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
― Lamp, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 02:20 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Lamp, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 02:33 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Nhex, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 02:36 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Lamp, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 02:48 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 03:54 (fourteen years ago) link
there was an ogre battle nes?
― recurrently posting, in an irregular series (Lamp), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 04:57 (fourteen years ago) link
nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre_Battle:_The_March_of_the_Black_Queen
― kingfish, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 06:20 (fourteen years ago) link
"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
― thomp, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 06:53 (fourteen years ago) link
that said, i refused to choose a character path in deus ex
― thomp, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 06:54 (fourteen years ago) link
the type of player that wants that experience also has a completist impulse
well, yeah, see Japanese collector pop culture
― kingfish, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 06:58 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― recurrently posting, in an irregular series (Lamp), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 07:12 (fourteen years ago) link
okay, what is jrpg standing for?
― Ant Attack.. (Ste), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 08:05 (fourteen years ago) link
Japanese rpg
― ears are wounds, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 08:32 (fourteen years ago) link
"there was an ogre battle nes?"
er, Snes; my typo.
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 13:56 (fourteen years ago) link
lol @ me itt
― recurrently posting, in an irregular series (Lamp), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 15:07 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Aieritating vowele syndroume (Will M.), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:12 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Euler, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:22 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― recurrently posting, in an irregular series (Lamp), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:32 (fourteen years ago) link
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!
― Euler, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:34 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― recurrently posting, in an irregular series (Lamp), Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:38 (fourteen years ago) link
that's rad
― Euler, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 16:47 (fourteen years ago) link
How much did you haul in?
― kingfish, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 07:59 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― EMPIRE STATE HYMEN (MPx4A), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 10:42 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― EMPIRE STATE HYMEN (MPx4A), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 10:43 (fourteen years ago) link
huh, turns out they made a shitload of suikoden games for the ps2
― thomp, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 11:22 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― ears are wounds, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 13:34 (fourteen years ago) link
My World My Way if you want to take it easyEtrian Odyssey 2 if you don't
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 13:41 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― ears are wounds, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 14:29 (fourteen years ago) link
must to avoid: fire emblem DS
― thomp, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 14:35 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― thomp, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 14:45 (fourteen years ago) link
I've already got Shiren and it is wonderful.
― ears are wounds, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 14:52 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 15:07 (fourteen years ago) link
Chrono Trigger DS is probably still the best possible DS selection.
― Aieritating vowele syndroume (Will M.), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 15:20 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Euler, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:22 (fourteen years ago) link
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?
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:25 (fourteen years ago) link
I dunno, even if it's a kiddie game I'd love to play it, it sounds great.
― Euler, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:34 (fourteen years ago) link
It's funny!
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:37 (fourteen years ago) link
Haha I have nothing against kiddie or "feminine" games - I'm a casual gamer anyway these days as I don't have as much time! I was semi-jesting cos you suggested two apparently very extreme recommendations. I would check it out, but reading reviews people seem to either love it or hate it, so I'd rather go for something a bit more "canon". I've toyed with Etrian, but like Euler thought it would be a bit too hardcore (having said that I picked up Bangaio Spirits on a whim the other day expecting it would be too difficult and I've actually really enjoyed it).
― ears are wounds, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:44 (fourteen years ago) link
mmmmmmaybe lock's quest? Combo RPG (with JRPG elements)/desktop defense game? Same guys who did Drawn to Life and are doing scribblenauts.
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 16:46 (fourteen years ago) link
and yes, shiren is dope.
this is true altho lol disgaea.
i LOVED drone tactics but its retarded and japanese and really stat-y and there were a few fun new mid tier games like lunar knights and magical starsign that i wouldnt really recommend but i enjoyed. the best still has to be the dragon quest remakes.
Is Suikoden DS good?
i think its fantastic. its pretty str8 forward and simple and i think it looks really lovely. its not very open-ended tho
― some DIED (Lamp), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 17:46 (fourteen years ago) link
i've never actually played disgaea. contemplating picking up one of the ps2 games to see what all of fuss is about
― thomp, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 18:08 (fourteen years ago) link
u will totally h8 it my guess
― margot channing tierkreis (Lamp), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 18:09 (fourteen years ago) link
We need Tombot on this thread
― kingfish, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 19:20 (fourteen years ago) link
hm, i should get around to trying drone tactics.
― (pronounced /ˈfɑrv/sklOf/tO/fewˈ/) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 19:45 (fourteen years ago) link
I liked Suikoden DS too in spite of its flaws. Of course, I got to the last boss and gave up. Warning: game is easy as pissing until the last boss where it pulls the rug out from under you, and it's a real bitch to go back to the beginning of the dungeon to properly change equipment. And you really only need one party for this so don't go thinknig you gotta pimp 20 guys ro someting as you do for other bits of the game.
― Aieritating vowele syndroume (Will M.), Wednesday, 17 June 2009 20:12 (fourteen years ago) link
so i was thinking about picking up rune factory for the ds which is harvest moon + dungeons and i was thinking about how despite the fetishism of old school rpgs theres kind of a trend towards these hybrid rpgs as well obv much more w/ non-japanese games but its there as well
also i was wondering what ppl tht of rune factory
― margot channing tierkreis (Lamp), Thursday, 18 June 2009 04:32 (fourteen years ago) link
not really sure if this qualifies as a "trend" or w/e but i mean at this point i doubt ill ever see a str8 rpg come from a western studio that isnt on some bs nostalgia trip
also also i wish class of heroes would come out for a real system
― margot channing tierkreis (Lamp), Thursday, 18 June 2009 04:34 (fourteen years ago) link
Okay, so now that we live in the next-gen console era, which system has the proper RPGs coming out for it? The only thing I can see is that it's the handhelds, either the DS or the PSP, that still have the decent release schedules. I've asked this before, and all y'all said that the major consoles all suck for RPGs.
― kingfish, Monday, 22 June 2009 07:29 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― SEX-MEN: Worst Ass (Lamp), Saturday, 4 June 2011 21:41 (twelve years ago) link
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
― thomp, Saturday, 4 June 2011 22:04 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― SEX-MEN: Worst Ass (Lamp), Saturday, 4 June 2011 22:15 (twelve years ago) link
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
― thomp, Sunday, 5 June 2011 20:04 (twelve years ago) link
No that is kind of true! I see Fry more than Laurie thpugh.
― Gravel Puzzleworth, Sunday, 5 June 2011 20:19 (twelve years ago) link
haha yeah i was going to say asian fry & asian guy standing beside fry (laurie by default)
― Alderaan Duran (Will M.), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 01:30 (twelve years ago) link
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
― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:09 (twelve years ago) link
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
― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:16 (twelve years ago) link
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
― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:21 (twelve years ago) link
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
― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:35 (twelve years ago) link
i think kieron gillen wrote a big screed somewhere about how mechanics spoilers should be afforded the same / more weight than plot spoilers.
― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:37 (twelve years ago) link
agree with that, many (most?) game plots are just flimsy cover for the development of the mechanics anyway
― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:43 (twelve years ago) link
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...
― Nhex, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 22:44 (twelve years ago) link
SUP BROS GUESS WHO BOUGHT DISGAEA 4: A PROMISE UNFORGOTTEN
― Lamp, Sunday, 11 September 2011 16:56 (twelve years ago) link
http://i52.tinypic.com/2cpt8g3.jpg
― ♪ ♫ my baby SBs all day ♫ ♪ (cozen), Sunday, 11 September 2011 17:08 (twelve years ago) link
hmmmm
― Lamp, Sunday, 11 September 2011 18:04 (twelve years ago) link
50 hours into Xenoblade nowgame just keeps on giving
― zappi, Sunday, 11 September 2011 20:59 (twelve years ago) link
http://whatculture.com/gaming/ni-no-kuni-coming-to-north-america-early-2012.php
get hype
― Lamp, Friday, 16 September 2011 20:43 (twelve years ago) link
whoa, may have to buckle down and get a ps3 for that
― original bgm, Friday, 16 September 2011 21:06 (twelve years ago) link
i have been waiting FIVE YEARS
― A Fudgesicle is a frozen, ice cream-like snack. (forksclovetofu), Saturday, 17 September 2011 00:27 (twelve years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AilUYs52DXYgo to youtube for the HD version
― that's cute, but it's WRONG (CaptainLorax), Tuesday, 20 September 2011 17:11 (twelve years ago) link
oh wait, you can do that from here
― that's cute, but it's WRONG (CaptainLorax), Tuesday, 20 September 2011 17:12 (twelve years ago) link
oh, Lamp hyped this game 4 days ago. My bad
― that's cute, but it's WRONG (CaptainLorax), Tuesday, 20 September 2011 17:15 (twelve years ago) link
75 hours on Xenoblade now don't want this to end :/this is the game FFXIII should have been
― zappi, Tuesday, 20 September 2011 17:43 (twelve years ago) link
This is an import?
― Dudley Daigle: Tugboat Captain (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 20 September 2011 18:52 (twelve years ago) link
zappi might live in Austrailia
― ilx user 'silby' (silby), Tuesday, 20 September 2011 19:05 (twelve years ago) link
yeah, can't play this on a US wii right?
― original bgm, Tuesday, 20 September 2011 19:16 (twelve years ago) link
EU, mofosif you are in US its simple to mod yr console http://gwht.wikidot.com/for-dummies
― zappi, Tuesday, 20 September 2011 19:18 (twelve years ago) link
wolf puppy@wolfpupyi wonder what fucking ridiculous treasures me and these stray dog will find in the bullshit caves and forests of the zone of alienation
― the bitcoin comic (thomp), Wednesday, 15 May 2013 10:52 (ten years ago) link
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
― the bitcoin comic (thomp), Wednesday, 15 May 2013 18:30 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ciderpress, Monday, 2 July 2018 14:46 (five years ago) link
here's the falcom post
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC & SCAfter 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 3rdEveryone 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 & 2Cold 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.
― ciderpress, Monday, 2 July 2018 15:49 (five years ago) link
on deck for the second half of the Year of JRPGs:
new games:Octopath TravelerDragon Quest XICode Vein
switch ports:Ys VIIITales of VesperiaShining Resonance RefrainThe World Ends with You
― ciderpress, Monday, 2 July 2018 16:25 (five years ago) link
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.
― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Monday, 2 July 2018 16:35 (five years ago) link
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
― ciderpress, Monday, 2 July 2018 17:10 (five years ago) link
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
― ciderpress, Monday, 2 July 2018 17:27 (five years ago) link