Incline Must play JRPG list

[Hirato]

I wanted to kill Teddy. All the time.

Agreed.
He keeps trying to steal my harem

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Also Jaesun needs a dumbfuck tag for that Dark Souls comment; what a fag.

What part of Dark Souls relies ENTIRELY 99% of PLAYER SKILL (NOT CHARCTER SKILL) am I wrong about?

Imminent Tears

 

[SCO]

Been playing terranigma. Bizarre environmentalism pedagogic tract. Fun though.

But Illusion of Gaia was worse, wtf deletion of escaped slave, burning a guy to death (realistic flame effect), participating on a suicide competition (where the widow of your opponent rewards you), dyslexic plot.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Terranigma was fucking weird. Can't tell if it was actually good or not, but it's definitely stuck with me for a couple of years.

 

[ForeverdarkWoods]

I wanted to kill Teddy. All the time.

Agreed.
He keeps trying to steal my harem

Worst thing he did though was always yell at you during combat during the first half of the game. Rushing would kill the animation, but not Teddy's fucking nagging. I felt like killing him all game through.

 

[SCO]

Energy breaker is really fun... good mechanics and crushingly hard TB (battles have time limits and skills must be learned by a complicated elemental system... in fact, i fucked up my current game because of not understanding the elements mechanic, didn't understand they grow on both sides).
Translation is top-notch so far, and you can tell the original dev's loved working on it. Also, you can turn off the music independently of sound effects, which although it's nice, i always prefer using my own.
Who said that girls games can't be fun

edit: game fell apart plot wise and a bit of gameplay wise later on (grinding is too easy and encouraged, there is a fucking ridiculous inventory exploit).

 

[Cassidy]

Here is my list:

- Anachronox: for the plot and characters, and some lulz
- Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden: for the lulz
- Uncharted Waters 2 New Horizons: arguably as fun as Sid Meier's Pirates!

Oh wait among these neither is both Japanese and a JRPG kind of game. Uncharted Waters 2 is centered on naval combat, trading, piracy and resource management and is too open-ended and exploration-centric rather than railroad-centric to fit in the mold, while lacking 15 minutes long cutscenes with emo voice acting.

Therefore, here is my real list:

 

[crojipjip]

ZSNES legend of the super sayian

 

[felipepepe]

I just brofisted Prosper.

 

[Jadeite]

Just going by memory:
(1) Final Fantasy VI
(2) Final Fantasy IV
(3) Suikoden II
(4) Suikoden
(5) Suikoden III
(6) Final Fantasy VII
(7) SaGa Frontier
(8) Breath of Fire II
(9) Breath of Fire
(10) Phantasy Star II

 

[Jadeite]

too much other shit to play

'Shit' is right. A game like Xenogears, even though it's not the best, is meant to be savored. I also wouldn't call Xenogears old-school, it's from the end of the golden age. There is no 'school' after Xenogears, just the last of the PS1 games, then Suikoden III.

 

[Machine]

Apart from games already mentioned, one of my favorite jRPGs (if you can call it that, but I guess japan/console is enough to label it here) is Dark Spire on NDS. Dungeon crawler which wont hold your hand, heavily inspired by older Wizardries (at least imo). If you like dungeon crawlers in general you really shouldn't skip this one.

It even has oldschool graphic mode which looks like this :

Also, Digital Devil Saga, SMT spinoff games. Gameplay is alright, if you can stomach derpy fetishised characters and story that has decent ideas but lame execution (have yet to play DDS 2, so idk maybe it gets better).

 

[Jasede]

I heartily recommend Dark Spire.

 

[Jaesun]

I heartily recommend Dark Spire.

I keep wishing they could do a PS3 port of it. ;_;

 

[Cynic]

I heartily recommend Dark Spire.

I tried this game and while I did love a lot about it, I got kind of bored with all the back tracking.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Here is my list:
- Uncharted Waters 2 New Horizons: arguably as fun as Sid Meier's Pirates!

Uncharted Waters 2 is centered on naval combat, trading, piracy and resource management and is too open-ended and exploration-centric rather than railroad-centric to fit in the mold, while lacking 15 minutes long cutscenes with emo voice acting.

Actually, I think it plays as much like an RPG as a strategy game. You pick a main character, follow their story, recruit party members and "equip" them with ships in order to explore a world map punctuated by towns where you can resuppyl, improve your equipment and hire new party members. The resource management is bare bones-- buy food and water -- which is comparable to any RPG where you have to deal with hunger. The naval aspects are analogous to traditional overworld exploration; you engage in world-map/town style explorartion in an attempt to find clues for advancing the main story, with your ships functioning as party members, pirates functioning as random battles and trading taking the place of monster grinding.

 

[aVENGER]

Chrono Trigger is quite good. If you want to play it, get the SNES version + emulator and avoid the Playstation port. The loading times in the latter are horrendous. Best ignore it and just watch the cutscenes on YouTube.

Also, Star Ocean 3 had a pretty decent story for a jRPG.

 

[ForeverdarkWoods]

@Dark Spire:
I posted this in another thread specifically about jap crawlers:

This is one of the games I actively play right now. This is similar to a lot of older western titles and not so much to Etrian Odyssey. Created as an obvious homage to Wizardry, and it plays in a similar way. The interface is a little weird, and I sometimes wish you could speed up the animations (why does it have to take almost a second to go from one tile to another in graphics mode?). Aside from some of these minor issues though, it is really good. Highly reccomended. Comparisons to Wizardry are not out of place.

Now that some time has passed I can pass some more judgement on it.

If you like blobbers and you've already played all the obvious ones and aching for something new it's worth it. It's not stellar however. Not in any way. There are some things about it that are above average and some things about it that are below average. Overall, it's solid. Worth one playthrough if you've got nothing else to play. Playing it without the wiki however, I wouldn't reccomend since the game doesn't tell you anything about anything and the "more expensive is better" line of thought doesn't seem to work at all. it's solid, but not stellar or must-play by any means.

You want a good and unique jap blobber for DS? Get SMT: Strange Journey. Excellent game all around. Schwarzwelt is an awesome dungeon by any standard and it does SMT gameplay really well. Highly reccomended if you like blobbers and maybe even if you haven't played all the obvious western ones.

On another note: I played Star Ocean 3 once and it was completely horrible. Some of the most retarded weeabo shit I ever saw actually, and I'm sort of desensitized. Are the other ones in the series better or should I stay the fuck away?

 

[Damned Registrations]

I enjoyed 2 a lot. Also pretty weeaboo (theres a dual wielding swordsman with two talking dragon heads growing out of his back) but the gameplay was much much better. The problem with SO3 I found was that I never found anything interesting while exploring (and I tend to find every nook and cranny) just tons of mundane useless crap. Which made everything quite tedius and boring. Ditto for skills gained while levlling up. SO2 has tons of amazing crap to find if you go out of your way, little side stories and powerful items. Levelling up skills can change them fairly drastically, and the variety in skills on the melee characters is pretty good. It also has a huge, albeit fairly simple crafting system. You can make food, weapons, medicine, armor, books, paintings, bombs, counterfeit money, all sorts of crap, much of it incredibly useful. It has I think 14 characters or so but a maximum party size of 8, and only 2 are mandatory, and many are exclusive with one another.

All in all, it has a ton to offer. It starts off a bit slow though, the introduction is long and the first 3 party members are probably the dullest of the cast. The game picks up a lot more when you get further and have more areas to go off the beaten path and more possible party combinations. There are a shitton of optional cutscenes for all sorts of character combinations, which influence the ending, which is made up of scenes showing all your party members, which can be romantically or platonically involved with any of the other characters or complete loners. There's also a bonus dungeon, and multiple difficulty levels, and the game isn't grindy at all. I think you get access to an item or skill to avoid random encounters fairly early too, though it might only be partially effective until later. There are multiple ways to affect the encounter rate iirc.

 

[Cynic]

You want a good and unique jap blobber for DS? Get SMT: Strange Journey. Excellent game all around. Schwarzwelt is an awesome dungeon by any standard and it does SMT gameplay really well. Highly reccomended if you like blobbers and maybe even if you haven't played all the obvious western ones.

Did they finally crack Strange Journey? Last time I tried with my R4 I couldn't save and it made me rage. Really wanted to play it.

 

[ForeverdarkWoods]

You want a good and unique jap blobber for DS? Get SMT: Strange Journey. Excellent game all around. Schwarzwelt is an awesome dungeon by any standard and it does SMT gameplay really well. Highly reccomended if you like blobbers and maybe even if you haven't played all the obvious western ones.

Did they finally crack Strange Journey? Last time I tried with my R4 I couldn't save and it made me rage. Really wanted to play it.

I emulate it on DesMuMe and for me it works fine. Just make sure you render in opengl and use synchronous audio. Never had a problem besides rasterizer sucking dick and cannot into DS emulation and audio glitches with unneeded surround effects. Oh yeah, if you have linux the only way to disable rasterizer and use opengl instead is to start DesMuMe from the command line and use command line options. Worth it though, although linux desmume is terrible and I would almost suggest running windows desmume under Wine instead since it works almost as good on a linux system.

If the saves go fucked up I can also fall back on savestates like I had to do with all my Sega Genesis emulation cause the saving system of pretty much every emulator seems fucked royally.

 

[Krraloth]

Supercard DSTWO user here. SMT works like a charm.

 

[Zorgfin]

http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=mmr
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=mysticark
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=danzarb

 

[Hobo Elf]

King's Field 1, 2, 3 and 4
NIER

didn't see those recommended yet

 

[DragoFireheart]

Radiant Historia