Old/obscure/underrated JRPGs

[abnaxus]

Finished Filsnown by Leaf (PC98, 1995).

It’s one of Leaf’s very first games, they’re mostly known for Utawarerumono franchise.

Main character is a redhead by the name of Thiria Fray who is soon joined by two other ladies. The main point of the story is Thiria trying to save her boyfriend (whom you never meet until the very end of the game) but along the way she partakes in several lesbo scenes that are thankfully short.

“Filsnown” refers to a sword that’s needed to beat the God of Chaos.

It is a very traditional game in every sense and without the eroscenes would simply be a mainstream game. I found it to be most similar to FF4. At one point in the game Thiria gains control of an airship, opening the world and indeed there’s quite a bit of optional content to be found.

I guess I got a bad ending because at the end Thiria was forced to stab her boyfriend. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was likely missing some obscure item at the end, I did not find a detailed guide about the game anywhere.

Spoiler

 

[Cosmo]

Regarding this thread's topic, there's a hardback on japanese video games obscurities live on kickstarter !

 

[Skall]

Their Unbound campaign for the same book seems to be going slightly better: https://unbound.com/books/japanese-video-game-obscurities/

 

[abnaxus]

Finished Dragon Knight 4, final chapter in Dragon Knight franchise by élf (1994).

The game starts with an interesting intro where the main villains and their motivations are revealed. The main villain is Minax who manipulates Lusyfan (the bad guys are basically Dark Elves) and sends him back from the far future (where humanity has colonized space) into the distant past to assassinate Takeru. Lusyfan is forced to obey since he wants to marry Minax’ daughter.

Totally randomly the devices used to time travel are stones ripped from the womb of an Elf woman – Minax ripped the stones given to Lusyfan from his own daughter’s womb to give even more incentive.

When Lusyfan arrives in Takeru’s time Takeru’s son Kakeru is 15 years old and sent off by Takeru to make his mark on the world. Lusyfan poses as a dragon knight invading the continent from the East while a petrifying black fog enters the continent from the West. It is a ploy to lure Takeru to him.

Among others Kakeru teams up with Sail, Baan’s son, in the first town. Kakeru and Sail are almost enveloped by the black fog but are saved by a mysterious swordsman in black armour called Eto. Sail becomes an actual Dragon Knight later in the game, taking control of a dragon and even gets his own waifu.

My favourite character in the game was Marlene, Elven archer and basically a Pirotess clone. She’s Kakeru’s main love interest along with his childhood friend Natasha (Luna clone).

At the end of the game when Kakeru reaches Lusyfan everybody gets roflstomped yet Kakeru is left alive and put to sleep only to be awakened and killed when Elves completely dominate the future, to make him taste defeat utterly.

However Marlene appears sometime in the future to Kakeru and sends him back in time – this future Kakeru is Eto. This was p. clever (I had expected Eto to be Takeru in disguise) as throughout the game Eto routinely seems to cuck Kakeru with Natasha and is often seen conversing with Marlene – though Eto ultimately does fail first time through the game.

So basically when one expects the game to be over Kakeru is sent back in time and one needs to play through the entire game again from the point of view of Eto – experiencing earlier events from a new angle, picking up characters along the way that were unavailable first time, and learning the truth about Marlene who is pivotal to changing history (she’s the little sister of Lusyfan’s lover).

But a plot such as this shouldn’t be surprising from the company that created YU-NO which uses similar concepts. Made me do a double-take whether Kanno Hiroyuki wasn’t behind the game story.

Gameplay has evolved into a turn-based strategy, kind of an amalgam of Shining Force and Suikoden 2 strategic battles. There’s permadeath when non-plot critical characters die in battle (which you don’t want lest you miss out on scenes), otherwise it’s just game over. Maps also need to be completed in X amount of turns lest game over.

Between the battles there’s some town exploration during which Kakeru recruits new commanders and the game functions basically as a visual novel. It’s here where the game truly shines as along with humorous events (like a gay knight that keeps hitting on Kakeru or an annoying brat that keeps trying to get it on with Kakeru’s waifus) and utterly absurd events (like a village called Sodom with sex-crazed dwarf inhabitants) there are some genuinely touching events.

The game has interactive sex scenes, which are quite annoying to go through. Thankfully though the game is not exactly a sex romp.

It is a p. good game and either this one or II is the best in the series.

The ending isn’t as conclusive as I had hoped, Marlene’s story isn’t resolved, not to mention you never even meet the main bad guy. Another open ending.

Spoiler

 

[Valestein]

Posted this elsewhere but these indie JRPGs by dancing dragon games deserve a mention here.

 

[Siveon]

They just look like your slightly above average RPG Maker games. Could you elaborate on what makes them special?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Watched the review for the second one, sounded pretty awful. Generic storyline, generic combat without even a hint of challenge (every fight you start at full hp, losing lets you retry the fight and even swap your gear and shit- why not just give me save states and be done with it) and the only thing that seemed appealing at all were the aesthetics, and even that was just kind of average. Better than the usual rpgmaker fare sure, but hardly worth playing a bad game for. Reviewer claims the writing was good but didn't really give any examples, and the bits I saw in the background didn't stand out.

 

[CryptRat]

I played Skyborn. I didn't like the story and don't remember how the dungeons are, the game is linear, but regarding combat and character developpement it's actually not that bad, I don't remember exactly but you've got class-branchings and, even if the beginning is far too easy, some (optional? or is it just that you can reach them when you're barely strong enough?) late game parts are fun, not hard but fun. Overall I wouldn't recommend it but above average RPG maker game seems fair to me.

To give examples regarding similar games I preferred Zeboyd games' stuff, and if you want some combat challenge I could recommend Liar Jeannie instead (although story is even worse and it's even more linear) and if you prefer good dungeons with various traps, cursed items and hidden doors (+ full party creation) then there's Dungeonmen (the guy's other game, Spellshard is said to be even better, but unfortunately I've only played the begninning of the game, which is promising alright, so I can't recommend it).

This is just my own opinion. To add a slightly more interesting note to this boring message I am several hours into the recently translated G.O.D., I'll leave my impression when I complete the game but what I wanted to say is that you really mustn't spoil you the story at all before playing it, you're playing as an agent of an anti-alien organization in a invaded Japan and the setting and story sure are worth it so far.

 

[Siveon]

What a coincidence! I was just looking into games made in the engine that Dungeonmen and Spellshard was used and they looked really fun.

I think G.O.D also had a spiritual sequel on the PS1 that's also untranslated. I want to play that one too.

 

[CryptRat]

I played a few games made with the engine, Void pyramid is a very cool puzzle RPG, Festivus is a short and fun baby's first first-person blobber, plain attacks make very low damage and you'd better use elemental spells and the dungeons are above average but it's getting interesting only about halfway through and even then the combat is a cakewalk.

But yes, the base UI leads to a very different look from RPG Maker game, and some games like Vkings of Midgard or Sword of Jade: Parallel Dreams seem to have some personnality, the former maybe only because of very good low-res gfx and big furry monsters but the latter because of important time mechanisms, I haven't played any of the two though'.

It's always the problem when dealing with this kind of stuff, RPG Maker or OHRRPGCE or whatever the engine, we don't need Labyrinth of Touhou difficulty on average but it's hard to distinguish the games which are only a story with a "press attack to win" mechanism over the top and those which are actually fun to play, and needless to say that the ones with the best presentation have no reason to be the best.

About G.O.D. I think there's a remake of the SNES game on PS1.

 

[abnaxus]

Finished Burai Joukan for PC88/98 by Riverhill Soft (1989).

Game is the first part of a duology with a 30 minute intro that’s better than animu:



The basic story: eight baddies wake up the God of Darkness to gain ultimate power and rule the world. To counter this out eight orbs are sent out to eight champions to protect a holy child in which the God of Light will reincarnate.

The story becomes more complex as later it is revealed ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ are merely two sides of the same coin; in fact Light had invaded a peaceful world ruled by Darkness in the past. One of the party members is a god who descends to remove both Light and Darkness from premises.

In the end there’s a p. kewl twist; everything turns out to be a Xanatos gambit by the main antagonist which nicely sets up a sequel.

The game consists of seven (p. short) chapters introducing the eight ‘chosen ones’. At the end of the game there’s a chapter with everyone together. The first seven chapters are origin stories, in the final chapter the heroes unite. The game becomes open-worldy at this point.

Two of the eight heroes are children with initially very low HP who don’t really level up at all during their chapters; it takes quite some time to bring them up to par with the other six. Ironically though the kiddies in the party become the most powerful with special skills that can do 65,536 damage to enemies…

Each of the eight have unique abilities. Gameplay uses a learn-by-doing system to increase stats (à la Betrayal at Krondor).

Combat is fairly challenging but in the individual chapters characters will quickly overpower every enemy. The final chapter with a party of eight is most challenging, overall good use needs to be made of the characters’ abilities – then again some party members might gain very overpowered abilities.

Not to mention, one of the party members is a god… with a spell similar to Dragonskin from Betrayal at Krondor.

Also amusingly there are random encounters with entire armies (up to 100,000 enemy units).

There are some labyrinthine dungeons combined with high encounter rate; however one party member has an ability to skip combat which is a godsend when one gets tired of fighting.

Overall p. classy, stylish game with a great soundtrack, kewl characters, fun gameplay and good storytelling. Taking everything into account definitely THE BEST I played so far.

Spoiler

 

[abnaxus]

Finished Startling Odyssey: Blue Evolution by RayForce (1999).

Not to be confused with Star Odyssey, it is a PS remake of an older game for PC-Engine complete with voice over and (animu) cutscenes (since from a story perspective these are really well done, I wonder how the original handled these…).

Story is standard epic fantasy “peasant from tiny village destined to beat ancient evil” (like a weeb David Eddings novel) but executed very well; characters are likable and there are some good skits.

In the beginning the hero’s village is attacked, his mother turned into a statue and taken away. Moreover his nephew is brutally killed in front of his eyes, and his dog disintegrated. Then the hero and his party travel all across the world solving everyone’s problems and gathering the McGuffins.

At one point you get a submarine and spaceship and the world opens up completely; some of the McGuffins are well hidden but there’s also a NPC who reveals their locations.

Random encounter rate is high but combat is fun and reminded me of Kuro no Ken at times as main character gains some p. kewl looking special moves. There’s also some optional content when party gains access to ship/submarine/spaceship.

Most importantly running from combat works in 90% of cases. I must’ve avoided battles 40% of the time, game took me ~24.5 hours to finish.

Difficulty wise it’s about as challenging as any early Final Faggetry i.e. level trumps all.

Overall p. enjoyable PS game, below my top games on this platform (Suikoden/Valkyrie Profile/Legend of Dragoon) but more than good enough so I might also check out the prequel/sequel to the original game on PC-Engine (there’s an ungodly amount of allusions to the prequel story).

Spoiler

 

[Siveon]

(Suikoden/Valkyrie Profile/Legend of Dragoon)

Holy crap man this is good taste, speaking from a guy who's personal favorite is probably Legend of Dragoon.

 

[CyberWhale]

I'm sad I have to bring this up again, but why haven't some of you guys formed a team and started translating those games in English? Use Patreon or whatever to get the funding.

 

[Grauken]

Isn't it obvious, they don't need the translation and they rather do something else than invest countless hours into something of no benefit to them, also I think you seriously underestimate the time needed to do one of these translations, I've been following the romtrans scene since the whirlpool days and in some cases it has taken years to get something to a finished state

 

[newtmonkey]

It is simply not worth it. FF7 (granted, quite text heavy, but NOWHERE close to more recent games) probably has a script of something like 2 million plus characters. That is not a workload that a single person can translate in a reasonable amount of time, so you are looking at a team doing it. That means you need a project manager and an editor to make sure the translations from the multiple translators are consistent.

Large documents like this are often handled by translation agencies who use dozens of freelance translators, but have professional editors and project managers on staff. An agency would charge anywhere from 10-15 yen per character, with the freelance translators receiving anywhere from 7-10 yen per character.

Unless fans are willing to contribute 200,000 fucking dollars to translate some obscure PC9801 game, it would mean taking a nonpaid vacation and earning zero income so that 5-6 people could play some game no one knows/cares about.

Personally, I have enough of a workload that I routinely turn assignments down, so I have zero time to translate some game on a fan basis for little or no compensation, only for my translation to get picked apart by nerds cuz I didn't append SAMA and KUN to every name JUST LIKE IN THE ORIGINAL JAPANESE.

Anyone translating video games (especially for free) is doing it for the love of the genre, and I think few of these people would be willing to translate something that will likely be played for 5-6 min by half a dozen people and then forgotten.

[edit] For reference, I work at a speed of 1,000 characters/hour, which is on the high end. I translate technical documents (programming specifications, car repair manuals, CPU architecture documents) from J-E, and have a background working in this field in both English (in the US) and Japanese (in Japan of course). This is the only reason why I can translate at this speed. Translating something literary, like a game script would be MUCH slower, possible 1/2 to 1/3 as slow.

If someone were to hand me a 2 million character Japanese game script under the condition that I had to do it all by myself, I would bill as follows.

4,000 characters day @ 10 yen/character.
The bill would end up being roughly 200,000 USD and I would require 500 working days, or just over two years.
That would leave me with time to accept other work, as I couldn't simply just refuse all work from other clients for two fucking years lol.

 

[lightbane]

, only for my translation to get picked apart by nerds cuz I didn't append SAMA and KUN to every name JUST LIKE IN THE ORIGINAL JAPANESE.

Fucking weaboos fuck up everything.

But yeah, translating Japanese games is hard. Wasn't there a story of how one of the translator of these Trials of Steel or whatever almost committed suicide due overwork?

 

[CyberWhale]

The bill would end up being roughly 200,000 USD and I would require 500 working days, or just over two years.

You could find people to do the same amount of work for 10x less money in Eastern Europe. And they would consider it a good pay as well.

But yes, you have a point, it would still be too expensive. Although when you actually take into the account many that were translated for no money at all, this really shouldn't be a problem. Consistency and editors are something that you need for high-quality official translation, not something that is necessary for fan-translated hobby projects. Many parts of it could also be outsourced to students (people learning Japanese) and then simply edited by the project leader. In fact, maybe you could even charge money for such courses.

For example; Fallout 1.5 and similar other text-heavy mods were played by people even if they didn't have proper translations, let alone perfect ones. The same is true for many SNES-era JRPGs not released outside of Weaboo Land.

 

[abnaxus]

Finished 魍魎戦記MADARA 大金剛輪編 (Mōryō Senki Madara: Daikongō Rinhen) for PC98 by Kōgadō (1993).

This is a game based on manga/animu. Other games from this developer include the Cosmic Soldier, Power Dolls and Schwarzschild series.

Very popular sword and sorcery shounen series with a mixed dose of Japanese mythology and some futuristic themes. According to myth, the evil emperor Miroku will be dethroned by a young hero who's also destined to open the gateway that connects the human world to the legendary land of Agalta. When a son with tremendous powers was born to Miroku, the infant's body was cut up into eight parts to prevent the prophecy from becoming true and given to Miroku's eight evil generals for safekeeping. Then the poor baby was cast into the river but luckily was found by Tatara who gave it both its name, Madara, and artificial limbs to compensate for the missing ones. Madara grew up with a girl named Kirin and when he was 15, he was given the sword Kusanagi and told to go and get his real body parts back. Along the way, he discovers the truth about his father, his lineage and his own powers.

Rather atypical shounen fare with heavy Buddhist elements, rather stark artstyle and a kind of post-apocalyptic fantasy setting (almost like a weeb Dark Sun). A unique part of the game is making use of chakras to progress through the story.

Gameplay wise it is a mix of visual novel/adventure game and rpg. Every battle is fixed and ordained by the story. In fact combat is so scarce that it might as well be considered a full visual novel – XP is gained after battle but it serves no purpose as gaining levels is meaningless. So it’s most accurate to state this is a pseudo-rpg similar to AmbivalenZ from Alice Soft.

Overall I found this game fairly interesting, enough to play to completion (also Kirin is a splendid waifu).

(also when exactly did Final Faggetry VI release? waifu #2 Marika was basically Terra)

Spoiler

 

[Great Deceiver]

abnaxus are you Wapanese?

 

[rohand]

abnaxus, you're a machine

 

[abnaxus]

Finished London Seirei Tanteidan by Bandai (1999).

Spoiler

Like Gunblaze this is a Wapanese rpg with (steampunk) Victorian setting, which is exceedingly rare. Funnily enough both deal with the occult.

Main character is a street urchin (you get to name him yourself) who fights with slingshot and by chance joins a private investigator called Everett. He partners up with another street urchin and a posh professor’s daughter who fights with an umbrella which is hilarious (her special attacks are also p. funny). Occasionally a ghostly fellow joins as well.

Random encounters are generally not too frequent (depends on the episode) and it’s always possible to run from combat. Episodes are quite varied; some are short and straightforward while others feature elaborate mazes.

The game is divided into 19 episodes, each of which almost always deals with a separate detective case. There is however an encompassing story that is gradually introduced as the game progresses (the bad guys stay in the shadows the entire game and take over London with an army of steam soldiers near the end of the game – though the true villain, the Man of Steam, who appears shortly in the prologue goes literally Golden Throne God-Emperor at the end).

Side quests come in the form of occasional assignments for detective agency, e.g. finding someone’s diary, missing person or cat. Some of these tasks seem petty but usually tie into something bigger.

The short episodic stories are p. cleverly handled. E.g. a child disappearance case tying into a “rat catcher of Hameln flute” mystery that ultimately ties into the whistling of a malfunctioning steam machine. Some episodes are moving, like one dealing with temporarily stopping the smog so that a sickly child can see the setting sun in London for once.

The game looks, sounds and feels incredibly charming throughout. Also props to the great detail in environments. It is one of the best games you’ll likely never play; why this was not brought to the West is a completely mystery; moreover I now feel like replaying Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

Spoiler

 

[lightbane]

It's too bad it was never translated, because it looks awesome.

 

[CyberWhale]

abnaxus since you think translating those games is an impossible task, why not simply make a Youtube Let's Play channel where you play the original Japanese version while giving us an English translation/narration like many people do?

 

[mck]

abnaxus since you think translating those games is an impossible task, why not simply make a Youtube Let's Play channel where you play the original Japanese version while giving us an English translation/narration like many people do?

yeah this would be really cool. especially for games like London titgrab gaiden where there are no english let's plays of it on youtube