Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[overture2112]

Nocturne Hardtype is busting my balls, each boss is a bigger wall than the one before it...I think I'll easily breach 100 hours played by the end of it.

Overall do you recommend it to someone who liked regular Nocturne?

 

[Puukko]

Nocturne Hardtype is busting my balls, each boss is a bigger wall than the one before it...I think I'll easily breach 100 hours played by the end of it.

Overall do you recommend it to someone who liked regular Nocturne?

I put it on hold for SMT2 but I will definitely return to it. I would recommend it for anyone looking to do a second playthrough with plenty of added challenge - I never tried the regular hard difficulty but as far as I know that just bumps up stats (and macca costs) while Hardtype actually balances things and adds flavor via new spells and unique encounters. Random encounters will screw you over more than in any other game I've played in the series and if a boss takes less than a dozen attempts then it's on the easier side. But again, I put it on hold after Daisoujou so I've only seen the early game. A buddy of mine just beat it and based on what he said, the late game bosses got stupidly hard at times.

On a related note, SMT2 meanwhile offers a different sort of difficulty that is a refreshing change of pace from the usual. It's about balancing your resources by knowing when to bring out your demons and stretching out your precious mana since if there are mana recovery items in this, I haven't come across any by about the midway point. While combat itself isn't particularly difficult by series standards, you really get minimal info regarding demon weaknesses and no info about spells until your COMP gets upgraded, so you really have to deduct a lot of the important bits yourself via combat experience. Even detailed item info is behind a paid merchant. There are so many "new" demons as well that I might as well be playing a new generation of Pokemon. Now, I am using turbo and save states to lessen the RNG impact and smooth out the dungeon crawling exoerience but I am glad I finally cracked the classic blobber ice - perhaps DOS is next as go back in years.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Finished The legend of Dragoon,fucking 46 hours man ! it's a okay Final Fantasy clone.

The story is generic and uninspired,and the game uses a lot of cliches that i already sick of(phantom ship,tree of life,festival,MC village burning,philosophical pretentious dialogues...at least the story is told well until the end of disc 3,i fucking rolled my eyes at those nonsensical plot twists.

The characters are okay.

The combat is mediocre at best,outside of the timed combos there's really nothing else to do,just pick up the strongest addittion and repeat combos until you reach the boss then use the same magic and dragoon moves over and over again.There's no character customization here ! no materia system,no espers,nothing like that.This game is very anti-grinding,random encounters gives very little EXP to grind,the battle speed also doesn't help,long ass screen transitions ! attack moves from magic and dragoon are also unnecessary long and slow ! make boss fights 20x longer than it's should be.

Soundtrack is good.

The best parts are the soundtrack and locations,the setting is generic but the locations you visit are colorful and different,the pre-rendered background gave me FF7 vibes.

Overall rating is a 7.3/10.

I would only recommend if you want a FF clone,this game is just too long for how average and generic everything is.

 

[Hyperion]

Overall rating is a 7.3/10.

You're being generous.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Terrible game remembered way too fondly by many people.

 

[Puukko]

Huh.

And here I was believing the decent amount of praise I've read.

Updated my journal...

 

[AdamReith]

I recently gave Death End Request a shot and to my surprise I find the combination of JRPG and VN stuff very enjoyable. The combat where you bounce enemies around is very fun too.

Combined with the very nice dark writing I'm very surprised more people don't talk about this. Are there any other games similar to this out there?

 

[Puukko]

SMT2 gets more obtuse as it goes on. The first third can be completed without a walkthrough with a bit of perceptiveness, but around the midway point this changes. I just completed the filler arc of finding the six pieces of Masakado. The first two are located at the end of shrines aboveground from the tunnels where I got the quest. Alright, simple enough. The next two are located in similar shrines in another area I visited earlier. Okay, though these areas kind of blend together for me and it gets difficult to remember how to access each. Then the last two are just a big middle finger, with one being sold by a STALKER in a random room in a random building you might very well have missed, and the last one is given to you by a demon you might have cured from petrification at a shrine earlier, but nothing hints at this (other than the shrine bit) and he's located in an area that's difficult to access at this point and I had to rely on video walkthroughs to remember how to get back there.

Before that bit, I wandered headlessly for a while because I had missed an encounter with an NPC in the tunnels between two areas since he was a bit off the path, and just now I had to meet the same NPC in the factory area - which has quite a lot of tunnels and he was in one building I luckily stumbled upon. He told me to go to the watchtower which turns out to be all the way back up past the tunnels, that one area that was simply locked before with nothing to indicate it was supposed to be a watchtower when I passed by it before.

Really, most of the parts where I have been stuck in this game could have been solved by giving just a bit more info.

 

[Falksi]

Just finished Tales of Zestiria, really enjoyed it.

Awkward start which took some adjusting to after playing Berseria, great creamy middle which has an excellent blend of action, drama & humour, flagged noticeably towards the end though as some of the side quests were literally just bouncing from save point to save point unnecessarily.

Despite it's characters not being quite as good as Berseria, they're still great and the banter is still very enjoyable. Combat is always a bit convoluted for my taste with these games, but you can simplify it enough so it's just button mashing fun and doesn't get in the way.

I can see why some don't like it, the flaws it does carry are pretty big flaws. But Any experienced JRPG vet used to the SNES days of gaming will brush them aside no probs.

Berseria is better, but I'd play that first then this simply due to how the timeline flows. Definitely worth the £10 I paid for it.



For those who aren't a fan of the series, I hated Vesperia and both these Tales games were really enjoyable.

 

[d1r]

Am in the middle of a playthrough of Wizardry: Forsaken Lands and it's quite a ride.

The actual dungeon crawling is really good, since most of the levels look unique, have their own little gimmicks, while some other levels are huge, randomized labyrinths, which you could compare to the Chalice Dungeon of Bloodbourne, giving you the opportunity to find better loot, or to grind more levels. Party building is fun (the usual Wizardry stuff), and I was pretty surprised that all the unique companions that you can find in the dungeon come with their own little quest, plus most of them comment about main story progression too. The actual main story is very minimalistic at the start of the game, but opens up the more you delve into the dungeon. Premise is, that there was a phenomenon called "The Flash", which destroyed most of the kingdom of Duhan, and that you, as an adventurer, feel somehow drawn to a certain dungeon / village, which lies close to this destroyed and now snow-covered rubble of a kingdom.

The 3D graphics are appropriate for a 2001 title, even though it's a little bit too desaturated and grey for my taste. The 2D character, monster, and environment artwork is absolutely fantastic though, while the music sadly is a mixed bag. Most of the town themes are very good, creating a very mysterious and melancholic atmosphere that fits the setting, while most of the dungeon and battle themes are mindnumbing bad (certainly not something I like to see in games where grinding is encouraged). Another painful aspect of the game is the actual game speed. This game is slow, painfully slow. I might be just spoiled by other, newer dungeon crawlers, but I do think that battle initializations shouldn't take six or seven god damn seconds each time you encounter an enemy group. Same goes with the movement and battle speed, that feel like as if you were playing this game only on 50% of its actually speed. And on top of all that, there are NO spells that prevent / kill low level monster encounters. Emulating this game is definitely recommended, because otherwise you unironically will take twice as long to finish it. I am playing this game with 150% of it's original speed, and sank more than 60 hours into it so far, and I don't feel like stopping anytime soon. I certainly can recommend it to anyone who is a big fan of the Wizardry series.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Is Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star inspired at all by the Phantasie series? In FF case bouncing characters & waving arms after victory makes it seem so.

 

[Garbage]

Going through SMT IV so I can finally get to IV Apocalypse.
Why do Law routes even exist? If you wanted to be wrong you'd just pick Neutral, Law is just overkill...

 

[Sigourn]

Ys Book I

Ys Book I was short (5 hours) and neat. Not exactly a great game but not a bad one either, I rate it 6/10 because even though it wasn't exactly that fun, it wasn't that unfun either compared to Resident Evil, which I rated the same (much more fun when it was fun, but much more unfun when it was unfun ). IMO this game (among others, including RE1) pushes me to think that RPG bosses are just bad compared to bosses found in other genres. I prefer to think of Ys as an action game with RPG elements, but the RPG elements in this game, much like other action RPGs of its kind (or even Dark Souls) help the player grind up levels to overcome bosses if they find them too difficult.

My few criticisms are:

• Half of the game is spent in a tower walking around hallways.
• The awful backtracking near the very end. Arguably the developers encouraging the player to level up before the big bad
  
• NPCs are not memorable at all.
• Uninspired voice acting.
  
• [QoL] NPCs may not repeat whatever quest-related information they have given you, so this is very much a "write everything down" RPG (or in my case, screenshot everything).
  
• [QoL] No subtitles, or option to replace narration with dialogue boxes.

Other than that, I liked the bosses, the combat is extremely swift and a great change of pace from turn-based JRPGs of the era like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy or Mother, there's little grinding involved and the game makes sure to let the player know what level they are supposed be as experience scales down non-linearly as you level up (so for instance an enemy may give you 30 experience in levels 31, 32 and 33, but 15 in level 34, and 5 in level 35). I don't even need to say the music is great, but the one in the tower got old pretty quickly.

Ys Book II

This is basically the second half of Ys as it plays the same, plus the addition of MAGIC!!1!. Everything I said earlier carries over to this second half, but we shall see how it turns out. For starters, there's more diversity in the environments so that's nice.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I've played 6 hours of Valkyrie Profile,i really didn't like the game.The voice acting is terrible,the combat is all over the top,the dialogue is full philosophical pretentious crap,the plataform jumping is bad...also,just like Vagrant Story this game has alot of obscure mechanics,lots of hidden menus and barely any explanation/tutorial to them.Also this game have a sort of time limit.This game also have multiple endings,C = bad ending,B = meh ending,A = true ending,i've heard it's almost impossible to get the true ending without a guide.

Also while i am not a guy who usually complains about writing,but VKP has one of the most blatantly bad character writing i've ever seen in a video game:

Spoiler

So around the beginning of the game,there's this princess who wants to take revenge on a guy who insulted her father,then out of nowhere she start acting like she loves the guy,WTF ?

I guess everything i've said is just personal opinion or nitpicking,is not a bad game but just like vagrant story there's too many things that put me off.

The setting and soundtrack is great thought,norse mythology is awesome !

Totally agree. I thought the entire game was total bollocks tbh. Some bizarre attempt to morph various types of gameplay, all resulting in just a shit game.

It's not nitpicking, it's a bad game.

Valkyrie Profile is amazing. Most games you select "hard mode" and you get a 20% bump in enemy HP and that's it.

In VP? You get a completely different set of dungeons not available on normal. The game doesn't stack the deck against you it just takes away the free levels on recruited characters, and the new dungeons have way better loot than normal. Talk about replay value. How many games have the balls to gate 50% of their content behind a difficulty slider?

The voice acting is indeed goofy but you get used to it, some of the character vignettes are amazing. Plus it has Lezard Valeth, the greatest animu stalker immortal time traveling wizard of all time.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I'll say 'Nice try.'"

 

[Puukko]

Going through SMT IV so I can finally get to IV Apocalypse.
Why do Law routes even exist? If you wanted to be wrong you'd just pick Neutral, Law is just overkill...

SMTII's law route is about setting the corrupted thousand year kingdom right, which involves rebelling against the archangels and eventually YHVH. It's considered the best route.

IV's infernal Tokyo shows the outcome of the chaos route, it's a hellscape where weak humans are literal feeding stock for the stronger humans who became demonoids. The law route results in a hostile wasteland with pockets of humanity living in even worse conditions than in post-nuclear Tokyo, until they're destined to be wiped out to make room for the next generation of humans. So at least humanity survives in the end.

The neutral route is the best one for humanity by far and also has the most content, but requires a lot of planning and sidequests to achieve.

All of this is more or less rendered moot by the revelations in IVA;

Spoiler

Lucifer and Merkabah were both created by YHVH to wage a false flag war with no victor. There's two neutral routes - ~the power of friendship~ which results in a world where YHVH will eventually resurrect, or choosing to wipe the universe clean, preventing YHVH from resurrecting in that universe (he exists in several at once, which is why the White ending in IV is the bad end, because it doesn't even get rid of him) and becoming the new Creator God with other gods returned to their primordial, intangible forms.

In most cases both Law and Chaos reps talk about ~equality~ when they are not in power which only a fool would buy - Law results in an exclusive, hierarchical theocracy (gets my vote) that is then easily corrupted to start killing off anyone except the upper echelons of power. But when that doesn't happen, you get prosperous and long-lived kingdoms like Mikado. Chaos results in demon rape orgies where survival of the fittest is turned up to 11 and the only prospering humans are those who become demons. Everything is on fire 24/7 and everyone has succumbed to their most base urges.

 

[Jasede]

I was warned about SMT 4. Should I give it a spin anyway? And is 4A a full game? Can I skip to it?

 

[d1r]

I was warned about SMT 4. Should I give it a spin anyway? And is 4A a full game? Can I skip to it?

Don't skip IV, even though the beginning of the game can be very frustrating, because your party lacks health points.

IV is, compared to 4A, the better game in every aspect, but gameplay.

 

[Puukko]

I was warned about SMT 4. Should I give it a spin anyway? And is 4A a full game? Can I skip to it?

It is worth playing even if it has its issues and it is recommended to play before IVA. Above point is more or less correct but the gameplay and everything surrounding it has been improved by such a margin that IVA sits comfortably above IV for me. The difficulty curve doesn't go flaccid, you've got a huge compendium of demons, it's visually more consistent (replaced weak sprites from IV) and the world map is not hell to traverse. IV is carried by its excellent soundtrack and atmosphere.

IVA is a funny case in that it was essentially a bunch of DLC ideas that got out of control and were turned into a full game, but it doesn't feel like that. The biggest change is the apparent shift in tone to a more shounen like presentation since you're playing as teenagers (as opposed to young adults) but that's mostly a facade as the game gets plenty gruesome.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

SMT 4 was great. Huge difficulty curve at the start, but becomes much easier once you leave the first dungeon. You just gotta earn it. Really fun game though.

 

[Miner 2049er]

The Alliance Alive HD Remaster. It's basically a more linear Saga game.

I was coming from playing Saga Scarlet Grace Ambitions and I loved its combat, art style, the world map exploration and interaction, but after 20 hours every single encounter became so damn hard, I had to try most of them several times. Not my idea of fun. I actively tried to only pick the mandatory fights, but in the end the battle rank mechanic killed the game for me.

In comes The Alliance Alive. Here I can battle my heart out without being punished. Training (=combat) is actually rewarded. While the combat of Scarlet Grace is insanely deeper, I hate level scaling and battle rank mechanics with a passion.

Like in Saga games you gain new moves randomly (?) during combat, but you also get TP (talent points) you can spend on abilities. So every encounter makes you stronger.

The Alliance Alive features a sweet world map, you're exploring with various vehicles. Mobs are visible, so you can doge them. No random encounters.
They hired the Suikoden 1+2 story writer and a Final Fantasy muisc dude. The graphics are simplistic and the characters are nowhere near as gorgeous as the ones from Scarlet Grace, but after 40 hours I can say, I had so much more fun with The Alliance Alive.

 

[d1r]

I was warned about SMT 4. Should I give it a spin anyway? And is 4A a full game? Can I skip to it?

It is worth playing even if it has its issues and it is recommended to play before IVA. Above point is more or less correct but the gameplay and everything surrounding it has been improved by such a margin that IVA sits comfortably above IV for me. The difficulty curve doesn't go flaccid, you've got a huge compendium of demons, it's visually more consistent (replaced weak sprites from IV) and the world map is not hell to traverse. IV is carried by its excellent soundtrack and atmosphere.

IVA is a funny case in that it was essentially a bunch of DLC ideas that got out of control and were turned into a full game, but it doesn't feel like that. The biggest change is the apparent shift in tone to a more shounen like presentation since you're playing as teenagers (as opposed to young adults) but that's mostly a facade as the game gets plenty gruesome.

The game keeps that facade for way too long, and completely ruins the mood, which SMT4 set up. It's sad to see how badly you can fuck up an established setting / mood by personafying your game.

 

[Falksi]

Fuckinghell, I forgot just how boring FF12 is. This is my 3rd attempt to play it through to the end (previous 2 failed around 80% & 50% in before), and it's beat me.

It's the remastered version so I was hoping the 2/4x option would help, as the game is WAY too big & MMO-like. But that still doesn't stop me from nodding off as I play.

It's weird because it has so much going for it, and in there is a good game. But it's just structured & paced so poorly, with all the MMO elements bleeding into the fun, that it can fuck off now.

 

[Viata]

I fail to see the point of playing a game that plays itself like FF12. And that fucker has such a great plot, damn. Squenix has no fucking idea of how to make good games since when Square was bought by Enix.

 

[Puukko]

Fuckinghell, I forgot just how boring FF12 is. This is my 3rd attempt to play it through to the end (previous 2 failed around 80% & 50% in before), and it's beat me.

It's the remastered version so I was hoping the 2/4x option would help, as the game is WAY too big & MMO-like. But that still doesn't stop me from nodding off as I play.

It's weird because it has so much going for it, and in there is a good game. But it's just structured & paced so poorly, with all the MMO elements bleeding into the fun, that it can fuck off now.

I HIGHLY recommend the struggle for freedom mod for difficulty. I really enjoyed my time with the game thanks to it.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

FF12 one of the few games I have actually fallen asleep while playing.

After FFX's fast battles and sphere grid, plus the great Yasumi Matsuno at the helm, I assumed it would be the greatest FF game of all time.

Yikes. So wrong. What a waste of a game. Main character is a yaoi sidekick for fangirls, main plot is baffling nonsense, no links to FF Tactics or Vagrant Story, bad guy is toothless loser, Shakespearean dialogue is painful, and combat is repetitive grind to the extreme.