Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[Rean]

After having to drop Monark due to the incessant need for grinding, trying out Caligula Effect 2.
Characters thus far seem a bit annoying, will see if they get any better.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished Vanguard Bandits. Took me 12 hours to beat.

It's a PS1 SRPG with Escaflowne-esque mechs. The game is 20 missions long, and splits into two different routes at chapter 4. You can pick whether to go down the kingdom route, or the empire route. Since there are hardly any JRPGs that let you play as the empire (and JRPGs about playing as the plucky rebels going up against the empire are a dime a dozen), naturally I went the empire route.

The story is a little bit more nuanced than your average JRPG. Countries aren't inherently good or evil, but are filled with people both good and evil. You fight alongside good rebels and good imperials and fight evil rebels and evil imperials. The empire route is more about removing the warmongers rather than conquering. That being said, it still feels like a SNES era JRPG that doesn't have a very fleshed out story. The lack of a wide variety of music might play into this, as you hear the same 1 or 2 extremely upbeat themes play for almost every cutscene, even during dramatic moments such as a character death or a character being informed that they have been framed and have become a wanted fugitive.

Gameplay wise, the noteworthy feature is the fatigue mechanic. Performing an action builds up fatigue, which wears off if you end a turn with more action points than fatigue points (in other words, your fatigue goes down if you don't do much in a turn). If a unit's fatigue hits 100 points, that unit becomes dizzy and can't do anything for two turns, and they become completely vulnerable. They can't dodge or mitigate incoming attacks. Avoiding or defending against an incoming attack builds up fatigue. Bosses can be fatigued and made dizzy as well. So the meta is to launch a barrage of cheap attacks at an enemy unit to make them dizzy, and then tear into them with your heavy attacks. This tactic can also be used to prevent incoming damage, by making them dizzy before they can attack you. In the second half of the game, I was able to have up to three enemy units dizzy simultaneously, which means three enemy units that aren't attacking my guys. Which means easy kills for my weaker units so they can level up.

The hard hitting winged boss mech with a star on top of him, in front of the blue one at the bottom, has been made dizzy. My team can freely take out the other mechs unhindered by him. Two other enemy units have been dizzyed as well.

Compared to the kingdom route, which had more characters, the empire route has you play with a party of 5 (and sometimes 6) characters. With so few characters to divide the exp among, I didn't really need to ration EXP very much. They were all overleveled by the end. I'd imagine that that the Kingdom route would have been overall harder since your characters wouldn't be as relatively high level.

There is a morale mechanic where you can lift people's spirits by talking to them in between battle, but it is very undercooked. Could have been expanded in a sequel.

Overall was pretty fun for a short, 12 hour long game. A sequel could have fleshed out the game mechanics and the storytelling even more, but alas.

If you want to play the game, then I would recommend checking out this website. I found it useful for understanding the game mechanics and figuring what stuff to buy in shops and what abilities to learn. You don't really need to follow the walkthrough on how to beat each mission (except for the first empire mission, that was pretty tough).

 

[Late Bloomer]

You guys seem like you are getting picked on quite a bit by the puritans of the dex so I thought I would mention Super Bullet Break as a game worth looking into. Not a JRPG so I apologize if thats not allowed. Its a deckbuilder type game like Slay The Spire but has waifu's to collect and fight. It has been surprisingly fun so far. It feels frantic because of the sounds and music but you can take your time. The translation is rough. The story is really just filler though and I don't really see that changing as I get farther along. Anyhow, it just came out on Steam and I think consoles. Maybe it will catch some interest. I think it deserves some playtime. It has a demo if the price seems to high. I didn't play the demo though so I am not sure how indicative of the game overall it represents.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

This game's demo. It's basically a Growlanser clone combat wise, but EVERYTHING screams low budget, the hub feels empty as fuck and the story is constantly rushing in what it wants to tell, i have zero desire to go back to this. One of the female characters constantly refers to herself as a male "僕", now sometimes that happens with tomboy characters but i think they are trying to pull some FTM tranny shit with this one, gotta be cool like western games now right? They pulled a lot of shit with XB 3 that i will talk about when i finish it, but it wouldn't be weird for Square Enix pulling shit like that, they even made the main character of one of their new games a niggress.

I'm going back to XB 3 now, hope i can finish it this month. Clocked 60hs and i'm at chapter 5.

 

[deuxhero]

ぼく女 are adorable!

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

ぼく女 are adorable!

Yes, but tomboys are offensive now, they are all FTM trannies now. Snatch yours before they go extinct.

 

[Puukko]

Val the Moofia Boss thanks for the effortposting, it's always interesting to read more in depth codexian analysis on games I'm not familiar with.


I'm currently some 90-100 hours (in game timer is already completely off) into Xenoblade 3. In a word, it's well on its way to becoming my favorite in the whole franchise, though not without some caveats. I just reached chapter 5 which I believe puts me roughly in the midway point. I've been pretty thorough, doing most side quests, fighting uniques and exploring. And most importantly, playing on Hard, which seems to amount to a lot of extra gametime.

The combat and systems are an evolution of the previous games with a lot of customization options. You manage a full team of six with an additional hero character who can't be tweaked beyond their Arts, but who come with other special properties in combat. Those hero characters are your source of new classes for your main party as well. Your main party members essentially go through class after class as they are unlocked. They then unlock Arts and skills from those classes to use in other classes, essentially enabling you to build semi custom classes. Then you get interlinked (interlinked) into fancy EVA forms, which have their own skill trees.

Combat is even more positioning focused thanks to all the field effects - buff circles. It stil has that MMO feel where distance is kind of iffy and everything works off cooldowns. I really wish Monolith had also picked up on this little thing called 'telegraphing' if they were going to stick to this route. You get two set of Arts, which recover either over time or based on hits. Ideally you'll be combining Arts from both sets by firing them off at the same time for extra effectiveness, so pairing Arts with roughly equivalent cooldowns may be smart. Arts cancelling is back, at first in a limited way and eventually at full capacity. I only just unlocked cancelling for the interlinked forms, which made them feel much better to play. Their animations are long and elaborate which made them feel awkward to play before that. Those forms are pretty weak for a long while, mostly suited for soaking damage and applying some de/buffs.

Chain attacks are way more tactical than before and have quite a lot of nuance to them. You fill up the meter, initiate the hype simulator and hope the RNG doesn't fuck you over. You pick from a random assortment of three party members for a bonus effect (lowered aggro, damage buff, heals etc) and then do your regular moves, trying to hit high multipliers for extra damage and being able to reuse party members. Rinse and repeat, hopefully finishing on a neat interlinked attack. That, or stacking healers has fucked you over and the attack ends prematurely. There's a lot of stuff to learn here and there's no point in me going over it with a fine comb, you need to see it yourself.

A notable change is that only healers can resurrect now, but at no cost, and the process can be sped up by multiple healers. As a result, at least on Hard, you may find yourself stacking healers. Two is the absolute minimum, with three being a common number and some bosses calling for four. I've tried all sorts of party compositions, sometimes with four healers pocketing one tank. Difficulty is very good and unique monsters and bosses in particular can stall you for a very long time. I spent four hours on the chapter 3 boss who was two levels below me yet could end my fully healed and well buffed party in 10 seconds. My best guess is that on Hard, the game treats as being lower level than you actually are, perhaps by 3-4 levels. For a long time I couldn't beat any uniques that were near my own level. Even some grey leveled (five levels or more below you) can put up a serious fight. Which leads to a rather major issue - it is really easy to end up overleveled. This didn't happen until chapter 3 when I used bonus EXP to gain a few extra levels to access a side area. This led to more side areas and the snowball was out of control. By the time I returned to the main story every enemy was grey for a long time. I haven't spent any bonus EXP since then, so I have 9-10 levels worth in stock. Eventually the game did start scaling a bit more aggressively and I was only slightly overleveled, until I did more side content (unlocking heroes, which you of course want to do) and everything was grey again. I wish I could deduct levels from myself. I haven't used any bonus EXP food either.

A few words about the hickups along the way. The game is REALLY overbearing with its tutorials. It will explain each and every new thing ("here's how you buy at shops") and takes control away from the player constantly in the first ten or so hours. It gets rather comical when the game introduces a new thing, lets you play with it for five minutes, then yoinks it away. Here's how you change arts. Controlling a new party now? Fuck you, no changing arts for you. You WILL sit down on the campfire and you WILL craft those gems NOW. I am convinced they playtested this on actual troglodytes who needed constant handholding. Xenoblade 2 neglected to explain some key mechanics like auto attack cancelling but here they went way too far in the other direction.

Finally, the story. No spoilers here, so don't worry. The main gist of it is that you're given a destination, everybody hates your guts, and you make friends with them on the way by solving the colonies' problems. As a result the base structure has fairly predictable beats. You go here, recruit a hero, explore more, recruit someone else, end of the chapter showdown time with lots of exposition, repeat. Not a bad thing necessarily, but it does undermine the mystery somewhat when the game doesn't really throw you curveballs, at least not yet. I like the main party and the tone is very close to 1's. The characters each get their time in the spotlight. What I don't really care are the Consuls. They're depicted as comically insane psychos with no redeeming qualities. Now I am sure there will be some reveal that the real baddie stripped them of their humanity or something, but as it is they're just crazy clowns. Pretty low on the villain tier list.

Regarding the religious elements of the series, I still hold that Xenoblade 1 had the perfect balance. It kept its cards for a long time until the layers started getting peeled off and the 'conspiracy' unfolded. Later revelations gave new light and context to older events. Even then you needed to have done some outside reading to catch all of it. Xenoblade 2 did away with almost all of this which was massively disappointing. So far, 3 hasn't given any hints as to whether it will have these elements, or whether it'll be content acting as a love letter to the series. This dilution of the franchise's original identity can be seen in the art style as well. They've settled on a clean and generic anime look since 2, which gives it mainstream appeal but makes it stand out less.

Excuse the length. Won't be able to return to the game until tomorrow so had a nice gap to collect my thoughts here.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I want to finish the game but i agree with you Puukko stacking healers on the party is fucking broken, you can tickle their health and brute force the bosses that way, they should have a time limit like FF XIII. Have you gotten the hero from the nigger colony? The one with the waterfall, i think i bugged the game doing a quest for that colony before doing the hero quest, i will go there again after i finish the chapter. Xenoblade 2 is full of religious references, constant even that they took out during the localization, blame NoA for that. "Elysium" is "Rakuen" in the original text which literally means paradise, NoA re writing is fanfic tier.

 

[Puukko]

Isurd? Yeah I've got him, I get new heroes at first opportunity. I am reminded that I did in fact do some reading on 2 at the time and found out about many of the dumb localizations, that had slipped my mind. Still likely a lesser laundry list than Xenogears. Xenosaga probably made it here the least scathed but if a localizer tried changing anything in those games the story would probably collapse like a game of jenga and become completely indecipherable.

 

[v1rus]

I'm finishing Xenogears Disc 2. I enjoyed the ride greatly. I was planning on doing full Xenosaga run after a pause, then going for XB. But some of clunkiness and archaics got to me, despite my enjoyment of the game. Would you fellas say playing all three Xenosagas would be worth it?

 

[Puukko]

I'm finishing Xenogears Disc 2. I enjoyed the ride greatly. I was planning on doing full Xenosaga run after a pause, then going for XB. But some of clunkiness and archaics got to me, despite my enjoyment of the game. Would you fellas say playing all three Xenosagas would be worth it?

I have beat Xenosaga 1 which I thought was a solid if somewhat unremarkable PS2 JRPG. I decided to skip 2 and just watch the story synopsis, while 3 is still somewhere down the list but I'm not in a hurry to finish it. I'd definitely sooner recommend playing Xenoblade first.

 

[Maxie]

I've finished FF7 and let me tell you, the game very quickly becomes a horrible drag, ideally it should have got resolved in the pyramid - anything past it gets progressively more convoluted and tests your patience a tad too often. The final dungeon was no good either. At least you get to kill Sephiroth, I guess.

 

[Reality]

Chugging Through - Shiren The Wanderer : Dice of Fortune & Tower of Fate (Shiren 5) . It's kind of making me realize that Azure Dreams might be my favorite Mystery Dungeon style game after all. Overall it's fun for someone with not a lot of time on teir hands.

 

[Puukko]

Related to my complaints about easy overleveling in Xenoblade 3 above - GBATemp has a section where people post cheat codes for games. I found one that allows levels to be freely distributed at camp, which allows for deduction. Xenoblade DE already has this functionality under expert mode if memory serves right, but they decided not to include in 3 for some reason. I went and dropped my levels from 54 all the way to 45, lol.

Note that the private section requires registration.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/xenoblade-chronicles-3-010074f013262000.615986/

 

[Sentinel]

I'm playing Kingdom Hearts 2. The gameplay is much improved over 1, but there's a god damn fucking cutscene every single map change. This is the most annoying shit and already caused me to drop the game for 1 week but I came back to it and it's annoying me a lot again. What the hell were they thinking.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I need to finish Xenoblade 3 and go back to work, it's been a month.

 

[spekkio]

BROs, finished Tear Ring Saga for PS1.

yuge wall of text and pix inside

What a weird fucking game. BRO Kaga gets kicked out of Intelligent Systems, establishes a new company (Tirnanog), makes a shameless clone of FE, gets his ass sued by Nintendo... But the most funny thing is, many elements introduced in Tear Ring Saga got later copied 1:1 by Intelligent Systems in FE9 (Path of Radiance) and later games. For example, TRS introduces skills, which work in the exact same way PoR skills work, use identical icons... I'm not sure about their names, but the fan-translation team went with FE ones, so in TRS they are 100% identical to PoR skills.

What an actual fuck? Intelligent System just decided to troll Kaga and other Tirnanog guys, or what? Comedy gold anyway.

Oh yeah, the game...

Good:

• Fire Emblem from the Snes era, only with some new shit added and worse art (subjective).
• Compared to GBA emblems, can be brutally and unjustly difficult (Kaga's modus operandi).
• Actually decent plot and writing - characters' actions generally make sense, two main protagonist are fleshed-out. Both "lords" are different, but none of them is a trusting-everyone retard, like many FE protagonists.
• Holmes is one of the best "lords" in all FEs. Guy just does not fuck around. Here's his (almost entire) speech to citizens of his capital, afer his team liberated it:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A healer/dancer multiclass unit is what FE needed. And you have to "loose" one healer for some missions first, but later she will come back as a healer/dancer. Plus her quest is quite hilariously written:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  A couple missions later:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• There are no 100% good and 100% bad guys. Most members of the royal family of the "evil empire" are actually honorable and responsible dudes, who just got butt-fucked by evil cult.
• Probably the most reasonable villain in any FE evar. I mean you can really sympathize with the guy:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Liked the idea of some mages using summoning staffs. You can wait for enemy mages to summon >9000 of enemies (to gain EXP) or just deal with them ASAP (to prevent them from summoning reinforcements). Sadly, regular "sudden reinforcements form outside the map" still appear like all the time.

Bad:

• Weird difficulty spikes (sudden hard mission out of the blue).
• Game is way too long (40 missions) and wordy (like 100000 lines) for its own good. Trimming the game a little would make it much better.
• Introduces some IMO pure decline elements to the FE formula:
  
  a) Skills (which make some allies / enemies imbalanced or plain broken). I mean, check out this nigga:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The only way of dealing with him is to wait til his super-spear breaks (replenishes HP equal to damage dealt, on top of "Sol" OFC). With it, he's basically invincible.
  
  b) Two teams which have separate "plots", but you can transfer soldiers and skills between them at some points - IMO total waste of time which artificially prolongs the game - you train double number of units (~24), only to be able to use like 12 in final mission. Yawn.
  
  
• Choosing your team is way too convoluted and worse than in any FE before / later.
  
  a) There's a vertical list of fags, and certain number of them at the top of the list are the ones participating in battles. Sadly, each time you get a new fag, he or she end up at the top of the list. So if you want to move this unit to the "non participants" part, you have to manually and painfully move it there (switch with unit #2, then with unit #3, then #4 etc.). Jesus F. Christ, how could this shit go past the testing?
  
  
  
  
  
  (you can set the "red line" - limit of units - yourself, which is the only good thing about this mechanic)
  
  b) Even worse offender is the fact that you can't deploy your units manually on the map. They get placed in available slots depending on their number on units' list, so if you want to place certain unit in certain slot, you have to sort your units' list accordingly:
  
  
  
  
  
  Rince and repeat before every mission. What the fuck, Kaga-san?
  
  
• Shitty items in treasure chests. Most of the time you will get shit like Door Key or Physic even in final dungeons. There's no point of getting most of chests, while in other FEs most of them have rare and useful shit.
• You can't buy / sell multiple items in shops. You have to buy /sell every item one by one. Jebus.
• Transferring units and esp. items between teams is royal pain in the ass.
  
  
  
  
  
• Mission 26B is either broken (during development or translation), or I've messed sth up. I mean there are some invisible mages & archers in the "dark room" in the middle:
  
  
  
  
  
  And initially I thought there's some "superunit" inside, with item negatively influencing my units. But it turned out, it was sth else. Check Maruj for example. In one tile, his accuracy drops to 10%:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  But if you move him even one tile left, it suddenly goes back to 100%:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  After reaching the "dark room" I've found, that the problem wasn't caused by some "atypical" unit inside. But by fuck knows what. Haven't met with this problem in any other mission. I don't have to mention, that this mission was one of the hardest I've faced in any FE evar (sudden drops in units' accuracy).
  
  
• Gameplay is often more puzzle-like than tactical. You have to "test" the mission first, find the "solution" to beating it (survive sudden reinforcements, wait till invincible unit leaves, etc.) and execute the plan. Yawn.
  
  - Example #1: Mission 37
  
  a) There's a "Rout" mission objective, so you have to kill all enemies.
  b) But there are 15 zombie dragons in one corner, who all rush you the moment even one of your units gets in attack range of any dragon.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c) These fuckers are tough AF, only mages can deal with them, as long as they dodge most of their attacks. Getting hit like 2-3 times is KO.
  d) But wait, there's more! One of the dragons is a superunit, which can't be killed!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  OMG, what to do? Well, reach the boss (avoiding dragons), kill him. Twice:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Grab the magical sword [tm] he was guarding:
  
  
  
  
  
  And only then you can kill the dragons easily. And face the superdragon:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  - Example #2: Final mission
  
  To kill the final boss, you have to reach him first, and fast (he will kill everybody after turn #20). Which practically forces you to use Teleportation Staff, that only one unit in the game can use (3 doors block your progress, and they can only be opened from the inside).
  
  After that, you have to block infinite reinforcements with your regular fags, surround the boss with 4 "lords", and only then you will able to kill him. If you're lucky / fast enough (he can hurt your units OFC + 20 turns limit still applies):
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Tactical gaming in its prime...

Ugly:

• WAY too many characters. During the ending (which includes a "farewell" to all units) I had serious problems remembering who some of them were. I greatly prefer smaller cast of "active" units (ones that participate in the story all the time) over huge cast of "one-timers" (fags who are active in the story once or twice, and after that they are just sitting in the rooster, don't participate in the story and have no spoken lines).
• I didn't like the character art in many cases (fugly big animu eyes, not enough hot waifus, etc).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Game introduces breakable shields (incline? - in case of bosses mos def), but you have to move around the map to buy them (decline - you have to stock on them ahead).
• Even "final areas" often have only shitty items in shops. What the fuck, why should I need shit like Iron Sword near the final area?
• Animations are way too long and not as awesome as GBA ones. It was the first FE game in which I've decided to disable combat animations - in some others I was Fast-Forwarding animations, but I've never before decided to entirely disable them. Plus, even when disabled, animations for bosses still pop up:
  
  
  
  
  
• Some "regular" enemies are pure retardation, like tanks (regular brawlers can't hurt them) who can shoot 4 arrows in a row:
  
  
  
  
  
• Same with some missions, filled with 100 fags with Thief's Daggers (steal random item on hit) or Zombie Dragons (see above). Or painful shit like this:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Infinite reinforcements, most of the time with ranged weapons (so you can't simply block them from attacking mages / healers). Cheap.
• Ending slides / monologues take hours to scroll through. Somebody clearly loves extensive writing in his games...
• Evil dragon-worshipping cult? Not disso shitto agen...

Anyway, it's done!

It took me like over a month actually... If the game was like 1/3 shorter, it would've been like 50% better.

Verdict: and only if you're a FE / Kaga-san fan.

 

[Endemic]

The lawsuit was pretty dumb (trying to copyright Greek mythology lol), the lawyers probably made more money out of the whole thing than Nintendo

There were more ambitious plans for TRS during development, like being able to play as Tia/Sennet/etc from the start in different parties. Considering the relatively short development cycle and having to mesh the ex-IS people with the staff Enterbrain (Kadokawa) provided, I think the end product was okay. In any case, it paved the way for a much better follow-up in the form of Berwick Saga.

 

[spekkio]

Alright, with Tear Ring Saga finished, maybe it's time to try a game from a different genre?

Or maybe not...

Spoiler

Send help.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I tried playing Triangle Strategy on Ryujinx and Yuzu and neither did well.

 

[Puukko]

Yuzu was horribly broken last time I tried it. I'll get back to it for sure when it emulates well.

 

[spekkio]

Ryu works well so far, but only in OGL, Vulcan is broken (white screen after starting the game). Yuzu crashes right after the "new game" intro, tested both OGL & VUL.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Yuzu was horribly broken last time I tried it. I'll get back to it for sure when it emulates well.

Xenoblade 2 runs perfect on Yuzu for me. Fire Emblem was kinda slow.

 

[Puukko]

Yuzu was horribly broken last time I tried it. I'll get back to it for sure when it emulates well.

Xenoblade 2 runs perfect on Yuzu for me. Fire Emblem was kinda slow.

I meant Triangle Strategy. I've used both emulators a lot.

 

[spekkio]

BROs, started Shadow Hearts 3

Protag is decline popamole when compared to EMOBRO Yuri:

And gameplay looks much more complicated than in SH1 & 2 (materia, combos & shit):

But some things haven't changed.

a) B00ty:

b) Humor:

c) Total faggotry:

They don't make them like this anymore...