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

Today's random jrpg observation is from playing Suikoden IV: I always like games where you get a stronghold, to hold all your shit and/or people you pick up along the way. The thing I dig about this game is that your stronghold is your ride. Instead of the usual FF-style airship, you actually get a boat w/ which you need to defend tactically.

― kingfish, Monday, June 15, 2009 12:35 AM (12 hours ago)

I don't know if I should be put off by the fact that I enjoy the jrpg mechanic WAY too much. Then again, rpgs have been my favorite kind of game since playing Ultima: Exodus or Ultima V 20 years ago.

I mean, shit, I get bored with one jrpg, there's always 3 more to try, and there's like God knows how many such games for the snes/sega/GBA/etc

On a related note, on a whim I've started playing Secret of Mana, since I always wondered what the deal was with people reffing Seiken Densetsu 3 alla time.

― kingfish, Monday, June 15, 2009 12:40 AM (12 hours ago)

SoM is great for a lot of reasons, but a good portion of the magic is that it allowed 2-3 player CO-OP(!) RPG play in the SNES era which was wonderful. I always mean to play SD3, though, only touched it for maybe an hour.

― Nhex, Monday, June 15, 2009 1:08 AM (12 hours ago)

Can we have a general random jrpg observations thread? I see myself spending a lot of time on such things in the weeks to follow :|

― thomp, Monday, June 15, 2009 5:24 AM (8 hours ago)

Today's random jrpg observation is from playing Suikoden IV: I always like games where you get a stronghold, to hold all your shit and/or people you pick up along the way. The thing I dig about this game is that your stronghold is your ride. Instead of the usual FF-style airship, you actually get a boat w/ which you need to defend tactically.

TOTALLY agree w/ this, which is why the Suikoden games are pretty much the only "genre" games I still enjoy!

― Aieritating vowele syndroume (Will M.), Monday, June 15, 2009 10:09 AM (3 hours ago)

i always like that breath of fire/secret of the stars u get 2 build a town thing best it appeals to the collector impulse that most rpg fans carry in a neat way that seems vaguely productive - instead of just having a load of crap in your inventory u can watch as sprites cavort in the homes u have built them and at the ice cream shop that the dude u rescued from a bog hag now runs

also will m what are non-genre games?

Have you guys ever played Skies of Arcadia? Besides being really upbeat and having a cool climactic ship fighting element, the end game basically has one of those "go around the world and collect people to live in on your airship" large set of non-required quests.

Dark Cloud 2 also had the 'build a village' bit, sort of.

challenging opinion: if it hadnt had such terrible level design and shitty graphics tecmo's secret of the stars wouldve been on the greatest rpgs of the snes era

skies of arcadia is pretty rad but i like the games that build the town sim shit into the story gives additional avenues for quests that can prove engaging

speaking of underrated dreamcast rpgs what up record of lodoss war which was one the first games where chngs in equipment registered visually on scrn. ive always liked when games do that

By genre I meant the jRPG genre. Examples of games that are not "genre":

- Splinter Cell
- tetris

that's all I meant. stupid choice of words.

Atlus is the greatest purveyor of spreadsheetism, no doubt.

skies of arcadia seemed totally the slowest and most generic thing in the world to me

yes i know flying pirates sailing through the sky are not a mainstay of the genre (well, not as a focal point, anyway) but it was just so ... eeenh

also i hate spreadsheeting. whenever a game looks like it making it necessary (cf. vagrant story) i go straight to gamefaqs. the rest of the time i basically just ignore that aspect of things as much as i can

http://img.skitch.com/20090615-q21e1hhu4seixuyktt8p5uc5r2.jpg

Yeah, when I saw that spreadsheet I was like half "wow what a badass" and half cryingeagle.jpeg

looool im a total spreadsheet nerd wrt 2 all games btw not so secret shame i guess. part of the "problem" is that i always want to max my guyz and items and riches and magic so i need to plot and chart the mechanic of the thing. the absolute worst spreadsheet game of all time has 2 be disgaea which had about 10,000 different things to lvl and track. ugh.

skies of arcadia seemed totally the slowest and most generic thing in the world to me

h8r wot u on about

thinking about it i think the reason i like spreadsheeters is that theres a strong correlation btw that kind of stat detail and a breadth of customization that deepens a game for me and thats maybe close to necessary in a jRPG or sRPG.

like a good game will offer some type of feature - class changes, item leveling, stat leveling &c that allows u to "build" unique and interesting characters. i've always tht that good sRPGs operate almost like sports sims at least at that end of it. the problem a lot of the time for a developer in balancing that part of the game is that i think the type of player that wants that experience also has a completist impulse. so a lot of the time the developer makes the trade-offs about repetition and time rather than about making in-game choices.

i remember ogre battle SNES being on of the cruelest games because i was v. accustomed to being able to get EVERYTHING if i just worked hard enough at it - every hidden character every indispensable magic item every cut scene - and ogre battle was steadfast in making u pay for your choices. persona is pretty good at this too although they made it easier to work around things like choosing which s.links to advance or what persona to level.

Ogre Battle is an unbelievably cruel game straight up. A really appealing one but god it drove me crazy. I don't think I ever got past the 4th or 5th stage. The Karma system was absolutely ridiculous.

ogre battle was ridiculous and had the worst learning curve. u could basically fuck up your chances of getting a decent ending w/in the first three maps and there wasnt much to point out u were doing so.

I played Ogre Battle NES with four other guys in THAI, courtesy of one of my good college friends disc system. we played it for about two years. I still have no idea what the hell we were doing.

there was an ogre battle nes?

nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre_Battle:_The_March_of_the_Black_Queen

"the problem a lot of the time for a developer in balancing that part of the game is that i think the type of player that wants that experience also has a completist impulse. so a lot of the time the developer makes the trade-offs about repetition and time rather than about making in-game choices."

^^ ding ding ding

that said, i refused to choose a character path in deus ex

the type of player that wants that experience also has a completist impulse

well, yeah, see Japanese collector pop culture

yah sure i think its an acknowledged part of the genre but its also a tuff path to tread from a development standpoint. like a good game has to force a player to make choices but u cant frustrate players too much either. and so in jRPGs it seems like developers have been overly leery of shutting of too many paths or options.

something ive been thinking about is e.g. allowing the player to improve say item steal %s by maxing certain stats that have little other combat application so that theyre at a significant disadvantage in tough fights BUT for players to whom its important theres an out for just grinding randoms until u get the drop/steal u want. its a small thing but design ideas like that where the player is allowed to make choices that help w/ the collector side of a game and avoid reset/retry type of play style - idk id like to see more of that in my jRPGs.

okay, what is jrpg standing for?

Japanese rpg

"there was an ogre battle nes?"

er, Snes; my typo.

lol @ me itt

The thing with Atlus spreadsheetiness is that it never gives me a reason to actually delve into it.

Other games that get pretty spreadsheety that I end up playing make me interested before they make me get all obsessive about them. The most recent example I can think of was FFTA2; I got hooked by the pretty graphics and the interesting play mechanics. Then I got sucked into the completist "can i build every weapon so that this asshole in the store has nothing left to offer me" cycle and had a spreadsheet with all of the ingredients I needed to get and all that.

In fact there seem to be a lot of genre tropes in ALL genres that I need to be "tricked" to continue tolerating. Henry Hatsworth, for example; I'm not into piss-hard platformers BUT I love Planet Puzzle League, and for that reason I kept picking it up.

I'm still trying to figure out what you guys mean by spreadsheet games; I guess you mean games where you're "pushed" to optimize your stats? Probably I've played something like this but not known it? I just got the Suikoden for DS so maybe this is what I'm getting into.

I used to write spreadsheet games at jobs where I had a pc that could only run Lotus 123 and WordPerfect (no internet, no minesweeper, what's a boy to do?). Using scripting in 123 I simulated several simultaneous plays of (the card game) War, the computer against itself, so that I could watch them take each other on and check the statistics in the end, to see if there were some plays that led to quick victory and some that led to cycles. Yeah, it was great. I gather that's not what we're talking about here.

Using scripting in 123

@_A

I'm still trying to figure out what you guys mean by spreadsheet games; I guess you mean games where you're "pushed" to optimize your stats?

games that have complex and manipulable in-game stats, yeah. at the simplest i might say keep a spreadsheet tracking stat chng in golden sun so that i can look to see what class or combination of classes will give optimal stats. also refers to games where u have to discover combinations e.g. dq8 alchemy pots

yeah isn't the 1-2-3 thing fucked up? Imagine boring office jobs BEFORE the internet, you'd do crazy shit to get by.

ah I get it, like in Oblivion with all the potion choices or deciding when and what to level in. That's intense!

as a 2nd year ibanker i wrote a gin rummy sim in c on company time in order to facilitate winning money from my colleguages. i think i still have it actually

that's rad

How much did you haul in?

Is Suikoden DS good? I felt the urge to get one of the recent PS2 ones a few years ago but I couldn't hack the idea of there being loads of different endings and characters that I could miss by not being psychic

I think Oblivion has this right when you complete the first level and it's all telling you there is some really urgent world-affecting shit going on right now and you are the only person who can change it but tbh look at this big fucking field, just go and do whatever you want for the next two years

huh, turns out they made a shitload of suikoden games for the ps2

If I was going to get 1 stats heavy, but still relatively accessible JRPG/SRPG for my DS which one should I plump for?

This is from someone who likes the *idea* of JRPGs but has never quite got into them on console and thinks maybe that they might make more sense played in small chunks on a handheld.

My World My Way if you want to take it easy
Etrian Odyssey 2 if you don't

Ok so on the one hand you are recommending a game where you "delight in the off-the-wall journey of a spoiled princess whose selfishness fuels her ability to successfully become an adventurer" in a "light-hearted RPG with feminine appeal" (to quote the Amazon blurb), and on the other hand a game that is commonly acknowledged as one of the most hardcore old school RPG to have been released in the last few years.

I was hoping for some recommendations that were a bit more, errrr, in between those two extremes.

must to avoid: fire emblem DS

best rpg thing i have played on the DS is the fantastically titled MYSTERY DUNGEON SHIREN THE WANDERER, but this is i) a jrpg-influenced roguelike rather than straight up jrpg ii) a converted SNES game so not exactly fantastically next gen

i think the remake list for DS is probably stronger than the original titles, sadly: some final fantasies/dragon quests. disgaea, rhapsody. chrono trigger.

originals: the world ends with you (not really much of an introduction to stat-juggling tbh); final fantasy tactics A2 (haven't played, believe it may be basically the same game as fft for gba? which was fun, i guess); uh some other incomprehensible strategy games that others are more equipped to tell you about than i am

I've already got Shiren and it is wonderful.

Don't knock 'My World' till you try it; it's a fun game.
And Etrian, while hardcore, is engaging as hell... but only on the stats level.
Etrian isn't half as complex and batty as Knights in the Nightmare. There's a continuum there.

Chrono Trigger DS is probably still the best possible DS selection.

On the recommendation of this thread I bought Chrono Trigger, The World Ends With You, Suikoden Tierkreis, and Dragon Quest V, but I'm not letting myself begin them until this weekend when I leave my 360 behind for a year+. I was intrigued by Etrian but it looks a little hardcore for me at this point.

I might get My World My Way for my eight-year-old daughter though, who's never played an rpg but has a DS and loves fantasy novels. And I'll probably end up playing it too lol.

shit not this thread, the DS thread, but I meant ILG

Can someone back me up on the notion that 'My World' is not a kiddie game?

I dunno, even if it's a kiddie game I'd love to play it, it sounds great.

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...

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