The catch-all JRPG thread : "Y'know, this game is not anime or spreadsheet-y enough"

dq8 is dooooooooope, stick w/it

u shd try rogue galaxy, dark chronicle or breath of fire: dragon quarter next

yeah dq8 is great

i'm not saying it seems bad, i'm just saying it seems very much what it is

sadly i already own copies of rogue galaxy and dragon quarter. i basically got the ps2 so i could stock up on these things cheap.

lol @ "sadly" thats sum real misfortune there its tru

I called my castle "Roy"

lamp every1 else in my family responds to long periods of enforced idleness by say training for marathons or whatever

me, i have a shoebox of last-gen videogames to work through

i think some declension of the word 'sad' is called for yes : /

damn thomp every1 of your family been 2 prison???? thatz ruff declend sad all u want bro

ok so I'm finally starting on suikoden V after like a gigantus hiatus from everything due to real life things, and I got an idea - it's not limited to "J" rpgs though, but it's more like the computer rpg in general, bcz a fallout would still count - there's a sandbox quality to RPGs that isn't present in most games, because frankly there's little to no twitch requirement. The expert level of playing one of these gets into how you want to spend your time, and my chosen metaphor will be small automobiles: do I want to enjoy my compact car as a easy-going fuel-sipper, that doesn't require a lot of looking after? or do I want to go j-spec, and order thousands of dollars of parts from overseas to prove a point? Or! do I want to try and figure out how to get the most ridiculousness for my dollar, and refit the entire machine with air filters, amplifiers, goombachargers and five foot wind handlers painted like jovian currency? No, it's still not an actual drag racer that demands huge balls and reflexes and shit. But the hell it isn't a bold statement of dedication to a cause!

I am basically the guy who buys the factory turbo and doesn't mess with it. But I think I understand the spreadsheet a little better now.

i think i agree with you but i have trouble following the car metaphor

i was just looking at some youtube video of the bit that i just finished on dq8 (the giant mole that thinks he's james brown) and the youtube comments threads were all STRATEGY and I WAS THIS LEVEL, and the guy who posted the video had a whole thing using a monster team and then getting real elaborate with what he did next, and basically like every other boss fight in the game i found this worked perfectly well: buff -> charge -> charge -> charge -> attack -> win

how is suikoden v? i really enjoyed the first one but i was never convinced there needed to be a half dozen variations on the theme

40 hours in, I like everything about Suikoden V apart from how bad it looks, how easy it is and the fact that I have to recruit an anthropomoprhic beaver called Fuwafuluwafu to complete the game properly

hey so this is prob as good a place as any to mention that for iphone/pod types this zenonia thing is pretty cool, and its $3 right now, and app its like 40 hours of gameplay

http://www.148apps.com/reviews/zenonia/

diggin it tons so far

no gphone/android for that?

it appears not

I actually think suikoden v looks quite nice. I fully expected the PS2 to be OH GOD THE PIXELS on my new gigantor teevee but no, it's actually not bad at all. in the towns I sometimes zoom in on purpose!!

i think i agree with you but i have trouble following the car metaphor

I was trying to express that while the games themselves are often extremely linear, the options they provide for different ways to solve the given problems and/or challenge yourself make them quite flexible. Some people find them too easy and make things hard on themselves, like assembling a monster team to beat the mole boss (wtf). Other people like me enjoy the travelogue aspect and are perfectly happy to spend 100+ hours watching numbers increment, as long as the scenery is pretty and the illusion of choice isn't too violently compromised.

owning a compact imported car can be very cheap and convenient or it can be very expensive and time-consuming, it's up to the customer how he wants to enjoy his product. This is as opposed to genuine sports cars, where the time sink and expense are mandatory, which I would be inclined to compare to PC-based first person shooters where the primary gameplay mode is online multiplayer.

now I want to go see if there's any economics work that's been published on comparing those two types of goods

2 fast, 2 furious

plying thru persona 3 fes again

not close to bonking mitsuru

yet

shes the 2nd to last chick u can get with

fyi other SEES chick whose name escapes me 4 LYFE

lol i wanna say asuka but i *know* thats not it

also lol if any1 else gets that ref - does cankles read this thread??

chihiro?

persona 3 soooooooo fkn good btw

like srsly

http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Games/P/Persona%203%20FES/Bulk%20Viewers/PS2/2008-03-13/44--article_blog_image.jpg

YAKURI \\

ws

WHAT

Playing Zenonia on the Iphone. It's fun so far! Not bad for $3!

Found Suidoken III for $15 used randomly at a Gamestop. I think I like this version better...

Found Suikoden Tactics for $8. Is this going to suck?

its... not great.

resonance of fate vs ffxiii

which do i buy? shld be a poll really but this is a good thread

FF for old time's sake

bizzump

Playing thru Chrono Trigger again. Kinda curious if any sprite RPGs will be shown at E3 or not.

Currently playing Radiant Historia, which is actually really great.

so i bought final fantasy iii, the DS remake. it's fun! but i've just got to the first point where the game kind of opens up a bit - the ship - and there's a vast cosmic ennui settling over me; i just want to let these little polygonal people alone to sort themselves out. i feel little compulsion to reopen the DS. i don't know if that's because of the big scheme of things -- some kind of evil is apparently taking over the world, but i'm not exactly sure how or who or what it is doing, since there is very little evidence as yet; or if it's because, i don't know, i have to wait three seconds every time a battle starts or ends, and mentally i find myself going, well, say two dozen fights per chunk of the game, and say two dozen chunks, say hey wait THAT'S A WHOLE HOUR OF MY LIFE I'M WASTING TO DO NOTHING

i mean, not that i'm wasting an hour playing the game -- i have no problem with that -- i will probably waste 25-50 hours playing the game, if it is about as long as i would expect it to be long -- but that i'm wasting an hour in which i am doing nothing at all for the privilege of wasting the other 24-49

-

also some mechanical stuff is bothering me. there's no stat or skill holdover between jobs bar HP, and no bar to joining a particular class -- so i can spend the first half of the game with someone as a white mage and then turn them into an advanced fighter class as soon as those are unlocked, and bar the HP thing they'll be as good a fighter as someone who spent the whole game a warrior. whereas if i turn that warrior into a mage they'll be a better mage (well, one with higher HP.)

also if you put everyone into the back row they all take less damage and argh that is stupid if there is only one row

this would bother me less if i hadn't just finished a dungeon where you have to be under a status effect causing yr physical attacks to do nothing, so the game requires you, basically, to make an all-magic team and put them all on the 'back' 'row'. grrrrr

there's no stat or skill holdover between jobs bar HP, and no bar to joining a particular class -- so i can spend the first half of the game with someone as a white mage and then turn them into an advanced fighter class as soon as those are unlocked, and bar the HP thing they'll be as good a fighter as someone who spent the whole game a warrior. whereas if i turn that warrior into a mage they'll be a better mage (well, one with higher HP.)

well there is transition time as bar to joining every class, as well as resetting your character's effective job level (which is typically more important than base stats in dealing damage). generally i think its frustrating that the game punishes you so much for playing around with classes - i.e. that you get 30 job levels into white mage & have a really effective healer, switch to a devout and to start you're actually worse at healing.

the hp thing feels like a wash tho since you shouldnt be spending enough turns in battles for higher HP totals to offset the cost in 'wasted' job levels for your support characters ime

i dunno about the transition time. i was looking at how the original does it -- you earn and then spend points from battles -- and that seems like a better barrier to constant respec than the transition time does, since (it seems like) every time you're required to do it you can just hang out somewhere near an inn / heal pool and just fight a half dozen easy fights

it hadn't occurred to me (from the faq i was skimming, oy) that yr white mage to devout example is a corollary to the no carry-over rule. that is also pretty annoying sounding

yeah transition time is mostly avoidable but i feel like its the games attempt to do what your talking about - classes with similar affinities require fewer 'penalty' battles than those with disparate skills - but in the end it only makes the game less strategic. like there were a couple of situations where i might have liked to switch classes before the final boss in a dungeon but either had to grind out 7 or so additional battles in order to get my stats back to normal or just power through w/ the classes i was using for the dungeon proper.

i think they replaced the point-buy system with job levels which yeah, is probably a worse system but harder for the player to fuck up.

also the producer and director kind of look like asian fry and laurie

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Hiromichi_Tanaka_and_Tomoya_Asano.jpg

hum. i think this might be relegated to insomnia and train journey coping device

No that is kind of true! I see Fry more than Laurie thpugh.

haha yeah i was going to say asian fry & asian guy standing beside fry (laurie by default)

i'm now playing four heroes of light instead, which so far has almost exactly the same plot / is probably what a remake of ffiii should have looked like

actions all come from a common stock of AP, which replenish at one per turn, two if you defend. attack takes one, spells take two; ie. the effective cost of attacking is 0, defending is -1, magic is 1. however, your job can affect this: black mages only use 1 to cast offensive magic being probably the most helpful example, also white mages only 1 to cure. also, you can set your battle actions to repeat indefinitely; you can leave this running over more than one battle. SO you can then set up 'magic enemies here are weak to / attack / cure' for your team to do and not have to i. worry about "saving" mp for bosses / ii. enter the commands for the xth time once you've figured out the most efficient thing to do in a given area

^ this means i like it

HOWEVER no one has done a hyper-nerdy analysis of the hidden numbers involved, which makes me a little twitchy. i don't even know if my job class is affecting stat gains, how can i live

ah, I was thinking of starting a thread on how that kinda stuff on the internet ruins games for me... not really the plot spoilers so much as the levelling & strategy guides

i dunno, i think there's a lack of transparency in games of this sort which bothers me a lot

-- i. manuals/ingame instructions have to be readable by your average ten-year-old and her mother
-- ii. they want to sell the official strategy guide
-- iii. they're aware that a vast internet culture exists to do your work for you

if u play one of the old d&d games like 'eye of the beholder' or 'warriors of the eternal sun' then you know that when yr fighter gains a level he gains 1d8 hit points, this seems essentially fair

when one of my characters gains a level in ff:fhol they gain ... some numbers

i think kieron gillen wrote a big screed somewhere about how mechanics spoilers should be afforded the same / more weight than plot spoilers.

agree with that, many (most?) game plots are just flimsy cover for the development of the mechanics anyway

sweeping generalisations ahoy of course...

it is? the mechanics of most RPGs don't change terribly from the opening hour... maybe I'm not understanding you guys correctly...