Top modern jrpgs?

[Arthandas]

I miss the times where technical limitations forced developers to be clever and creative.
Nowadays they can do whatever the hell they want but somehow all we get is mostly generic mainstream pasta.

 

[Sigourn]

To me Vagrant Story or Soul Reaver look absolutely terrible compared with PSX-era 2D. Even most PS2 3D games look worse than PSX-era 2D ones.

Ehh, I disagree. Mostly because I consider "terrible" to be "all over the place".

It's important to distinguish between "a game's aesthetic/art style" and "a game's detail when it comes to graphics".

Final Fantasy VII looked like dog shit because the detail was all over the place. On one hand you have very detailed backgrounds, and on the other you have those blocky fuckers.

On FFVI, you can see everything receives the same amount of attention. Likewise with Vagrant Story. Now...

Final Fantasy XII suffers from the same problem FFVII does, except this time it is the opposite and less evident: the character models are of a much higher quality than their surroundings, both in meshes and in textures. Anyone who has played Morrowind will surely remember how terrible the ground textures were (256x256 textures for large areas, compared to the 2048x2048 texture used for a fucking crow in Bloodmoon).

Vagrant Story simply didn't suffer from this because it had a level of detail that was fairly even across the board, but also benefited from going the "pixelated" route as opposed to the "filtered" route that makes this contrast in texture quality so obvious. I personally believe Final Fantasy XII looked great when it came to character models, it didn't need any more detail. I would have concerned myself with increasing the level of detail of environments and so on instead of emphasizing character models time and time again.

 

[CryptRat]

Most of them yes. Arx Fatalis was good. VTM:B was good. Deus Ex was good. Morrowind was good. Vagrant Story was good. Ultima Underworld was good. Gothic was decent. But most of the greats are 2D or a hybrid of 2D and 3D. Or 2.5D. I don't blame 3D though, just sellouts. Even big budget 3D games used to be good back then.

What's your top 5 platformers CryptRat ?

All the the RPGs you mention are action-RPGs, so obviously they're not exactly my favourites, which does not mean I hated them. It's been a while I played those, Morrowind has a very interesting alien world, maybe the best, but the fact the dungeons suck is annoying. VTM:B is the most awful buggy mess I've completed (obviously completed, they're games I never even managed to run), otherwise it is a decent example of how some single character RPGs can work (I highly prefer party-based ones) with how you have to approach situation differently, although I wouldn't say it's on Quest for glory/Fallout/Dark disciples level, which leaves with action phases that I don't remember being particularly interesting. Gothic I've only played the beginning of the 3rd one which I know is controversial, never finished Deus Ex and never played Arx Fatalis although ironically it may be the one I would like the most from the bunch but I really don't play many action-RPGs so there's a good chance I just never play them.

Regarding plateformers, hard to say, let's go with The lost vikings, Mario World, Rayman, Spherical and Super Meat Boy.

 

[Damned Registrations]

FF7 gets represented by that shitty scene waaaay too often. 95% of the time the game looked like this:

which is fucking amazing. I wish skyrim had that much detail on a single screen.

Saying that's what FF7 looked like is like saying VS looked like this:

 

[Ash]

Yeah FF7 looks absolutely stunning 70% of the time*, even if among that 70% there are some minor inconsistencies. Still wouldn't have hurt to have better character models though, but it's clear their 3D modellers were inexperienced, or 3D modelling tech not up to scratch at the time, or they saw it necessary to have super primitive polygonal models out of some technical reason, which they addressed with FF8.

*70% because battles + overworld + models contrasting the backgrounds.

 

[Arthandas]

Speaking of 2D vs 3D, ShitEnix's releasing today remake of Secrets of Mana which looks WORSE than the original. This is fucking hilarious.

 

[Damned Registrations]

FF7 did have much better character models, but they only got used during the battles, for obvious reasons. I suspect the simple overworld models had something to do with their ambitions in regards to how they animated them. FF7 had a lot of minigames and other one-off animations those models used. I'd expect it would have been impossible to do all that work with models as complex as the battle ones.

 

[Ash]

Yeah true, there is a shitload of animations during story segments, mini-games etc.

 

[Sigourn]

FF7 gets represented by that shitty scene waaaay too often. 95% of the time the game looked like this:

which is fucking amazing. I wish skyrim had that much detail on a single screen.

Saying that's what FF7 looked like is like saying VS looked like this:

I mean, this looks great to me. Even if you scaled it twice the size. The colors in the screenshot you posted look awful.

But any game looks great when you look at it from afar. Problem with Final Fantasy VII is that the game didn't look like that 95% of the time. That's a HUGE exaggeration. The character models always looked like shit in any picture, especially when they are in motion (and thus catch your attention). I've seen that the example you posted doesn't have a single character in it, for instance.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If it did they'd be a blip, smaller than a single pixel on nippleman's chest. And they usually were. Very, very few areas in FF7 were zoomed in enough to make out the models much at all. Like, that's just a floor of Shinra's tower. Every floor is that size, because that's the size of the tower. Now that I think of it, they're probably blocky specifically so that when they're scaled down that much you can still make out hands and feet. If they had realistic dimensions, a character hitting a button on a console from that distance wouldn't really be obvious.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Vagrant Story simply didn't suffer from this because it had a level of detail that was fairly even across the board, but also benefited from going the "pixelated" route as opposed to the "filtered" route that makes this contrast in texture quality so obvious. I personally believe Final Fantasy XII looked great when it came to character models, it didn't need any more detail.

What the hell does this mean? Do you think having pixellated textures was an option in PSX games? Do you think it had texture filtering at the hardware level?

 

[Arthandas]

Damn, I love those sprites. I could shave myself with them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Aside from it's awesome visuals, it also had a great system for simultaneous attacks during battles that sped things up a ton if you're using basic attacks. Sadly I think they dropped it in the third game. Would kill for it to have been more widely adopted instead of the retarded camera panning shit most games did when the 3D era started.

 

[Ash]

Suikoden 2 is boring!

 

[Siveon]

If it did they'd be a blip, smaller than a single pixel on nippleman's chest. And they usually were. Very, very few areas in FF7 were zoomed in enough to make out the models much at all. Like, that's just a floor of Shinra's tower. Every floor is that size, because that's the size of the tower. Now that I think of it, they're probably blocky specifically so that when they're scaled down that much you can still make out hands and feet. If they had realistic dimensions, a character hitting a button on a console from that distance wouldn't really be obvious.

Legend of Dragoon did that to an alright extent.

Although it wasn't as zoomed out most of the time.

 

[Hyperion]

Aside from it's awesome visuals, it also had a great system for simultaneous attacks during battles that sped things up a ton if you're using basic attacks. Sadly I think they dropped it in the third game. Would kill for it to have been more widely adopted instead of the retarded camera panning shit most games did when the 3D era started.

Suikoden 3 allowed for multiple actions at once, but it was usually only movement related because the camera could cause problems in some crowded fights. On occasion you could see some numbers appear in the corner of your screen while attacks happened offscreen. This happened a lot in the Flame Champion's Hideout with the low ceiling of the cave.

The biggest factors that made S3 a bit sluggish were everyone having to move (did make Area spells more fun though), slowdown during spellcasting, and characters like Augustine, Juan, and Emily who would routinely get 5+ attacks per round, and guys like Fred who not only would block 95% of attacks and spells, but would also swap places with his partner, and block for them as well.

S1 was really the only game where only 1 action could take place at any given time.

 

[Deflowerer]

Also ePSXe is outdated piece of garbage emulator and most definitely not authentic emulation by any means, so I'd be wary of any screenshots made with that.

Haven't played Legend of Dragoon, but I'm pretty sure that there isn't such a stark contrast between 3D models and backgrounds originally.

 

[Deflowerer]

Suikoden 2 is boring!

Which makes me wish that every would be obligated to release its source code or modding tools so that people could fix them. The fundamentals are great, gorgeous 6-party turn based combat with bunch of different combinations and so on, just needs better encounters and difficulty.

Suikoden 1 has a difficulty patch: http://ngplus.net/index.php?/forums/topic/93-suikoden-hard-mode-complete/ and apparently the tools are available for anyone to make their own.

Suikoden 2, but apparently that one is retardo difficulty: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3303/

I'll probably check out S1 patch myself, since I just started replaying S1 Japanese version for language learning purposes (can actually understand quite a bit already!) so playing a harder difficulty version with the English version would be great in both ways, to compare the original difficulty as well as the translation.

 

[CryptRat]

By the way Arthandas , Unlimited Saga is not that old and can't be played on PC, it's hard, with a not over-the-top story, without any large scale exploration since it's mission based and you can't explore the world at will but the missions themselves have good exploration. There are weird features and many people hate the game though', so not sure you'll like it but it may be worth a try given your criteria.

 

[Damned Registrations]

S1 was really the only game where only 1 action could take place at any given time.

I think it had the same system, enemies at least can attack in groups. I think the party can too, but only if you spread their attacks or maybe auto-fight or something, they definitely take turns if you have them all target one enemy, even if the enemy is going to die from the first attack.

 

[Hobo Elf]

By the way Arthandas , Unlimited Saga is not that old and can't be played on PC, it's hard, with a not over-the-top story, without any large scale exploration since it's mission based and you can't explore the world at will but the missions themselves have good exploration. There are weird features and many people hate the game though', so not sure you'll like it but it may be worth a try given your criteria.

Unlimited Saga might be going too far into the deep end. I think it'd be better to take baby steps by playing some of the previous Saga games as they might be more accessible, as much as Saga can be accessible.

 

[Arthandas]

By the way Arthandas , Unlimited Saga is not that old and can't be played on PC, it's hard, with a not over-the-top story, without any large scale exploration since it's mission based and you can't explore the world at will but the missions themselves have good exploration. There are weird features and many people hate the game though', so not sure you'll like it but it may be worth a try given your criteria.

I'll give it a try though I already played one Saga before (RS on ps2) and it proved a little shallow.

EDIT: Actually I also beat one Saga game on psx when I was a kid. I remember nothing apart from the fact it was 2D and apparently quite easy since I beat it then.

 

[Alkarl]

By the way Arthandas , Unlimited Saga is not that old and can't be played on PC, it's hard, with a not over-the-top story, without any large scale exploration since it's mission based and you can't explore the world at will but the missions themselves have good exploration. There are weird features and many people hate the game though', so not sure you'll like it but it may be worth a try given your criteria.

I'll give it a try though I already played one Saga before (RS on ps2) and it proved a little shallow.

EDIT: Actually I also beat one Saga game on psx when I was a kid. I remember nothing apart from the fact it was 2D and apparently quite easy since I beat it then.

It was either SaGa Frontier 1 or 2. Differences are pretty noticeable, but thematically speaking, 1 has robots n' shiet while 2 has a very medieval vibe to it.

 

[Arthandas]

It was either SaGa Frontier 1 or 2. Differences are pretty noticeable, but thematically speaking, 1 has robots n' shiet while 2 has a very medieval vibe to it.

Based on screens it was definitely SF1.
CryptRat
I gave Unlimited Saga a try. It's trying to reinvent the wheel by making it rectangular. Also, it's more obscure than Dark Souls but in a bad way, all in all I didn't like it though it's not a bad game per se.

 

[Alkarl]

It was either SaGa Frontier 1 or 2. Differences are pretty noticeable, but thematically speaking, 1 has robots n' shiet while 2 has a very medieval vibe to it.

Based on screens it was definitely SF1.
CryptRat
I gave Unlimited Saga a try. It's trying to reinvent a wheel by making it rectangular. Also, it's more obscure than Dark Souls but in a bad way, all in all I didn't like it though it's not a bad game per se.

SaGa games are kind of like that, but Unlimited SaGa is decidedly the worst offender when it comes to obscurantism. At least mechanically. I still love it, it's my second favorite SaGa behind Frontier 1. I would honestly recommend Frontier 2 over the others, to someone new to the series. Or, maybe RS ps2 remake, but you said you've been there done that.

Do you enjoy blobbers? Stranger of Sword City is excellent.

What are some of the things you're still struggling with when it comes to jrpgs? I just wanna get an update of where we are to help with future recommendations. We can discount your experience with Unlimited SaGa wholesale, saying that game turned you off is like saying you don't like sauer kraut on your pb&j, I get it.