game's story isn't awful like a lot of the stuff in here, being good humored and quirky. However, this has nothing to do with systems. By the way, just so I am not accused of just preffering western stories, I think the same can be said about Earthbound, although a lack of any interesting systems kept me from mentioning it.
[Edit]
12. Dungeons & Dragons - Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara
While these games are very much beat em ups, I think they are the best example we have of action RPGs, blending different characters with many different special abilities with the genre. The characters in the game also have levels, gain XP and can carry different sorts of items and equipment.
If the game wasn't an arcade game, and could have had, say a bigger game world, with actual exploration and the like (and maybe a few more hours of gameplay), it could have been the perfect blend of beat em ups and JRPGs. So, I think it should be mentioned as well.
[/Edit]
Well, these are the games I can think of now. I may append to this list later if I think of any others. I would love to know about any other game you guys feel should be here, even if they don't have any kind of english translation or such. I don't particularly care if the game came from Japan either.
P.S. In before someone mentions Planescape: Torment.
There's so much potential there.)
