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Best JRPGs

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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Oct 26, 2012
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5,104
Just hit up emuparadise and look for individual games. I think Coolrom was also good before they removed Nintendo consoles.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,980
Yeah, the users might be, but the site itself is not. Important distinction for legal purposes. As mentioned, torrents are a pretty shit source for roms anyways, unless you want to grab like all the NES titles at once for some reason. Plenty of decent sites around, just google around and keep interweb shields at full power, a lot of those sites are old and poorly maintained, probably crawling with the kinds of ads that can actually fuck your computer up.
 

Taskityo

Educated
Joined
Nov 14, 2015
Messages
68
Some of these are repeats others mentioned, but here are my recommendations:

FF6 (but only PS1, GBA, or SNES versions - best if just using one of those with CRT)
FF7
Persona 3
Legend of Dragoon
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy: Tactics
Star Ocean: Till The End of Time
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
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Joined
Jan 19, 2014
Messages
13,512
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Some of these are repeats others mentioned, but here are my recommendations:

FF6 (but only PS1, GBA, or SNES versions - best if just using one of those with CRT)
FF7
Persona 3
Legend of Dragoon
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy: Tactics
Star Ocean: Till The End of Time
Stay away from the PS1 version if possible. Only play this version if you have no other way to play the game. Maybe modders will completely fix the PC version.
 

Taskityo

Educated
Joined
Nov 14, 2015
Messages
68
Stay away from the PS1 version if possible. Only play this version if you have no other way to play the game. Maybe modders will completely fix the PC version.

If ones choice is only PC or PS1. Then PS1 is miles better in that regard. I had no problems with it. Plus it has the added FMV sequences, which they took out of the iOS and PC versions, which are by far the worst versions as-is.
 
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zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
Developer
Joined
Nov 21, 2015
Messages
3,084
Location
デゼニランド
So I'm new to this sub genre. I've only played Chaos rings on the phone and Ni no Kuni demo years ago and I liked both, Ni no Kuni was very exciting.

I currently started the first final fantasy and I'm also liking it but something about walking around a world with nothing on the surface then randomly stumbling into fights or getting ambushed rubs me the wrong way.

Which JRPGs are good or should be played? Does someone have to play all the final fantasy games?
Here you go. Titles marked with (-) don't have a translation, but they're perfectly playable if you don't speak the language.

Koudelka
Devil Summoner (-)
Shin Megami Tensei 1-3
The Last Remnant
Genei Toshi - Illusion City (partial translation is available for MSX)
SMT: Strange Journey
Megami Ibunroku Persona
Persona 2 (IS/EP)
The Dark Spire
Panzer Dragoon Saga
Stargazers
Saga Frontier
Warsong
Majin Tensei series (-)
Kartia
King's Field series
Eternal Ring
Shadow Tower series
Evergrace
Forever Kingdom
Lost Kingdoms series
Hungry Ghosts (-)
Baroque (-) (SAT/PS1)
Magna Carta: Phantom of Avalanche (-)
The War of Genesis series (-)
Rhapsody of Zephyr (-)
Tempest (-)

Avoid:
Persona 3/4
Revelations: Persona
Persona titles for PSP
Baroque (PS2/Wii)
 

Siveon

Bot
Joined
Jul 13, 2013
Messages
4,509
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Damn, somebody must really like From Software. Also,
Stargazers
is...this a joke?
hoshi_start.png


Obligatory: Not many people want to play import games, especially those new to the genre.
 
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aweigh

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
17,978
Location
Florida
i actually watched an entire complete LP of king's field 4 the sunken city a few weeks ago just cos i was eating some chips
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,997
Location
Platypus Planet
So I'm new to this sub genre. I've only played Chaos rings on the phone and Ni no Kuni demo years ago and I liked both, Ni no Kuni was very exciting.

I currently started the first final fantasy and I'm also liking it but something about walking around a world with nothing on the surface then randomly stumbling into fights or getting ambushed rubs me the wrong way.

Which JRPGs are good or should be played? Does someone have to play all the final fantasy games?
Here you go. Titles marked with (-) don't have a translation, but they're perfectly playable if you don't speak the language.

Baroque (-) (SAT/PS1)

Avoid:
Baroque (PS2/Wii)

I don't understand how they could fuck up the port / remake so badly. The gameplay is whatever because it wasn't good to begin with, but the soundtrack is unforgivable.
 

Siveon

Bot
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Jul 13, 2013
Messages
4,509
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The color patch would fix the brightness thing. They did that for GBA ports before the SP came out, so it'd be easier to see. I think.

GBA might have more content too (maybe?), I'd say go for that one.
 
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aeternalis

Wordcel
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Nov 26, 2014
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the aether
GBA has more postgame content but it's banal shit boring (though not as bad as the horrible garbage they tacked onto the Chrono Trigger re-release).

Aside from that, it is probably a better experience overall. They did, inexplicably, censor one scene where an imprisoned character is beaten.
 
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aweigh

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Aug 23, 2005
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17,978
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Florida
motherfucking 100% absolutely play FF6 on snes9x emulator.

test out the new snes9x branch with xBRZ textre-scaling and see if you like it. i think x2BRZ scaling makes these snes games look awesome.

at any rate besides the option of improved texture filtering i also only recommend the snes version because believe it or not it has a better fucking translation than all of the remakes/ports that followed.

so much stuff but just one very quick example: in snes ff6 the localization team named the lead character "Terra", not because it was a literal translation of her japanese name (there actually isn't; the japanese name is basically the equivalent of a girl with a name like Sarah); they named her Terra because the first translated word of her name from the kanji produces a letter 'T', and going with that they named her Terra because thematically her character is the literal embodiment of the hopes of both the esper race who draw their energy and live literally inside the earth and her developing abilities that take her further and further away from the common world of man, i.e. "earth".

in the following re-translations they changed her translated english name to something more literal because the "fans" wanted everything to be "better translated".

they named her Tina.
 
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aweigh

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my mistake then. however my point stands: sometimes literal translations are worse. like the re-translations of ff6. the original translation team had flair and made good choices: like naming her Terra instead of Tina. there are also a lot of Kefka lines that create a more crafty/heinous character portrayal than the japanese kefka.

sign me up for never playing any game with designers banal enough to name their character Tina. i give ff6 a pass because the japs don't know shit about anything, and they had no idea how dumb a name Tina is for her character.

an original translation SOMETIMES IS INFERIOR TO A TRANSLATION MADE BY OTHERS INTO ANOTHER LANGUAGE.

translation is an art, and the o.g. team's decision to name her terra is a definite win for artistry.
 
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aeternalis

Wordcel
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in the following re-translations they changed her translated english name to something more literal because the "fans" wanted everything to be "better translated".

they named her Tina.

Sidestepping the Ted Woolsey argument here, the GBA (FF6 Advance) re-translation keeps the character names from the original English translation as well as some of the most memorable Woolseyisms while improving in other areas (partially because of removing hardcoded character limits), it's perfectly fine

I do agree that some of the fan translations were awful awful garbage.
 
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aweigh

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oasis, we are at an impasse my friend. we have entered an area in this argument that predisposes subjective preference.

translation is not the same as "literal translation".

this has been a big factor of my life because here in my native country all US movies are shown in theaters in their original english language but with spanish subtitles. We also do the same when showing a few of the US dramas in our local TV channels. reading translated subtitles is something ingrained into the mind of every single movie-watching puerto rican.

even knowing english does not mean i won't read the spanish subs when watching a movie at the cinema because i *love* paying attention to the translation that was used. is it literal? is it an actual translation that is *not* literal? for example when watching 300 there is once scene where Leonidas tells his men to scream (literally). the spanish subtitle showed the text "Rugidos", which is an older spanish word that is usually utilized to describe the roar of a lion or the like. a beastly word if you will.

the english script was literal and used the word "yell". the spanish subtitle was much more artistically elaborate and paints a fitting acumen around the scene's dialog; as leonidas and his men are indeed quite beastly. it is a better word of dialog than what was in the original english script.

in the movie pirates of the caribbean 4, which is a terrible movie, there is a scene where one character complains that the other and a third unknown benefactor are in league together and uses the english/US common-usage phrase of "thick as thieves!". in Spanish this has no translation. There is absolutely no single context in which the spanish word for thick, for which there are many, could correlate anything in relation to the closeness of a partnership while using an etymological reference of medieval banditry.

instead the spanish translators used the subtitle text, "como una y carne!", which is an old spaniard common-usage phrasing that has no english translation. a literal translation would be: "like nail and meat!". i was actually wondering to myself specifically just how exactly they would translate thick as thieves during the scene, and lo, i was NOT disappointed. in fact i learned one of the greatest lessons regarding translation i've learnt yet and i've taken it to heart: translating an artistic work (such as FF6, or even dare i say, PotC 4) can be done in many ways; the best way is to utilize all of them. That includes translating literally AND also doing what in reality is called "re-writing", but in translation is called "localization".

i do not know who Woosley is but i assume he was the head of the NoA translation team in that SNES era, but at least for me he had a definite win with FF6. Give me Terra, or give me death.

the most misunderstood aspect of the art in translation is that it is not comprised of technical knowledge but rather the best translations are those done in spirit. there is no meaning in the words.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,104
first time FF player

FF6 SNES (emulator) or GBA w/ sound/color patches?

If it matters to you SNES version's Evade stat is completely broken and doesn't do anything. I believe GBA version fixed that.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
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I really don't understand why anyone would defend "Tina" in the english translation. Yeah, that's the original name. But that name was picked for an audience to which it would sound exotic- nobody in japan is named fucking "Tina". So in translation, you would expect her english version to have a name no english person would have, not something incredibly mundane.

They did the same thing with the holy sword in Chrono Trigger- in japanese it's named the "Grand Leon". Not the japanese word for grand, they used the english word as the name. Which I'm sure sounds cool as fuck to a nip, but it sounds dorky to us. So when they translated it, they renamed it to the "Masamune". Which to a japanese person would make little sense, as it's the name of a significant historical/mythical figure. It'd be like naming the sword "Lancelot" or "Edward" or something. But for anyone who isn't a total weeaboo, you're not going to know who the fuck Masamune was, so it just sounds like an exotic and fancy name for a sword, like Excalibur. Actually, they did this same shit in FF6 as well with the "Ultima" weapon being changed to "Atma" because the former is corny sounding in english.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
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Messages
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Locke has never been a popular name in america. Edgar is indeed out of place (though still far far less common than Tina was at the time of release); however it still has a very specific connotation of wealth to it- unlike Tina, which calls to mind Tina Turner instead. Try typing in the names here and compare what pops up: http://www.famousbirthdays.com/names/tina.html

Most of the rest of the cast isn't anglophone at all either; Sabin, Gau, Cyan, Kefka, Leo, Relm, Ceres, Setzer, etc. It would have been okay if the name had been like Locke or Edgar as well, something old and associated with royalty or prestige, but Tina is a short cutesy version of Christina. It'd be like having Edgar instead named Eddie. It doesn't suit the character at all.

Origin of the name Edgar:
Derived from the Old English Eadgar, a name composed from the elements ēad (prosperity, fortune, riches) and gar (a spear): hence, "spear of prosperity."

For a king wielding a lance, this seems incredibly appropriate to me.
 

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