Old/obscure/underrated JRPGs

[Stabwound]

Everyone knows all about the famous JRPG games: Final Fantasy, SMT, Breath of Fire, etc. But I've always had a soft spot for old NES JRPGs like the old Dragon Quest series, Destiny of an Emperor, etc.

I thought it might be cool to have a thread about more obscure/old games that don't get talked about a lot. I mean games from the NES/Master System/Genesis era, maybe even obscure SNES and possibly PSX games.

Are there any great games that you really like but don't get talked about much?

My favorite obscure game is Destiny of an Emperor for the NES. You basically play a party in ancient China, and it plays like a typical oldschool JRPG, except in this one you can recruit enemy generals like Pokemon. It really is like Pokemon, except it predates it by 10 years. You recruit generals by defeating them in combat, and then you can either use them as a party member or set them as the party tactician; some generals have spells available that others don't, some are much better at tactics in general, etc. There is a pretty huge cast of characters; I'd guess there are probably about 50-100 you can recruit.

You basically travel the world, taking over strongholds by defeating bosses (army commanders and their soldiers) in typical JRPG combat, but it's an absolute blast if you like old games.

So yeah, obscure/old/good JRPGs, go!

 

[yes plz]

Don't know how obscure this will be on the Codex since this place is filled with people with an arcane knowledge on just about everything but...

Chou-Mahou Tairku Wozz (Mostly just known as Wozz)

Made by RED Entertainment (probably best known for Sakura Taisen/Wars and maybe Far East of Eden), Wozz is a fairly light SNES JRPG. A typical fantasy world is in need of heroes, so they try to summon some from our world but end up getting only a brash, arrogant American teenage archer, a genius female Japanese teenage inventor, and a shy, psychic Chinese kid. They then set off to rid the world of evil so that they can then be transported back home.

About the only noteworthy thing about the game is that it's probably the earliest example I can think of that has a point-of-view system. At the beginning you get to pick which of those three is the leader and the story thus gets told from their point of view. The other POV routes still play out (e.g. the girl will run off and leave the party to go save someone trapped in a cave), so the other two are still active in the story. You also occasionally get to make choices throughout the story, though they don't really change much. Those three also get some character development, though it's very straightforward and typical (Chinese kid becomes less shy, the American less of a dick, etc.).

Gameplay mechanics are your usual generic JRPG stuff - four active people per party, an EXP level-up system, turn based combat, and all that. About the only thing that is even somewhat unique is the crafting system. You can combine various items that you find to create new stuff. I'm not talking about combining ten potions to create a high potion, but rather putting together various junk to create a robot you can then summon in battle.

And going back to the party members, unlike the main three, the others that join you throughout the story are your typical JRPG crap, usually with very little reason to join, even less of a reason to stay, and then basically fade into the background, only really having any type of relevancy in battle.

 

[Tehdagah]

Final Fantasy 8

The game is underrated, considering it gets a lot of hate and is better than FF7/9.

 

[FromWisdomToHate]

Namco X Capcom

 

[MRY]

A few random tidbits on Destiny of an Emperor: (1) it has a deliciously quick walk speed, which makes it far more playable than most console jRPGs; (2) it has awesome theme music coupled with one of the great "cold opens" in an RPG (obviously you're dealing with older NES production values, but for sheer impact, I put it in the same general category as Lufia, which has the best cold open, and Final Fantasy III, which has probably the most famous); (3) it has a fan-translated sequel that I always wanted to play but never got around to; (4) it has one of the best one-liners in all jRPG-dom (on par with SOTN's "What is a man?") -- Lu Bu's declaration upon changing sides again: "My life was an essay in betrayal." It's nice to know that there's someone out there other than me and a friend of mine from high school who remembers this game fondly.

I have super-fond memories of The Magic of Scheherazade, a kind of Dragon Warrior / Zelda mash-up that in some ways presages Chrono Trigger with its clever use of time travel and eclectic cast of characters. I'm pretty sure I antisocially played through this game for most of a Thanksgiving holiday while family was in from out of town.

In 1995 (I think?), on the precursor site to RPGamer.com (the Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage, I believe it was called), a glowing but enigmatic review of Live-A-Live (an untranslated Square SNES RPG) was posted. It contained an overview of the game, which was basically that it was split into chapters that had different genres (fantasy, science fiction, Wild West, etc.), gameplay, and moods, and you could play the chapters in any order. The evaluation included passages like this one:

[T]he story for this chapter is the most radical story I have ever seen, and probably ever will see, for an RPG. This story does not go as one might think, it takes horrible turns and reveals in a painful way the backside of such conceptions as hero, friendship, rivalry and love. All in a very human way. "Human"- not in a positive sense. Live Alive is worth its price for this chapter alone, it is one of the best RPG's ever made.

From like 1995 until December 2001, when a fan translation was released, this game haunted my imagination. Indeed, it did so to such an extent that sometime around 1999/2000, I made a significant portion of a game based on what I imagined Live-A-Live to be, though mine was exclusively in a fantasy setting. (If anyone is desperately interested, I can send them the RPGMaker 2k files, though I think maybe at some point I broke the game, and in any event it's incomplete.) It was a surreal experience to compare the chapter described above to my interpretation of it. I'm not sure that Live-A-Live quite lived up to the hype: much of it is silly, and doesn't translate that well (the name might be an indication), and I think the review was a bit hyperbolic. But the game is pretty clever, and the medieval chapter is pretty good, although knowing in advance that there would be a twist -- and having written my own version of the twist (I think mine is better!) -- took some of the fun out of it.

 

[Whisky]

MRY could you send me the RM2K files? I used to be active in the RM2K community and I always get a thrill looking at people's old projects, plus it being a recreation of your interpretation of Live-A-Live sounds interesting. I wish I still had my old projects.

One semi-obscure JRPG I own is Beyond the Beyond, which was one of the first PSX JRPGs. It was made by the same people who worked on the Shining Force games. The problem is that Beyond the Beyond was absolutely horrible and completely generic. If every JRPG in the PSX era was like it, it would have been the dark age of JRPGs. Like most JRPGs of that time regardless of quality, it had a pretty great world map theme:



On the non-translated side, here's an article about an NES JRPG frequently referred to as Legendary Shit Game.

 

[SCO]

Energy breaker.



It was fan-translated recently. It's a bit interesting in that its a sjrpg and that its later story approaches romancing saga 3 levels of clusterfuck (for different reasons, RS3 is a somewhat open world with dozens of minigames and no perceptible plot with a ensemble cast, this game has a crazy timetravel plot and a obligatory ensemble cast).

It's a bit tedious later on because to advance the story you need to shuffle around time and do the same dungeons again (edit: i've since found that if you pause in a battle you already did, you can skip it in the menu), but it's interesting in that the combat system has many mobility abilities and is objective based. It's not hard, but interesting (if you don't use the obvious exploit). Also girly protagonist and much hidden stuff on each and every map. It's also very... japan. 2 boss fights are in wombs. One of them in a underage girls organ. Game also feels incomplete.


Speaking of romancing saga, here is a review

 

[Stabwound]

Beyond the Beyond I would place on the top 5 list of worst JRPGs ever released in America, and I'm not shitting you.

1) The fucking dark cave boulder puzzles
2) The shitty characters
3) The way one of your best characters gets CURSED for like 3/4 of the game and is totally useless until he's cured.
4) Frequent, awful combat

The sad thing is that this is one of the "Camelot" style games like Shining Force, Golden Sun, etc. But damn, it was an early PSX JRPG and it was just awful.

 

[Zetor]

One of my old faves is Saiyuki: Journey West, a sorta-forgotten PSX sRPG from Koei. It has some interesting systems (shapechange, f'rex) and I really liked the setting (as a mishmash of Chinese myth/legends). I'll admit combat does get a bit too predictable around late midgame, though... but the game isn't THAT long, anyway.

There's a LP of it here -- http://lparchive.org/Saiyuki-Journey-West/

 

[deuxhero]

While newer than most of this topic, I've got to say Summon Night: Swordcraft Story and it sequel (sequels if you are a moon speaker). Released as part of a last-hoorah send off for the GBA in the west, they did OK, but the the GBA was pretty much dead when the third came out, dooming it to Japan only. The main reason anyone mentions them in the west is because the main characters are both blatant lesbians, and so are most of the female cast. While this is by no means a bad thing (and it's done much better than the shit Bioware pulls), it's a bit of a disservice to the fact that the rest of the game is pretty good.

The battle system has regularly been called "tales like" except it's better than any Tales of game's battle system (I could, and have, write paragraph on how it's better) and a weapon crafting system (underdeveloped in the first game, but option to customization and resource management in the second)

 

[yes plz]

Emerald Dragon is SNES JRPG I'm fairly fond of. It was actually originally for the NEC-PC98 and then ported to almost a half dozen times the following years, all with various tweaks and changes. Despite being popular enough for all those ports, I don't think I've ever seen a sequel to it.

The story begins with a little girl being found in dragon land (or maybe it's just an island where they live, I can't remember) and the dragons there are cursed to be unable to leave their land and interact with humans, so this girl is the first time they've interacted with a human in centuries. She grows up and becomes attached to a certain dragon, the main character (Atrushan). She leaves and then later gets into some trouble and calls out for him, so he decides to venture off to help her but to do so must first become human. Anyway, he eventually gets to her and then decides to investigate the curse placed upon the dragons and help out the humans. The premise sounds pretty generic, and it is, but it's fairly well told, especially considering its age. It's probably one of the first JRPGs to really place an incredibly large emphasis on its story. The cast is treated like in Grandia II where party members come and go as the story dictates, so unlike a lot of early (and Hell, even present) JRPGs, the party members actually contribute a great deal to the plot and usually 'exist' during cutscenes. There's even occasionally 'Tales of'-style skits between party members.

Its battle-system works a lot like Star Ocean or Tales of Phantasia but a lot simpler, and you have absolutely no control over your party members. The AI is about as good as you could probably hope for it to be for a game of its age but, sadly, only the SNES version was ever translated and, for whatever reason, the developers decided that it needed to be easy so they powered-up the party members (basically bloating their HP) while not rebalancing the enemies to match, so there is little challenge unless you impose restrictions upon yourself. Outside of combat, the game is a fairly typical JRPG in terms of mechanics -- normal equipment, leveling, items, and all that. I've heard some versions didn't have a world map but something more like FFX's interconnected areas but, sadly, the SNES version is not one of them and has a regular world map. I know the music for the game is pretty popular but it didn't leave much of an impression on me, so I can't really comment on it.

Since the only English version is pretty easy, I can only really recommend it to people who like JRPG story faggotry, like myself.

(Oh, and there used to be a really awesome English fan site for the game that had tons of information on it but apparently the guy stopped paying his hosting bill and it got took down. If anyone wants to try to get one of those Internet archive sites working with it, its address was: http://emedra.lakuuna.org/ )

 

[Valestein]

My pick for an underrated and obscure JRPG would be Legend of Heroes: Trail in the Sky on PC/PSP/PS3(only localized on PSP currently). It has your traditional turn based gameplay with light SRPG elements(can move characters in a grid and certain abilities depend on placement), an FF7-like materia system and a Witcher-esque act/chapter structure with monster hunting contracts.

It's sequel it's currently in localization hell I'm afraid but it's supposedly going to come out someday.

 

[MRY]

Emerald Dragon

Man, that game really reminds me a lot of an obscure (but terrible*) Genesis RPG I played as a kid called Traysia.

The two are apparently unrelated, though. The only things I can remember about the game are a twist where some dude in armor turns out to be some chick in armor and that, in the combat system, if you selected "move" but then didn't move your character, that character was invulnerable for the turn (though he/she couldn't attack). So if you formed a Tetris .:. pattern at the bottom of the screen with a ranged attacker in the middle, you could win any fight without anyone getting hurt. As a consequence, I raced through the game without leveling, until I reached a point where enemies moved so fast that I couldn't get into formation in time, and then I couldn't win any fights, so I couldn't level, so I couldn't advance at all, at which point I returned it to Blockbuster. Good times, youth.

 

[SuicideBunny]

It has your traditional turn based gameplay with light SRPG elements(can move characters in a grid and certain abilities depend on placement), an FF7-like materia system and a Witcher-esque act/chapter structure with monster hunting contracts.

it's also full of typical jrpg bullshit like missing out on best weapons because you are unable to complete a sidequest due to not talking to some flavor npc during a very narrow story window.

 

[ghostdog]

Sweet Home is a nice obscure NES gem. It's a horror themed jRPG with some puzzle solving. It's a pretty unique game. It got translated some years ago : http://www.romhacking.net/translations/222/
The Japanese also released an apparently not bad movie in the same year, based on the game.





Faxanadu is a platform action/rpg. I love this game, it has eerie surroundings and fantastic music.

 

[Cromwell]

My pick for an underrated and obscure JRPG would be Legend of Heroes: Trail in the Sky on PC/PSP/PS3(only localized on PSP currently). It has your traditional turn based gameplay with light SRPG elements(can move characters in a grid and certain abilities depend on placement), an FF7-like materia system and a Witcher-esque act/chapter structure with monster hunting contracts.

It's sequel it's currently in localization hell I'm afraid but it's supposedly going to come out someday.

there is no fanpatch for the pc version or is there? I orderd it for the psp but it got caugh up in some delivery trouble and didnt end up with me. Since the psp belongs to my ex I dont have it anymore but i would love to play that.

 

[Valestein]

there is no fanpatch for the pc version or is there? I orderd it for the psp but it got caugh up in some delivery trouble and didnt end up with me. Since the psp belongs to my ex I dont have it anymore but i would love to play that.

Not that I know of. It's possible that an english version might come out on Steam one day since the dev's NA localizer has been releasing it's other games on it(the Ys ones).

 

[MRY]

Faxanadu is a platform action/rpg. I love this game, it has eerie surroundings and fantastic music.

It's like Proust's Madeleine: the name alone brings back instant memories of madly blinking faces, impossible password back-ups, learning the words "mattock" and "deluge," developing a fear of dwarfs . . . .

 

[Valestein]

"Jeanne D'Arc" for PSP is another underrated and obscure strategy JRPG.

 

[Gragt]

Faxanadu is a platform action/rpg. I love this game, it has eerie surroundings and fantastic music.

I hated it at first but decided to keep going, out of a desire of being complete with my NES collection. I ended up loving it.

 

[Rahdulan]

It's not exactly old being a PS2 game, but I do think it's obscure enough for what it is. Game I'm talking about is Okage: Shadow King, one of the rare examples of good humor in JRPGs and responsiveness to at least your dialog choices if nothing else. Shame it had quite a forgettable and mediocre combat system. But then again, it has a Evil King Stan so all is forgiven.

 

[Stabwound]

I hated it at first but decided to keep going, out of a desire of being complete with my NES collection. I ended up loving it.

I used to love Faxanadu as a kid, but I tried to replay it recently and I couldn't do it. Decline of gamer skills, for real. The controls are so god-awful, that was mostly the killing blow for me replaying the game again. Fucking flying enemies and awful attack/jump controls.

It was a pretty sweet Metroidvania type game though back in the day.

 

[Valestein]

Here's another obscure PC J-ARPG, Xanadu Next (hasn't been officially translated yet)

 

[m_s0]

"Jeanne D'Arc" for PSP is another underrated and obscure strategy JRPG.

It's not that obscure and it's just not all that great. It's basically baby's first sjrpg with decent presentation and light inappropriate japanese insanity thrown into the plot for good measure. Fairly enjoyable if you know what you're getting into, hardly underrated. If anything, most reviews I've seen praise the game too much.

Some of the design decisions in it are really bizarre, though. If I remember correctly (it's been a while) the game poses absolutely no challenge - unless, possibly, you've never played any kind of turn based game whatsoever - up until the point where you unlock the arena (optional combat, higher difficulty - the usual crap). The problem with that is, if you want to engage the more challenging enemies on the arena you have to to grind around 20-30 levels - that's from around the level you can easily beat the game at (which is so easy you don't need to do any optional fights or even think about customizing your team) - in order to reach a level at which you stand a fighting chance. Not necessarily the level of the enemies, mind you, because that would require even more grinding. So is you want to be challenged at all, you need to work your ass off for hours before you're allowed the privilege. And the game clearly isn't even made for people looking for challenge. What the hell was the point of that?

Nice graphics, decent cutscenes if you like that sort of thing, alright music, silly plot. Decent introduction into the genre for someone who's never played a video game before.

 

[Valestein]

It's not that obscure and it's just not all that great. It's basically baby's first sjrpg with decent presentation and light inappropriate japanese insanity thrown into the plot for good measure. Fairly enjoyable if you know what you're getting into, hardly underrated. If anything, most reviews I've seen praise the game too much.

Some of the design decisions in it are really bizarre, though. If I remember correctly (it's been a while) the game poses absolutely no challenge - unless, possibly, you've never played any kind of turn based game whatsoever - up until the point where you unlock the arena (optional combat, higher difficulty - the usual crap). The problem with that is, if you want to engage the more challenging enemies on the arena you have to to grind around 20-30 levels - that's from around the level you can easily beat the game at (which is so easy you don't need to do any optional fights or even think about customizing your team) - in order to reach a level at which you stand a fighting chance. Not necessarily the level of the enemies, mind you, because that would require even more grinding. So is you want to be challenged at all, you need to work your ass off for hours before you're allowed the privilege. And the game clearly isn't even made for people looking for challenge. What the hell was the point of that?

Nice graphics, decent cutscenes if you like that sort of thing, alright music, silly plot. Decent introduction into the genre for someone who's never played a video game before.

The game's pretty easy, yeah. T'was my first SRPG and a pretty enjoyable introduction to the sub-genre for me.

Was hoping they'd create spiritual sequels based on other historical figures but alas...