Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[Gastrick]

Good review, people jumped too fast on the hate bandwagon of SJ Redux but it's clear 90% of them never played it and even less played the original. SJ Redux gave me my wife Demeter so i like it.

Spoiler

NotYukiko wasn't as intrusive as people made it out to be and the voice acting was good, Meme Aleph was more tolerable this time around thanks to the protag commander skills, the Womb was a good dungeon too. My best guess is that people want to pretend to be LE EDGY OLDFAG complaining about the lack of Kaneko like it would bring down the whole package.

BEGONE HARLOT


Edit: I like Alex tho. Her story was pretty decent in New neutral.

ftfy

 

[Malamert]

Finished Children of Mana. For a Nintendo DS game, it's quite alright. A fun and charming little adventure in the world of Mana. Pretty short however, only took me 23 hours to beat and I also did quite a few random missions.
The gameplay, while nothing complex or amazing, is entertaining enough. Competent action combat in dungeons that can easily screw you over. I actually found this game to be a tad more difficult at times than the other Mana games. Enemies like to throw a lot of status ailments on you constantly and dungeons are full of spikes, destroyable objects that can debuff the player too and a lot of monster abilities can send the hero hurtling across the screen, crashing into anything and everything. Unfortunately boss fights are still a joke. With the exception of two encounters, all of them went down in no time and posed absolutely no challenge whatsoever. The final boss fight looks great, has bitchin music playing in the background and yet it can barely deal any damage and goes down in a minute or two. What a shame. Anyway, the game has some light form of randomization; basically it chooses maps at random for dungeon generation, but the problem is that there aren't enough unique maps, so in some dungeons you'll end up redoing the same map a few times if you're unlucky. Also, I didn't quite like how the game throws weapons and armor at the player left and right constantly. It's always equipment a few levels higher too, so there's always an upgrade ready and waiting in the inventory.
The game has characters in it and, yea, the art is nice and charming, but that's about it. No cute and/or funny events, no entertaining character interactions and so on. Ah, well.
Graphics are surprisingly good for a handheld game. Environments look rad, character and monster sprites are tubular enough and do their job and that's about it.
The soundtrack, overall, is quite competent and there are a few boss tracks that are the real deal. If only those boss fights lasted for more than a minute though...
There's a story present in this game. Obviously there's not much to it. Foul things are afoot in the land and you're chosen by the Sword of Mana now go set things straight.
At first I thought this would be rubbish, but it turned out to be an entertaining enough adventure and I definitely didn't expect it to be the "hardest" Mana game out of all the others I've played.

 

[Thac0]

Chimera forge becomes much less rng if you progress, you have a forge level that unlocks new active skills besides the standard strike, forge minigame becomes quite fun at some point, and you will be able to consistently craft perfect items

 

[Puukko]

After something in excess of 100 hours, I've beat the main story of Xenoblade 2. I still intend to return to it for some post game/challenge mode content, and I've still got the supposed best bits (Torna) to go, but I'll get to those later. For now...

Overall, I did enjoy the game. I'd give it a solid 8+, and it is my least a favorite of the three, and it has probably the most issues.

The majority of what I enjoy about this series is there. The combat is fun, equipping the whole party with blades and effectively switching them in battle brings lots of variety and ways to hone the party. It's a bit simplified compared to X, with more focus on the flashy special animations. Keeping the rhythm going, positioning and making good use out of the break-topple-launch-smash loop is important. However, battle feedback is much worse than it was in 1. In that game, you had a constant view of the party's hype level as well as any statuses affecting them. In 2, you just have to follow the floating status texts which tell you if you've been afflicted with break, etc. I couldn't tell you if there's any reliable visual indication for knowing when such statuses fall off, but that in combination with similarly lackluster signaling of enemy attacks (mostly their area of effect) made for combat that while fun, felt rather imprecise. This series already takes its fair share of influence from MMOs, and I think they could have taken after say, FFXIV with its clearly telegraphed attacks.

Exploration is the same it has always been. The scale is all there, though the world being broken off into several disconnected Titans does mean there isn't that feel of physicality and scope as in 1 where you traversed the bodies of giant mechs in 1:1 proportion. I also think the enemy designs aren't nearly as interesting as in X - they're largely just alien versions of real life animals with funny names, whereas they got more creative in X. That game was also unparalleled in its open world exploration that made you really feel like you were exploring an alien, hostile planet.

The soundtrack is back to 1's style and it's a real banger with surprising variety like the inclusion of Irish choirs for some town themes. Time will tell if it stays memorable though. I switched between English and JP voices and liked both for different reasons. For the longest time I thought the battle announcer was completely missing from the English dub and I don't know why. I have a fondness for Bri'ish VAs in my Nipponese RPGs and this game utilizes some rather heavy accents for some characters which does help make them more memorable. However, I will heavily criticize the localization. The majority of character and location names got changed for no particular reason. I understand why the royal fire blade was originally Kagutsuchi or why the Torna fella in stylized samurai gear was Yoshitsune and his companion Benkei. The hell kinda names are Akhos and Patroka? There was a nice historical reference there and you just removed it. It just made me want to find out what everything was called originally before it got changed.

Now, for the real turd... The story and the characters. Okay, I will be fair. It's certainly not all bad, and I was generally invested in following the story and figuring out the mysteries. But the subtlety's all gone, and there's nothing left but tropes. I say this with not the slightest hint of exaggeration: I have never consumed any piece of media that was this heavily slathered in tropes. Where Xenosaga couldn't go 5 minutes without some sort of religious reference, here that's been scaled down to a minimum and instead replaced with a particularly cliche episode of Naruto. The power of friendship, random motivational speeches about said friendship right in the middle of combat, special forms, deus ex machina, being defeated in a cutscene after supposedly beating the boss, the boss fight being interrupted by a cutscene (probably about friendship), the pope is actually evil. The list goes on. It removes the sense of mystery when you know how a cutscene is going to end before it has even started. The humor never lands and it happens at the most stupid of times, like a real tonal whiplash.

Now, there are emotional character moments that I cared about. And then there were random interjections by that furry waste of oxygen Tora that I might skip only to realize it would have lead to an actually important cutscene. What was Zeke supposed to be? An exiled prince from a destitute isolationist kingdom built on a lie. Also a complete clown at random times. This has the consistency of a wet shit porridge.

And Christ, don't get me started on these Nopon fucks. I remember ranting about them at length a couple years ago when I wrote about my experiences with the other two games here, and it's so much worse in this game. The mascots have bred like rabbits and they're about to send you on menial heh-so-funny fetch quests. No, fuck you. Malos was right, this gay earth doesn't deserve to exist.

So I immediately started the expansion, Torna. I can immediately feel the small improvements. But more on that later.

 

[newtmonkey]

With 2021 over, I've been trying out (or continuing) some games to decide what to play/finish next:

Super Mario RPG (SNES)
I've been plugging away at this one since 2020, but I get bored with it very quickly. Combat feels very slow, even against trash encounters (i.e. most encounters) and even if you do the "timed hits" correctly. The dungeons have some nice gimmicks, but the combat really drags it all down. The story and characters are goofy but likeable, but the atmosphere is nice; it feels like playing some early CG-animated movie.

Estpolis Denki II (SFC)
aka Lufia 2. Combat is snappier and graphics are better than the previous game in the series... but I'm annoyed at how ridiculously linear it is. I've grown accustomed to the "town -> cave/boss -> town, etc." structure of 16-bit JRPGs, but this one takes it to a new level. You have exactly one town and one cave in each area, then a shrine to take you to the next area. This has happened several times in a row in only 3 hours, so it's beginning to annoy me. I do like the dungeons, which are puzzle-heavy and feel more like Zelda dungeons, even though I typically don't like lots of puzzles in my RPGs.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Arc Twilight of the Spirits (PS2)
This was my first Arc the Lad game and I came with no expectations. To give a quick summary, it's a tactical RPG which follows typical genre conventions, has good presentation and contains some interesting ideas that aren't fully developed.

Regarding combat the most interesting aspect is the lack of a grid. Instead you have blue sphere (its size dependent on your MOV stat) in which you can move around and execute actions. This enables fluid movement and very minute positioning, which often comes into play when attacking multiple enemies in a line, or launching an AoE spell / special move. It feels refreshing, although it doesn't necessarily add much in terms of tactical depth.

Another interesting thing is the use of "spirit stones" as opposed to mana. Everything to do with magic or special moves consumes spirit stones and there are no potions to restore your levels during battle. The only way to acquire spirit stones is to pick them up from vanquished monsters or buy them in towns. Since you'll be using them a lot more than what you get from monsters, this serves as a constant money sink. Another aspect of the economy is that you never get items after the battle, but must expend a turn picking up whatever monsters drop before the battle is over. I guess some won't like this, but I much prefer it this way. This was one of the only RPGs where I never felt I had too much money even late game.

The narrative is divided in two, as you have two main characters, and you jump from one party to the other in each successive chapter. The first protagonist, Kharg, is a typical JRPG hero, young, brave, handsome and patriotic. He's coming of age and he's ready to save his small country from the deimos menace. Deimos are basically demons, sentient humanoid beasts of various races, who are violent and cruel. They struggle with humans for control of the planet, but like the humans they are quarreling and leaderless, a significant element of the story.

The second protagonst is Darc, a human-deimos mischling despised by everyone. He starts out as a slave running errands for his deimos mistress, but gradually realizes he has a greater destiny awaiting him. It turns out that the two main characters are actually twin brothers separated at birth, which is not a spoiler as I read it on the back cover of my PS2 copy. Of the two stories, I found Darc's more interesting as he sees greater character development and his non-human companions are more varied.

The main story itself is nothing special--something about crystals and the end of the world. There were times I'd preferred to play just with Darc, as constantly switching between parties just as things were getting interesting is a bit anti-climatic. Still, they deserve some praise for trying something new.

The game is not very challenging, apart from the arena battles, which are quite grindy. Each scenario contains two arenas with 3 tournaments each, consisting of 5, 15 and 30 battles you must win in succession (you can heal in between them, providing you've stored enough spirit stones and items). These battles are randomly selected from a template, so you'll fight many identical ones. You can either use one or two characters, sometimes with no magic / special moves allowed, which is more challenging, but also contributes to the repetitiveness. And since you have two parties to manage, you'll have to fight the all the arena tournaments twice to get the best items and the hidden companions. I ended up doing this only for Darc, but I wouldn't recommend even that for a casual playthrough. BTW, you can't use the hidden companions in story battles, only map encounters. Lame.

Like I said in the beginning, the game has good presentation. In this game, that means nice art direction, good music and the characteristic JRPG charm that most of the good games have. The characters are simple and earnest. They can be humorous without being annoying. The English voice acting is horrendous, although thankfully there isn't much of it. They reserved it for the more dramatic scenes, which will make you burst out laughing at the worst moments. I found out too late that you can enable the original Japanese by pressing R1 + R2 + R3 while in the options menu. Why hide it behind a cheat? Oh well...

 

[dacencora]

Been playing Tales of Arise after I picked it up during the Steam sale. I see why it’s so highly praised. It’s my first “Tales of” game, so keep that in mind. The graphics are excellent, the music is really nice, and I quite like the cast. The combat took some getting used to, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit. I am going out of my way to initiate combat encounters, which is something that happens rarely for me. I also think that going on the different paths and finding treasure chests and stuff is done well here and feels fun and rewarding. I love the SaGa-esque skill unlocking, that feels especially rewarding. The story elements are sometimes especially wordy, so if you’re not down for VN elements, you might want to look elsewhere. They also do the “tutorial in character dialogue” a lot, so that can be a little annoying. I think my biggest gripe with the game is that the dialogue animation is particularly wooden. This is one area that a lot of modern JRPGs struggle with, I find. It probably has a lot to do with localization. It would be tough to correctly set the mouth to each localized language. Still, it’s distracting. I prefer Persona 4G/Devil Survivor/SMT IV/Three Houses where they use high-quality 2D portraits of varying poses in the dialogue. It’s a superior experience in my opinion.

Overall, I find it very enjoyable. It does lean on some generic stuff, so if that bothers you, this might not be your cup of tea.

 

[spekkio]

I'm playing DeSu 2 - Record Breaker.

Same as with DeSu 1, I'm also dumping some textures (mostly characters to make avatars later).

I remember lightbane bitching about the story, and I'm not sure what was he talking about. After all, the decission process in Atlus during development looked probably like this:

 

[KDcross]

DeSu 2 is pretty fun but also the beginning of Persona/Social Link bs in mainline SMT. First DeSu was pretty cringe, but had a nice mysterious atmosphere and “time’s running out” vibe. The pre-apoc lockdown setting is a nice callback to SMT 1. In DeSu 2 the world is ending, but the mc is too horny to realize.

 

[dacencora]

Persona 4 Golden is great and hating on it is gay and retarded.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

I'm playing DeSu 2 - Record Breaker.

Same as with DeSu 1, I'm also dumping some textures (mostly characters to make avatars later).

I remember lightbane bitching about the story, and I'm not sure what was he talking about. After all, the decission process in Atlus during development looked probably like this:

Yasuda is a God.



DESU2 is worse and less memorable than 1 but the gameplay and some character are quite enjoyable.

 

[Puukko]

Yasuda is up there with my least favorite 'bigger' video game artists. Guy's work does nothing for me.

 

[jrpglover]

The World Ends with You: Final Remix (7/10) - Finished the game. What can I say? The game as a whole is average, the combat could be excellent if it weren't for the terrible controls (I even bought a stylus on purpose to play it comfortably, but that didn't help either), the plot might have seemed very interesting to me if I were 14-16 years old... Aside from the mediocre plot and terrible controls, the gameplay in the game is generally good, different mechanics (chain of battles, difficulty that affects drops from monsters, the ability to lower the level to 1, which also affects drops from monsters, etc.), a huge number of pins (skills), food (permanently increase characteristics), clothes (characteristics), etc. The sequel (NEO: The World Ends with You) is also in my backlog. I watched a couple of gameplay videos, it looks a better than the original.

Dungeon Encounters (5/10) - Abandoned on the 30th floor. A very complex game with different interesting mechanics. A very high quality dungeon crawler, which is really fun to play. I abandoned it because I didn't like minimalism, but this is subjective.


I'm thinking now to start playing Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk.

 

[spekkio]

In DeSu 2 the world is ending, but the mc is too horny to realize.

BRO, like what are you ta...

 

[GhostCow]

Yasuda is the guy who designed the DeSu girls? If so I'm a huge fan. Airi is the hottest anime redhead I've ever seen and Makoto is hot as fuck too. Yasuda is a man who knows how to draw tits exactly the way I like them. Extremely firm and perky.

 

[Malamert]

Finished Heroes of Mana, the RTS Mana game for the Nintendo DS. I'm glad it's over, it only took 17 hours to beat.
I knew this wouldn't be that good, it's an RTS game on a handheld console, but Jesus Christ, I didn't expect the pathfinding to be this horrendous. I'll take guiding dragoons to go up ramps any day of the week over the nightmare inducing suffering that awaits in this game. This fucking pathfinding man, it's just headache inducing. If you order a unit to go somewhere and another unit cuts its path, then it's game over, it'll literally (seriously, I'm not exaggerating at all) circle the entire map to get to its destination even if it's just a couple of tiles in front of it. I had so many gatherers going to the ass end of nowhere and either starting events that would spawn mobs, getting themselves killed or just pulling giant fuck you mobs. To make it even worse your troops can't push friendly units out of the way, so if one of them is blocking the path then good night, your entire army grinds to a halt. Seriously, it's just so bad. Often times I saw units, that I never recalled giving orders to, on the opposite site of the map wondering aimlessly. But wait, there's more! You have certain units, hero units are the worst offenders here, that don't react at all when attacked by ranged units. They'll just stand there doing absolutely nothing while archers take them out. Hey, at least to balance things out you have some units that go full retard and chase the enemy to the ends of the earth. Think that's it? Fuck you, not a chance. Units can only be healed if they stand perfectly still. A bit odd, but it doesn't seem to be such an issue, right? Wrong. Good luck ordering your troops to go to a healing shrine and standing perfectly still. You'll have a good number of them that just won't stand still and will desperately attempt to reach a point occupied by another unit. Your units can't even disengage the enemy properly when ordered to. So if you want to order a unit to leg it while fighting an enemy, it will move away for a moment, then return to hit that enemy, then move away then jump around the same two tiles for a bit and FINALLY move away. It gets even worse if there's another enemy nearby as your unit will then go from attacking the enemy it's trying to run from, then attacking the other one nearby then going shuffling around between tiles a bit and if it's still alive by then, at long last retreat. It seriously felt like most battles were fought not against an opposing army, but against the pathfinding and unit AI. Now imagine no control groups and no ability to instantly move the camera to the latest event with this horrible, horrible pathfinding and AI. It's hell on earth to lead large armies on complex maps. But, to be fair, the opposing AI doesn't fare that much better either and quite a few enemy bases ended up with traffic jams that disabled and turned them into non-threats.
Almost dropped this game at mission 15. Terrible mission, simply terrible. You have to collect a certain number of resources to win. There are limited resources near your starting locations and the only other two collection points are near the enemy base and near a route frequently traveled by troops. You can't build units, the enemy base has infinite resources and if damaged will relocate to another place. If it's destroyed then another base will be deployed on the map. Still, it doesn't sound that hard, right? Doable enough, isn't it? Not with this pathfinding. Have fun babysitting retarded children that gleefully charge into abattoirs. Failed that mission so many times due to gatherers walking straight into the enemy base or taking six trillion hour long routes around the map.
Also found it rather amusing how on the first mission that introduces an enemy ship, the protagonists go out of their way to point out how eliminating enemy gatherers will eventually stop their reinforcements, but the AI has infinite resources and machine gun fires new units out of its base.
I still enjoyed the gameplay quite a bit at times. There's a somewhat decent game hidden deep beneath all those issues. If this were a PC game or at the very least on a real console then it might've been alright.
Anyway, the characters are pretty much cardboard cutouts and there's really nothing to them at all. No character building, no entertaining interactions, nothing. They don't even change expressions during cutscenes. Children of Mana, also on the DS, had characters changing expressions during conversations and events...
The graphics are pretty good for a DS game. Maps are radical, sprites are tubular and character art, despite being static, is alright. That's about it for the visuals.
It's a Mana game, so the soundtrack is decent enough.
The story isn't anything interesting. The story in all these Mana games, with the exception of Legend, is pretty much worthless anyway. Bad guys are up to no good, stop them. Anyway, this game takes place before Trials of Mana, so you'll encounter quite a few locations and characters from it and I guess that's nice. I did find the fact that you keep on fighting the same characters over and over again to be quite annoying. It's a bit amusing at first to see them return for another beating and all that, but after the third and fourth encounter with the same dude, it just gets real tiresome.
So, yea, Heroes of Mana... Fucking hell.

Oh and I didn't like how Wisp was rude towards Shade. Leave Shade alone, he's cool.

Well then, onwards to Dawn of Mana. Apparently that one isn't all that great either.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

In DeSu 2 the world is ending, but the mc is too horny to realize.

BRO, like what are you ta...

I feel like Atlus gave Yasuda too much freedom and that shit leaked out on the writers. All of these sprites are related a Medical exam scene..

Also for some reason Yasuda also made a art for that exam for the new character in Record Breaker but they never used..
hmm

Spoiler

Yasuda is down bad forever.

 

[spekkio]

I feel like Atlus gave Yasuda too much freedom and that shit leaked out on the writers

I think you may be onto something here...

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

Persona 4 Golden is great and hating on it is gay and retarded.

Persona 4 Golden is literally inferior to the ps2 original.

Doing a Maddening run on Fire Emblem Three Houses, Golden Deer route. I wonder why they didn't include this mode on release, is the only one where you have to make use of all your tool like battalions, characters unique abilities etc. I'm aslo doing it for the unique title screen and bragging rights.

 

[dacencora]

Persona 4 Golden is literally inferior to the ps2 original.

Perhaps I’m ignorant. What makes Golden inferior? Is it the inclusion of Marie? I’m curious, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone hold this opinion before.

Doing a Maddening run on Fire Emblem Three Houses, Golden Deer route. I wonder why they didn't include this mode on release, is the only one where you have to make use of all your tool like battalions, characters unique abilities etc. I'm aslo doing it for the unique title screen and bragging rights.

Maddening is great, the whole game is great. Loved it.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I found Golden too fucking easy, now that i think about it Atlus makes every game re release easier than the originals, Marie was a worse adition because you NEED to do her SL to get the true ending, fuck that shit.

 

[dacencora]

I found Golden too fucking easy, now that i think about it Atlus makes every game re release easier than the originals, Marie was a worse adition because you NEED to do her SL to get the true ending, fuck that shit.

Yeah that's definitely a fair criticism, agreed that it was easy overall. Marie and the randomized dungeons are definitely the weakest parts of P4G. The boss fights were always fun, though. And I love the soundtrack, especially for boss fights. Nocturne has a better boss fight track, but P4G's is great too.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The way you get the cards after a battle was different.

 

[Duraframe300]

I found Golden too fucking easy, now that i think about it Atlus makes every game re release easier than the originals, Marie was a worse adition because you NEED to do her SL to get the true ending, fuck that shit.

The game (and modern Persona's in general) literary have a god mode cheat as their easiest difficulty setting.

Their standards aren't that high anymore (other than post-game bosses being a grindy bitch. ).

 

[lightbane]

Same as with DeSu 1, I'm also dumping some textures (mostly characters to make avatars later).

Will you be allowed to do so? IIRC I read somewhere there was something shifty going on with Site Feedback's forum.
About that, I was wondering if I should try to update the sprite pack of Mother 3 that I used to make avatars. Should I bother, or wouldn't that be accepted to begin with since it has its own gallery already?

I remember lightbane bitching about the story, and I'm not sure what was he talking about. After all, the decission process in Atlus during development looked probably like this:

Meh, the tits are good, but I know better, and they're not on-screen enough to hide the bad writing and repetitive scenes.

n DeSu 2 the world is ending, but the mc is too horny to realize.

It's ending... So slowly you barely notice. Especially when you start working for the government that has secret underground trains everywhere. And whose leader is an edgy 15-something kid that's impossible to take seriously.
Desu 1 had a similar problem, but at least characters behaved in a somewhat-realistic way instead of being copy-pasted clichés.