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

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...

SUP BROS GUESS WHO BOUGHT DISGAEA 4: A PROMISE UNFORGOTTEN

http://i52.tinypic.com/2cpt8g3.jpg

hmmmm

50 hours into Xenoblade now
game just keeps on giving

http://whatculture.com/gaming/ni-no-kuni-coming-to-north-america-early-2012.php

get hype

whoa, may have to buckle down and get a ps3 for that

i have been waiting FIVE YEARS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AilUYs52DXY
go to youtube for the HD version

oh wait, you can do that from here

oh, Lamp hyped this game 4 days ago. My bad

75 hours on Xenoblade now
don't want this to end :/
this is the game FFXIII should have been

This is an import?

zappi might live in Austrailia

yeah, can't play this on a US wii right?

EU, mofos
if you are in US its simple to mod yr console http://gwht.wikidot.com/for-dummies

wolf puppy
‏@wolfpupy
i wonder what fucking ridiculous treasures me and these stray dog will find in the bullshit caves and forests of the zone of alienation

kind of disappointed to realise 'dragon quarter' isn't a phrase on the pattern of e.g. 'french quarter', but some bullshit about people being one-quarter dragon

gonna revive this thread for a mid year status report on my Year of JRPGs

Mother 3 - played with the fan translation which is quite good. this is more graceful and funnier than Earthbound and the gameplay holds up a bit better too, though I've never been a huge fan of the Turn Based But Not Quite mechanics like rolling health here or active time battle in FF.

Tales of Berseria - this series's reputation as b-list trashy anime RPGs is probably deserved but I thought this one was a legitimately great game in spite of it. if you buy into Velvet as a protagonist the game repays your faith with some really memorable storytelling. it's still the standard Tales formula of theatrical character writing, mashy action combat, and bland world design, but it feels better here than usual. I haven't played Vesperia which is the other Tales game that gets talked up more than usual, but definitely will when the remaster comes out.

Ni No Kuni 2 - the first 10-15 hours of this are fun and then you're halfway through but have seen everything it has to offer. I wanted to like it but ended up not finishing it. combat is basically a variant of Tales combat but lighter. Visually it's a really nice game and the Ghibli style animation tech looks amazing but you spend half the game on the overworld map and in the city building mode which toss it aside in favor of 3d chibi models - pretty inexplicable.

Final Fantasy 4 - I didn't play the whole thing, just the first 6 hours or so as a palette cleanser. nice reminder of how far we've come, this feels like a prototype of the genre.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle - I only played this because it came out on Switch during a game drought but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected despite the Switch version being pretty rough performance wise. The core concept of this series is that they're turn based JRPGs but your protagonist is a teenage girl who sucks at fighting and is instead an alchemist, which means you craft large amounts of bombs and potions and those sorts of consumables that in other RPGs get given out sparingly but here they're your primary method of fighting. it's a pretty unique formula and the crafting system gets very deep and puzzley and satisfying. in terms of tone and story it's basically a JRPG sitcom.

here's the falcom post

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC & SC
After playing all 5 of the localized Trails games i can report that this is a rabbit hole worth going down if you like slower paced, dialogue heavy RPGs. The first Sky game in particular is a really slow burner, you get a good 10 or 20 hours of cozy world building before the plot really starts to accelerate. Sky SC has the opposite issue where it gets into the story quickly but goes on a bit too long for a game that runs back the same world and characters. The Trails combat system is a very solid turn based system with the classic setup of character specific skills and customizable magic loadouts, though the Sky games juice the magic side of things a little too hard which makes some of the characters significantly less useful. Overall it's a great experience despite all this though, the writing and world building is excellent throughout and the PC version adds a much needed turbo button so that you can fast forward through long combat animations as well as the many cutscenes of airships slowly taking off and landing.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
Everyone from the first 2 games comes in for a big party abstracted dungeon crawler. I didn't think I was going to like this once I realized what it was but it won me over in the end and I think it's probably the best of the Sky trilogy now despite being more of an afterword than a full continuation of the story. you get some nice backstory for characters that weren't as well fleshed out in the initial games, and there's one really likeable newcomer.

Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2
Cold Steel 1 adds Persona style school life to the Trails formula which not only works but also fixes a lot of the pacing issues that the other games have. the vibe is more like anime Harry Potter than Persona though since all the kids are awkward dorks. It also features an evolution of the Trails combat system which has some new mechanics but more importantly shifts more power into the character specific skills which makes the characters all feel more distinct and useful than in the Sky games. This is my favorite of the 5 games and is a fine entry point if the Persona/Harry Potter setup sounds more appealing than the slow road trip adventure of the first Sky game. Cold Steel 2 isnt quite as strong but its still the same gameplay and is the second half of the story arc.

on deck for the second half of the Year of JRPGs:

new games:
Octopath Traveler
Dragon Quest XI
Code Vein

switch ports:
Ys VIII
Tales of Vesperia
Shining Resonance Refrain
The World Ends with You

interested in your takes on Trails series. I played thru TitS 1 and thought it was too slow a burn, the battle system only got interesting in the final dungeon and the story was not worth the huge amount of words spent on it. Started the second one but after 3-4 hours of walking around the same areas with the battle system reset to boring again I'd had enough. This was all on PSP though, the turbo button on PC makes the chances of returning to the series more likely - the fast forward in FFXII reissue made a decent game imo. was put off by the school animeness of Cold Steel, but it's coming to PS4 I think? will probably pick it up at some point.

yeah idk how much you'll like cold steel if you're put off by the anime high school stuff, hanging out at the school and following all the little storylines going on there is part of the appeal, but I definitely think the combat is improved. PS4 versions of 1&2 are unfortunately jp only until Falcom stops dragging their feet on licensing out 3&4 for translation

on another Trails front, there's a fan translation project going for Trails of Zero/Azure which came out between Sky and Cold Steel and got passed over for official localization but seem to be very well liked by the people who have played them (and its story merges with cold steel at the end of CS2 which was a bit jarring when some new characters showed up in the epilogue as if I was supposed to know them already). They're apparently getting close to done with the first game.

man this series is a mess, I really enjoy it