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

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.

It's funny!

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).

mmmmmmaybe lock's quest? Combo RPG (with JRPG elements)/desktop defense game? Same guys who did Drawn to Life and are doing scribblenauts.

and yes, shiren is dope.

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

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

i've never actually played disgaea. contemplating picking up one of the ps2 games to see what all of fuss is about

u will totally h8 it my guess

We need Tombot on this thread

hm, i should get around to trying drone tactics.

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.

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

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

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.

i was skipping through dialogue options and now in persona 4 i am two-timing my fictional videogame girlfriend. i feel kind of guilty.

I will so rep for My World, My Way. I started writing it here & then I decided to just turn it into blog fodder, the first in a long time.

u my homie

i was skipping through dialogue options and now in persona 4 i am two-timing my fictional videogame girlfriend. i feel kind of guilty.

just close the deal already

i want to play my world, my way but im stuck w/ knights in the nightmare which seems like its kind of mistaken complex 4 difficult

AGREED, i gave up fairly quickly when i started to understand how much thought and hassle organizing the weapons in that fucking game would be. I wanted it to be fun, instead it was more like learning to juggle.

need to get back to persona 3

pretty sure I post this sentiment on every jrpg thread

I am currently playing the Sonic RPG for DS. It is not good -- but at least you can be rude to the shitty friends.

just close the deal already

i thought this was what the whole 'can i see yr room' / "you spent some time with (x)" / euphemistic fade to black wz about

the whole thing in the first week of december with (spoiler) dying, i was almost upset by it and then i thought "man, i didn't even manage to max out the social link": i think this is a flaw in the mechanic

the first time i beat p3 i was mostly just upset because i still had one s.link that i hadnt even really started rip silent heroes u gave more then u took

~*EmTiOnZ*~ takin u over

oh & yeah the whole ♥ thought bubble + turn off the lights = yaaaah~ we doin it and doin it and doin it. cant remember an analogue in p4 to the aigis in p3 things which was O_ol time

Devil Survivor has some serious potential even if the story is FRIGHTENINGLY similar to World Ends w/ You (hip teens in Shibuya battle evil via technology that nobody else can see in 7 days or something)

persona 4's endgame is some seriously generic and imposed-seeming randomness, it's pretty annoying how the whole thing resolves into stock JRPG plot. n.b. i haven't bothered yet with the epilogue dungeon/boss, but seeing the plot stuff in the epilogue that leads up to it i doubt it'll help

tbh i kind of wish i'd let the gang throw wossname into the television; it would have been more of an interesting narrative that way

huh, i just saw nich maragos was the localisation ed.! i used to read him back on the GIA. grief.

I am currently playing the Sonic RPG for DS. It is not good

Indeed it isn't. Even the PS3 Sonic was more fun.

Suikoden Tierkreis is hard to get in the UK considering it came out three months ago

Course, DS being region free it costs about £3 to have one shipped from the US for $150,000 dollars or whatever

I am playing Suikoden V; fuck it

I had been warned that the first ten hours was really dull but I think I just raced through it in one sitting without noticing; I guess soon I will be at the point where I have to desperately strike a balance between not missing all the fucking missable characters and still being able to play the game without being totally glued to a guide to meet all the fucking conditions for them

i gave up on the last last boss in persona 4 and started playing "dragon quest: the journey of the cursed king" (no '8' in england.) here is a paragraph from wikipedia about it that annoys me:

"The North American version incorporated voice acting into the main characters and many of the secondary characters wherever new dialogue and cutscenes warrant. Since there was no voice acting intended in the original version, a player in North America can note that, as a character speaks, he or she may gesture his or her body for only the first few seconds. This can be compared to games such as Final Fantasy X where voice acting was intended in the original Japanese version, and characters' body sprites gesture throughout the full length of their speech. Since the game was localized in the UK, the spoken dialect is that of British English."

the first couple hours left me with way, way lower expectations than persona 4's first few hours

however at no point has it failed to satisfy my expectations

i mean, this game is basically one tweak away from bloody phantasy star in order of complexity

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.

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