JRPG General - Video games were never meant to be shorter than 50 hours.

[Ah ha']

@HexFag yes I know it was sort of a meta joke, since Look Outside just came out and the Turkish gas jockey was a reference to the Truck Pump from “Charles Barkley shut up and jam Gaiden” which was also a reference to a user names Turk Pimp on Gamingw.net which was an old Rpgmaker 2000forum I used to post on back in the day.

That is where Cboyardee and Drule and them originated from, including the artist for shutup and Jam gaiden2 and look outside. I had hoped that someone here also posted there, It was my favourite forum to post on.

 

[BradeRunna]

The Saga Frontier remaster released about 2 months ago. I guess they're having issues rolling out the physical release. I know the Lunar physical collection situation is a nightmare, I'm really surprised that it's seemingly sold out everywhere because I barely hear about it anywhere online.

I finished the Lunar 1 Remaster a bit ago and I have to say that the WD translation really grew on me. Would I have preferred a more accurate translation? Yeah sure, but what people in the 90s got wasn't bad whatsoever. I could even tell that the original translation had a sense of humor as well so it's not like a Ghost Stories situation where a relatively serious story got turned into an actual joke.

The gameplay was alright. The game wasn't extremely difficult and If I'm being honest I never used any of Alex's Dragonmaster skills, they all just seemed worse than just spamming Sword Dance ad nauseam until the fucker died. The bosses weren't that hard and as long as you had somebody as the dedicated item bitch for when the actual damage dealers run out of MP, there was never any problem whatsoever.

Also To The Horizon has been stuck in my head since I originally heard it. It's such a great overworld theme.

I'll probably wait until I finish a couple of other JRPGs before I get around to Lunar 2 but from what I've heard people seem to like it more than Lunar 1 as a whole. It's still a 7/10 game and I can see how GameArts eventually took the ideas brought from this first game and went on to make Grandia.

Yeah, I saw it on Steam last night. I want a physical copy though. I have a physical copy of the first Saga Frontier remaster I bought off Amazon. I think it was listed as imported. I bought the Final Fantasy pixel remaster from PlayAsia last year because Square Enix did this stupid shit where they only released a limited number of copies on their site for sale. Later on, I saw it on Best Buys website for sale. I was really annoyed by that. But whatever I have a physical copy of it.

I remember seeing Lunar in magazines back in the late 90's. I always wanted but I only had the ability to buy so many games. I got ROMs of them now. But I would like to play it on the Switch with a bigger screen. I pretty much buy all the remasters of the old 2D JRPG's on the Switch if I can. I'm glad they didn't do a woke translation. I heard that's a problem with some JROG's.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

I'm in the middle of Lunar 2 and just got the blonde girl. Game is definitely a lot harder than the first one thats for sure. But literally everything about it is far superior to 1. I love the blue text boxes. Translation is funny as hell. I get the purists who wish for more accurate translations but at the same time there's something fun about spicing up a script. Especially since they had no woke shit in it.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I'm chipping away at I think is Byuu's (PBUH) fan translation of Dragon Quest 3 for the Super Famicom. I feel this should have been one of the first games to be called "open world."

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Last week finished the new Phantom Brave after putting it on the back burner to play Expedition 33. It's overall alright, it's nice to have the weird battle system again after the TRPG genre turned into extremely samey. But it still suffers from modern Nisa-ism:
* All 3D models look the same rather than have models for different character sizes.
* Very basic arenas without much strategy.
* Mini bosses being spammed rather than unique enemy placements.
* No reason to use generics once you get enough named characters.
* Animations are lackluster and seemingly unskippable.
* Absolutely horrific framerate on the PS5. Not to the level it's unplayable but stuttering on PS3 level graphics is just inexcusable.
* Story levels being very uniform 5 stages each chapter, and midway through you revisit old places for character arcs.

I had fun but admit nostalgia and copium do a lot of the heavy lifting.

 

[HexFag]

Finished up Final Fantasy Tactics. Honestly a lot more fun than I thought when I was initially starting to play it and it was incredibly addictive once I got past Dorter.

I really appreciate the game getting slowly and slowly easier as time goes on due to how busted your units get. The game's difficulty went from hoping and praying that the two AI party members moved accordingly to becoming a joke as soon as Ramza had Dual Wield equipped and remembered that he could punch with both of his hands instead of just one. The mod I played for this version, The Lion War (mainly a mod that backports all of the good additions from the PSP version to the PSX version, no cheats here!), has a NG+ mode so maybe when I run out of games in my ever so long backlog, I can go back to shitstomp some of the other content with some other job combinations.

The job system in this game is probably my second favorite next to FF5's, though JP grinding is extremely fucking annoying and not fun to do whatsoever, which sucks because a lot of the fun/broken jobs are behind like multiple different levels for multiple different jobs that just aren't good at all (seriously why does a Samurai need to have a Dragoon leveled?). This especially blows because I had two Arithmeticians and they are by far the shittiest job class to have equipped. If job leveling was based on the skill being used, I could at least have a Black Mage leveling up Arithmetician Formulas while they're actually useful and not taking 15 turns to move once.

It also would've been nice if the recruitment center had units that were higher level in other jobs just to incentivise using them more but it's not the end of the world.

Also Cid. Cid is a nuclear force of nature that kicks ass and takes names while being the second best unit on my team next to Ramza. This is not a complaint whatsoever. Having a party member with the title The Thunder God and having him be a literal force of nature who kills everything in sight is the best thing ever. It's like the opposite of JRPGs where the boss joins the party just for them to be literal dead weight, it's fucking awesome.

Last week finished the new Phantom Brave after putting it on the back burner to play Expedition 33. It's overall alright, it's nice to have the weird battle system again after the TRPG genre turned into extremely samey. But it still suffers from modern Nisa-ism:
* All 3D models look the same rather than have models for different character sizes.
* Very basic arenas without much strategy.
* Mini bosses being spammed rather than unique enemy placements.
* No reason to use generics once you get enough named characters.
* Animations are lackluster and seemingly unskippable.
* Absolutely horrific framerate on the PS5. Not to the level it's unplayable but stuttering on PS3 level graphics is just inexcusable.
* Story levels being very uniform 5 stages each chapter, and midway through you revisit old places for character arcs.

I had fun but admit nostalgia and copium do a lot of the heavy lifting.

It's complete fucking insanity that NISA is so generally incompetent that they can't get a game with PS3 graphics to run poorly. I'm still looking forward to playing the original Phantom Brave though, it's been on my backlog for years.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

It's like the opposite of JRPGs where the boss joins the party just for them to be literal dead weight, it's fucking awesome

You know, i feel something similar with unlocking Magus in Chrono Trigger. Badass doesn't have dual tech but he's the most broken character besides Chrono itself.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

@HexFag

Now get into the Tactics mod extended universe with stuff like

>people who ported the PSP translation back into the PS1 game
>Laggy Fantasy Tactics, Tactics 1.3, Monster Tactics, Tactics Prime, etc
>people who hacked the PSP game to make it a better experience

Retranslations probably take out a lot of the notable lines from the original, which actually was pretty good until the last chapter.

"l i t t l e m o n e y"
"Blame yourself or God"
"Ignorance itself is a crime!"

etc

I say all this and I could never get into Tactics Ogre/Ogre Battle.

 

[ShitLurker]

Doing some threadomancy. I've officially dropped Lost Odyssey at the start of disc 4. The presentation is top notch, the OST is brilliant and the story is solid, but the moment to moment gameplay is too much of a slog and from my understanding, disc 4 is a good chunk of that. It's a real pity but I have had to force myself through most of disc 3 and I think I'm done. Saw the Majuular video to get the cliff notes of what was left of the game and I was of two minds "aw, I would have liked to have seen that directly" and "oh thank god I didn't have to play through that, it sounds like an absolute pain".

On other RPGs, I haven't touched Breath of Fire 4 in a while, combat is nice and snappy, but doing towning is on the annoying side on this one, everything feels cramped in towns.

The other one I'm playing is Terranigma which is going fine for the most part, just started chapter 3 after reviving humanity, though it seems it will be less action and more talking and I don't know how I feel about that. I'm also strapped for cash with new equipment costing double what I have, so unsure of that's expected or I'm doing something wrong.

 

[HexFag]

I finished Resonance of Fate about a week or two ago (no I didn't forget about my thread until it got bumped again, shut up) and let me tell you that game barely explains ANYTHING. The gameplay kicks ass, but is poorly explained and effectively requires you to go through the built in hour long tutorial in the Arena in order to partially get the gameplay mechanics. Once you get a hand on it though, it's a a lot of fun. It's very tactical, with you having to get ridiculously autistic about angles to form triangles properly to tri-attack to completely fuck an enemy up in order to play optimally. It also looks cool with the full party flying around doing backflips and shooting the shit out of some random goons with dual miniguns by midgame. The worldmap progression is also very cool with you having to manually unlock it yourself in order to traverse. You can also activate these terminals for extra effects (which takes an assload of grinding if you want certain areas to not be a slog to get levels and items for). I could double this paragraph's length and still not be able to fully explain all of the gameplay mechanics here, it's such a ridiculously complex game I'm legitimately bummed that they literally did nothing like this before or after. I'd kill for a sequel or something where we can see the mechanics that didn't work for this one-of-a-kind gameplay system refined (tone down the grinding, make the arena less dogshit, etc.) while adding some new things (preferably new weapons). If they did that and made the plot actually comprehensible to the average player, it'd be an all timer JRPG for sure. Unfortunately, tri-ace is prepetually broke and this game released in the west on the same day that FINAL FANTASY XIII dropped. Ouch.

The plot is all over the damn place, with major cutscenes explaining what the hell is going on either omitted entirely or in the opening cutscene of the game that you have to wait 5 minutes in the title screen to see. You genuinely get more out of the story by talking to the same random NPCs every chapter than you do out of the actual cutscenes in the game, it's insane. Honestly if you're going to play the game for the plot, just fucking read a summary it is absolutely not worth playing 30-40 hours of this game to barely kind of get an idea of what the fuck is going on. It's a video game first and a story to be told second, which I can appreciate.

What DID work for me were the party dynamics. Vashyron, Leanne, and Zephyr are an extremely amazing JRPG party with a ton of fun interactions throughout the story. While the plot you see barely has anything to do with the overarching plot of the story, it leads to a lot of fun interactions and great moments with the party. I'm a bit bummed the remaster didn't subtitle ANY of the in-fight dialogue because as soon as I switched to English to go from kind of understanding what they're saying to fully understanding what they were saying, I realized I missed out on a lot of great dialogue and banter. Nolan North also voices Vashyron and the overall dub quality is actually pretty good.

Doing some threadomancy. I've officially dropped Lost Odyssey at the start of disc 4. The presentation is top notch, the OST is brilliant and the story is solid, but the moment to moment gameplay is too much of a slog and from my understanding, disc 4 is a good chunk of that. It's a real pity but I have had to force myself through most of disc 3 and I think I'm done. Saw the Majuular video to get the cliff notes of what was left of the game and I was of two minds "aw, I would have liked to have seen that directly" and "oh thank god I didn't have to play through that, it sounds like an absolute pain".

That bums me out so much to hear. I'll still give the game a good college-try on my own but slow menus is always a bad sign for a JRPG because that's like 90% of what you do in these damn games.

 

[ShitLurker]

That bums me out so much to hear. I'll still give the game a good college-try on my own but slow menus is always a bad sign for a JRPG because that's like 90% of what you do in these damn games.

You should definitely give it a go, but it's a game that feels padded to a degree even though you can reach disc 4 in less than 30 hours. Fights are very time consuming between all of the animations and they certainly aren't the type where you smash attack and shit dies. The random encounters are not that bad, BUT when you are in the middle of a puzzle and a single random encounter can take minutes, it mines your determination. Also, menuing is pretty involved, you constantly have to be tweaking your immortals so they constantly learn things and since you can change equipment mid fight, you will constantly swap rings to maximize damage.

If you are patient all of this may be nothing for you, but it had felt like a slog for a while and I wanted to get into other things.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

@HexFag Oh god every time I try RoF it just gives me a headache. The battle system the hexagons map thing etc etc.

 

[HexFag]

@HexFag Oh god every time I try RoF it just gives me a headache. The battle system the hexagons map thing etc etc.

One of most popular (and the most useful) videos on the game is a 40 minute tutorial going over every single one of the game's mechanics and is more or less mandatory unless you are autistic and stubborn enough (like me!) to just learn from the game's built in tutorials and pick up mechanics along the way. I was still learning new things by the penultimate mission of the game. I can't imagine being a guy 15 years ago having to piece together the mechanics for this game, I'd lose my mind at some of the more esoteric ones.

 

[ShitLurker]

@HexFag Oh god every time I try RoF it just gives me a headache. The battle system the hexagons map thing etc etc.

Ok I'll bite, what is RoF?

 

[HexFag]

Ok I'll bite, what is RoF?

Resonance of Fate.

 

[Nigger Cattle]

@HexFag Oh god every time I try RoF it just gives me a headache. The battle system the hexagons map thing etc etc.

Ever tried The Last Remnant? It's from the SaGa people, i think it was originally released for the 360 but it's been ported to modern consoles (and it was on Steam, but the retards unlisted it).
I truly have a love-hate relationship with the SaGa games, after i understand the game i'm constantly thinking about going back for a new playthrough, but some games are so fucking convoluted that it makes me wonder who the fuck they make these games for. In Last Remnant you don't control party members actions, you have various parties in a "mini-army" that you give instructions as to what they should do. Like, "focus on attacking", "don't use SP", "focus on healing" etc and they just do the attacks they want to. It's the hardested JRPG i've ever played, the reliance on RNJesus is insane, and they fuck you harder than in the Romancing SaGa games.
I think in Romancing SaGa they track your overall levels and stats, in Last Remnant they track the NUMBER OF FIGHTS you've been in, so fighting a group with only 1 enemy counts the same as going in battle with a group of 20 enemies (towards your "level", or Battle Rank, as they call it). I'm really stubborn, i usually don't give up on games easily and i try to beat every game i buy, but this one i had to drop, i was angrier than when playing shit like Sekiro.
However, i can't say it's a bad game, but it's hard and there's a lot of outdated information around.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

I think I know of TLR. Is that where the infamous dinner clip comes from?

 

[HexFag]

Ever tried The Last Remnant? It's from the SaGa people, i think it was originally released for the 360 but it's been ported to modern consoles (and it was on Steam, but the retards unlisted it).
I truly have a love-hate relationship with the SaGa games, after i understand the game i'm constantly thinking about going back for a new playthrough, but some games are so fucking convoluted that it makes me wonder who the fuck they make these games for. In Last Remnant you don't control party members actions, you have various parties in a "mini-army" that you give instructions as to what they should do. Like, "focus on attacking", "don't use SP", "focus on healing" etc and they just do the attacks they want to. It's the hardested JRPG i've ever played, the reliance on RNJesus is insane, and they fuck you harder than in the Romancing SaGa games.
I think in Romancing SaGa they track your overall levels and stats, in Last Remnant they track the NUMBER OF FIGHTS you've been in, so fighting a group with only 1 enemy counts the same as going in battle with a group of 20 enemies (towards your "level", or Battle Rank, as they call it). I'm really stubborn, i usually don't give up on games easily and i try to beat every game i buy, but this one i had to drop, i was angrier than when playing shit like Sekiro.
However, i can't say it's a bad game, but it's hard and there's a lot of outdated information around.

Out of every JRPG series, the SaGa games scare the shit out of me. I was testing out Unlimited SaGa on my PS2 for shits and giggles one night and it was probably the most esoteric game I've ever played. I know it's the most complex in terms of mechanics but even when I was playing Romancing SaGa 3, I was surprised at how little they're willing to tell you as they just plop you in the world. I'm really looking forward to the day I decide to take the plunge into the series proper because I know it'll either be the most immersive gameplay experience I'll ever have playing a JRPG or it'll be absolutely miserable.

 

[Nigger Cattle]

Out of every JRPG series, the SaGa games scare the shit out of me. I was testing out Unlimited SaGa on my PS2 for shits and giggles one night and it was probably the most esoteric game I've ever played. I know it's the most complex in terms of mechanics but even when I was playing Romancing SaGa 3, I was surprised at how little they're willing to tell you as they just plop you in the world. I'm really looking forward to the day I decide to take the plunge into the series proper because I know it'll either be the most immersive gameplay experience I'll ever have playing a JRPG or it'll be absolutely miserable.

Imho the best entry-point to the series is probably the remake of Romancing Saga 2, Revenge of the Seven. They show you which arts you can still "glimmer" (unlock) with each weapon, they show you where to go for certain quest-lines, it even has a somewhat decent story (decent, not good or great because SaGa really isn't about the story, it's more about the gameplay, which i love as a turn-based combat enjoyer).
I think Unlimited SaGa is probably going to get a remake/remaster, probably they are gonna balance things out and make some QoL improvements, but the original game is not good or fun at all, imo. If you can play Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of The Seven, give it a shot. If you don't have a decent enough PC or Console, i'd recommend just playing Scarlet Grace, some quests are really obtuse but it's an approachable game. It doesn't have an open-world to explore, you basically just have a hub that shows you shops and where there's battle taking place, plus every decision you make impacts you towards the end, but the combat is REALLY fun. The remake of Romancing Saga 1 (Minstrel Song) for the PS2 is also a good game, but i'd recommend you reading a bit about it's mechanics because it's more convoluted than RS2Remake and SG.
SaGa Frontier 1 and 2 are great games as well, but they are different from the rest of the series. I mean, every game they change things up so much that you can't really think you're gonna like the next SaGa game you play just because you liked the last.

I think I know of TLR. Is that where the infamous dinner clip comes from?

I didn't finish it, so i can't confirm or deny it. lmao

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

I tried the Romancing Saga 2 demo and it felt.....complicated? I am aware this series is apparently considered some of the hardest JRPG's