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

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.

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