Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[InD_ImaginE]

Well months after the English release, I finally got 1 victory in Traveler of Wuxia, a roguelike deckbuilder by Heluo, of Tale of Wuxia and HoToLoShu fame. Time for a mini-review I guess:

So what is it? If you are unfamiliar with the dozens of games in the genre released in the past 3 - 4 years, RL Deckbuilder is a genre where your character's action in combat is determined by what cards they draw: imagine playing mana-based CCG like Hearthstones (or MTG if HS is too zoomer for you) but where it's PvE, your health persist between combats, and you get your card semi-randomly between battles (usually you got choice of several cards, with option to remove cards/upgrade them/buy specific ones in shops). The genre exploded in popularity in 2019 when Slay the Spire (StS) was released and is especially popular in China: you will A LOT of Chinese indie dev making games in the genre. Traveler of Wuxia was released Jan 2023 and got EN translation in July 2023.

How is it different? Between all the StS clones released over the years, they usually try to have a twist in the formula. In the case of Traveler of Wuxia (ToW from here point on, I know it's the same with Tale of Wuxia but damn writing the damn name fully everytime is too much), the main differences are:

i. Combo system: inspired by the wuxia theme, moves/cards in ToW are capable of being chained together which will result in a free (0 Mana/AP) card of varying effects. E.g. chaining 2 spear attack cards will result in you getting free action dealing light damage to all enemies (by swinging your spear around from the illustration of the card). Mind you synergy has always been the point of CCG, StS clone included, but this system means cards have both soft synergies (e.g. unrelated cards that complement each other) and hard synergies (due to said combo system).

ii. 2 Characters: besides controlling the protagonist, the game will let you choose 1 between 3 potential waifus as a partner: each of the 3 waifus has unique decks (and thus unique multiple builds) and unique mechanics of their own. During combat they have their own health pool, AP pool, discard pool and so on, basically a full, 2nd character you control. This combined with 3 Classes (and each of those classes has multiple builds too, mind you) resulted in a rather fun and robust experience as certain MC builds might work better/worse with each waifus build.

iii. Story mode: it's light but it's there. The game is structured in a way where you have 3 Chapters of Story (each consisting of 3 stages as per genre convention) where in each one your MC will be paired to one of the waifus. Finishing them opens the "true roguelike" mode where you are free to choose which waifus you want and where you can fight any enemies from the previous 3 chapters (even some new ones) which ends with a final unique final boss. The game is basically a stealth sequel of HTLS: the kid of our HTLS protagonist finds dad's isekai/transmigration book and is now starting his own adventure.

Is it good? In the end of the day roguelike deckbuild is a hit or miss for people. Some people really like it (I know I do) but others really hate it. Within the genre itself, I consider ToW to actually be good! A lot of pitfalls StS clone often has is that in the process of making it more approachable, they usually make cards generic/reduce the importance of synergy which results in bland and boring game. ToW on the other hand embraced it fully and tried to fix StS' "have a built deck by stage mid stage 2 or die" by means of other tools, namely reducing the card RNG factor. The hard synergy i mentioned above also makes for a nice guiding direction for players on what to get/not to get. On the other hand the true roguelike mode has it so that if you don't have a working deck by mid Stage 3, you will be fucked still (basically smoother difficulty and RNG curve vs StS).

Deck builds of all 6 classes (3MC, 3 waifus) are distinct from each other and play differently enough to have runs feeling fresh (within context of the game of course, in actual much like CCG in general it borrows from one another with twist here and there). The current problem I have with the decks themselves is in the final boss. The final boss requires taking 100 damage in a turn otherwise, he will fully heal any damage taken that turn. Maybe I am not good enough in the genre but this actively punishes you from using some builds for the characters. And then the fact that the final boss also "cheat", in a game of combo, synergy, and free action, the boss will instantly override your turn per 10 cards played. Once again punishing certain builds of certain classes from what I see (or I might not be good enough I guess). Other bosses are fun in general, once again having different mechanics and way to defeat.

Music reused some tracks of HTLS while having a few unique tracks that I actually like and I am disappointed not being able to find them on YouTube. Story is pretty light but it's there. You will also find cameos from HTLS characters.

Overall I recommend the game if you like the genre (StS clone). Traveler of Wuxia is a fun, well-made StS clone with high degree of replayability due to having 2 characters that can be built differently within one run. Card arts, music, the small things are pretty supportive with big minus of reusing HTLS assets.

 

[Yaksha]

Not exactly a jrpg but i couldn't think of a better place to talk about it.
So drakengard...
The closest thing to this game that i have experienced is hotline miami 2.
The same sense of exhaustion and depravity, the only difference being that this game just takes it to higher level.
Rambling aside i advise anyone who is remotely interested to at least play few the first few hours of the game, lps just don't do it justice.

The story start with caim, a crazed and dying guts wanna be who finds a dragon on the verge of death, and inorder to secure a victory and stay alive , makes a pact with said dragon , becoming a mute in the process, that's when the game starts.
One of the things that i liked the most about the game, was how it handled branching routes.
You have to beat certain missions under somewhat strict time limits or find certain things in the map in order to unlock other missions which change the order and sequence of the story, and by the virtue of these little changes , you unlock different endings.
Upon this adventure of yours you come into contact with a cast of upstanding characters such as
Caim : the child killer
arioch : the child eater
Leonard : the pedophile
And finally seere the 1000 year old child in the making
I just wish that there was more to the story and the characters, considering the awful gameplay this speaks volumes of how interesting the atmosphere and the story is.

Certain details that i enjoyed about the story:
The fact that the harder you try, the worse things get.
How the pacts deprive a person of both something physical:
The ability to speak, sing or age etc
And of their goals:
Caim is unable of protecting his sister and his homeland.
Inuart loses sight of his own beloved.
Seere ends up killing his own sister.

Combat :
Dull , boring and rather mind numbing.
Everything you expect from a game of this kind but worse.
Two modes, an arial one and a standard muso mode.
In the arial one you ride a dragon , pretty fun , the only grievance being the bosses going full dmc mode.
Muso mode is what most of the game is though , so be prepared to constantly mash buttons and accidentally trigger magic and die from the counter magic attacks.
Different weapons have different move sets and spells .



Music:
Commonly described as an orchestra group falling from from the stage, it takes a certain kind of madman to think of making such jarring music out of timeless classic just to annoy the player.
Not gonna lie the ending theme of end b is still stuck in my head.

Still something that i kind of hated but couldn't put down, would love to see something similar.
the later games ,while pretty good in their own right , lacked the certain kind disgust and revolt that drakengard 1 evokes.

 

[newtmonkey]

Live A Live (Super Famicom)

This game has you selecting from one of seven characters, each with his own unique scenario. The scenarios themselves are quite short (ranging from 10-15 minutes at the shortest to several hours at the longest), but each has its own quirks and game mechanics. It's a refreshing approach to an RPG, because you can just pop in, complete a scenario, and then put the game down for another day.

It has a turn-based combat system, with battles taking place on a grid. Each character has a variety of moves that can be used as much as you want, each with its own special properties and range. The more powerful moves tend to take longer to do (giving enemies more opportunities to attack or even interrupt your attack!), so it's important to keep in mind exactly what each attack does. You can run from pretty much any fight at any time (other than bosses), and also get healed up to max HP in between battles... so instead of conserving resources like in most RPGs, you end up doing everything and anything you can to win each fight.

---

It's a great game, but it is of course not perfect. I was very disappointed with a couple of the scenarios (Sundown Kid the cowboy and Masaru the street fighter), and found some of the better scenarios to be too short/simple (Akira the psychic and Pogo the caveman).

I really liked the other scenarios... but especially liked the Oboromaru (ninja) scenario. You have to infiltrate a mazelike castle to assassinate its lord, and all the encounters are fixed. There are multiple ways through the castle, so it's up to you to decide whether to kill everyone like a psycho, sneak through without a single kill like a true ninja, or something in between. It's just the right length for this game, but I would love to see a full-scale RPG using this concept.

I also really liked the final scenario, where you choose one of the characters from the previous scenarios as the hero, and then are free to explore the (very tiny) world to track down the other characters and form a final party of four. Each character has his or her own unique dungeon with its own gimmick and that character's ultimate weapon at the end.

---

All in all, this game was simply wonderful, and definitely one of the best games I've played through this year. I honestly had trouble putting it down until the end. There's absolutely no need to grind at all, the stories and characters were a lot of fun, and even the lesser scenarios were at least a nice change of pace. I'd rank it up there with Square's best on the SFC.

 

[Rahdulan]

Live A Live (Super Famicom)

All in all, this game was simply wonderful, and definitely one of the best games I've played through this year. I honestly had trouble putting it down until the end. There's absolutely no need to grind at all, the stories and characters were a lot of fun, and even the lesser scenarios were at least a nice change of pace. I'd rank it up there with Square's best on the SFC.

It also has a killer soundtrack.

 

[Reinhardt]

feels gud to be big. now i want to play super robot wars again.

 

[Suicidal]

So, after over 95 hours of Strange Journey Redux I've decided to try getting the "old" ending (before tapping the alternate one).

...Only to be brutally raped multiple times by the final boss. All previous bosses were total breeze (on Normal) compared to MA. There was always some "trick" to dealing with them: either by exploiting their weakness, fusing demons strong against their attacks, or using buffs / debuffs.

Unfortunately, MA can't be outsmarted - only outgunned. Let's list tactical options I've considered...

• She doesn't have any weaknesses. So using "follow-up" attacks is out of the question. And this fact strongly hints to the only sane approach to dealing with her: use only strong physical attacks, 'cuz that's the only way of getting a critical against her (which can lead to "follow-up" if you have proper sub-app).
• She can use ultra-strong elemental attacks, ultra-strong x1-x5 physical attack, deadly expel & death spells and status-changing attack which works even on demons strong against Curse. What the actual fuck?
• Buffs / debuffs are a no-go as well, 'cuz she will counter these with dekaja/dekunda skill which harms all members of your party and heals her as well. Jesus.

What makes things worse is the AI's behavior, which can be "checked" using quicksaves. 'Cuz it looks like the AI adapts to your actions AFTER you executed them (which player can't do). If you set up an anti-magical barrier, she will NEVER use an elemental attack (but Almighty one), and she uses the dekaja/dekunda skill right after your buff/debuff. It looks like the AI checks for the status of player's actions before acting itself.
So, AI always knows what you did before it acts, but you have no idea what will it do.

To sum this up... Hard fight? Sure. Complex one? Not really. Fun? IMO not at all. I mean the only sane way of dealing with her is to fuse demons with strong physical attacks and as many elemental strengths as possible (void / null / reflect). Having void curse and reflect phys is a bonus.

And that's what most of online guides suggest: grind, fuse a strong group of lev. >80 demons, get "pierce" if possible, punch her to death. So, it's the "pierce" bullshit from SMT3 all over again...

I'm gonna necromancy this post because I'm playing SJ right now for the first time and I've found a very easy and consistent way to kill MA because Labyrinth of Touhou taught to me to look for AI pattern exploits in bullshit boss fights.

She will always cast one of two non-elemental nukes if you cast a shield on your turn as long as you cast it before her action.
She has a high chance of casting a dispel all spell that also heals her if you have buffs on your party or debuffs on her. I've noticed that she always does that when the sum of your buffs + her debuffs is at 4 or 5 (for example if you have 2 stacks of debuff on her and 1 stack of buff on your party she probably won't use that spell but if you go to +2 on yourself -2 on her she will). Sometimes she will just cast that shit regardless, even if you only have 1 buff or 1 debuff stack.
Without buffs/debuffs any of her elemental attacks could 1shot my protag and also oneshot any of my demons who were weak or neutral to them.

Wat do?

Well, I noticed that her nuke spells that she uses to "punish" you for shielding always have first priority in her behavior, no matter what. If you cast a shield before her action, she WILL use one of those two spells. One of them does like 400-500 damage and debuffs agility by 1 (meaningless), the other does 200-300 damage and applies a random negative status (can be bad, cause she can pertrify the protag for an instant game over, but it's unlikely to happen).

This means, that as long as I keep spamming shields each turn, causing her to retaliate with one of those spells, I can safely buff myself to +4 and debuff her to -4, reducing the damage she does with those spells to negligible amounts, and never worry about her using a dispel.

The only problem then is the random status effects, which you can get immunity to on 3 out of 5 turns with the command spell, so there's an extremely tiny chance of them fucking up your run.

After that all that matters is that your designated shield spammer is supplied with mana so that he doesn't miss a single turn of shielding and then you're dealing with a boss that will do around 100-200 damage per turn as opposed to 800+ per turn with the elemental spells.

Doesn't work on the 2nd phase because instead of using those spells now whenever you cast a shield she will just cast an instant death spells that ignores all resistances and barriers and also heals her on a random unit (including the protag for an instant game over) but the 2nd phase is overall easier because she becomes far less trigger happy with the dispels, only using them at like +7 combined stacks to your advantage and at +3 -3 her elemental spells no longer one shot anyone.

Hope this will save some hours of grinding for people who try this game out and get stuck on this boss.

 

[newtmonkey]

Lunar: The Silver Star (Mega-CD)

I went into this not knowing much about the game, though I had heard of it. It ended up being what you'd expect of a 16-bit console RPG: linear and very easy, with a structure that hardly ever deviates from going from town to town killing whatever boss is causing problems in the nearby cave/tower/castle.

The combat system is somewhat cool in that it takes range and positioning into consideration... but ends up being wasted on this game because it's just too easy. Several of your characters have cheap but powerful healing spells, and you can even find a couple of staves that cast healing spells for free in combat. Making things even easier is a permanent item you find that can teleport you at will to any town you've already entered, and scads of items that restore HPs and MPs. You are never in any danger of running out of resources, never mind dying.

The way magic works in this game feels broken. Enemies that are weak to magic spells are REALLY weak to spells, and even early on you have so many MPs that you might as well just cast them all the time. Your spellcasters each end up with about a dozen spells by the end of game, but they are mostly minor variations of previous spells. One character ends up with a ridiculous total of 10 electricity spells, and since higher level spells are clearly better, that means nine of those spells are totally worthless. There are a handful of utility spells, but why would you cast a confusion or sleep spell (that might not even work), when you could spend the same amount on a spell that will just kill every enemy on the screen?

Having said all that, a breezy RPG you can just blast through can be fun every once in a while. The characters are all likeable, the story is fun, and it's got a nice ending.

 

[Puukko]

So... babby's first JRPG?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

just too easy.

The PSX version ups the challenge a bit.

 

[newtmonkey]

Final Fantasy USA Mystic Quest

This is the Japanese version of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which I played and completed back when it was first released. I was in the mood to replay it, so I decided to play the Japanese version and see if there were any differences (there are none, besides the language of course). I also tried to do a low-level run by ignoring the "battle fields" (grinding spots) on the map... but ended up at level 34 anyway, which seems to be around the level most people complete the game, thus proving that the battle fields are a meaningless waste of time.

This game was basically a crass attempt by clueless Square executives to get American kids into RPGs, under the delusion that RPGs were just too complicated and hard for them to understand. Even if their intentions were pure, what they ultimately released is mostly a failure of a game with some fun moments.

Everything about the game has been simplified to the point where the game is just boring. There are no random encounters, probably because some test group told them they were "totally bogus," so instead there are visible enemies on the maps. However, the enemies stand still in fixed locations and, due to corridors all being a single tile wide, cannot be avoided. In effect, the game becomes a worse slog than even the grindiest "real" RPG with random encounters.

There is no utility magic, just healing and damage spells, so combat completely lacks any strategy or tactics. Damage spells really aren't very effective unless an enemy is weak to them, so you can't even blast through battles quicker by casting spells instead of fighting. So, the game is just fight and heal. Making this even worse is that you have just two characters in your party. There's simply not much you can do with such a limited battle system.

Toward the end of the game, nearly every single enemy takes two hits to kill and casts lots of status effect spells. When one of your characters gets hit with stone/paralyze/sleep, it means your other character will be spending the next round curing... extending battle for one more tedious round. If you're unlucky, the enemy will just keep doing it, so it's round after round of this. Monsters can also cheat and change their orders in the middle of a round, allowing them to heal a damaged comrade instantly. That, too, means extending battle another tedious round.

Even so, you're never in any real danger. The main character (and often the second character) has access to powerful healing spells, and you find items that heal you and restore your spells all over the place. Even if you do get unlucky and die in battle, the game lets you restart the battle from the first round with no penalty. It's the very definition of trash combat: thoughtless, routine, unavoidable, and with no danger whatsoever.

What really kills the game is the extreme linearity and total lack of any sense of exploration. There is no world to explore, just a map that basically serves as a menu to choose which dungeon or town to enter. If the dungeons were worth exploring, and the characters were fun, this could have worked. Gaia Gensouki (aka Illusion of Gaia), though an action RPG, works similarly and yet is a great game thanks to its excellent dungeons with actual puzzles, thoughtful story with charming characters, and awesome sense of exploration even though the game is totally linear!

The game is not completely horrible, though. The monster graphics are colorful and fun, and actually show damage as the fight goes on. The game has also got an excellent soundtrack, though there aren't very many songs and things get repetitive very quickly... even for a game that lasts only 10 hours or so.

 

[Brimruk]

Currently playing Demon Gaze and EarthBound Beginnings on my Switch.

DG is interesting because instead of building a full party, you only start with the MC and have to pay an increasing amount of gold for future party members. Just kicked this one off but it's scratching the DRPG itch nicely (I dropped Labyrinth of Galleria in favor of this game; I don't know what it is but something about that game is not clicking with me even though I loved the first Labyrinth game).

EBB has a simple, but pretty satisfying gameplay loop (and great music!). It's a nice brain break game when I need to unwind; just got my second party member so a lot of time is being spent grinding up money for gear and exp to get him up to speed.

 

[Lincolnberry]

Elminage Gothic. I've played for about an hour and I'm bouncing off hard. Conceptually I love the idea. The lack of a map to follow / see or locked behind one use consumables is hard. I don't think I have the patience for this, regrettably.

 

[REhorror]

This year: Octopath Traveler 2 and Star Ocean 2nd Story R rock the JRPG boat for me. Honorable mention to Wandering Sword too.

All games have fun stories and very fun combat system.

Should also mention Armored Core 6, but it's not strictly a JRPG I guess, multi-choices and endings aside.

 

[TheSoul]

I finished playing the Phantasy star series this year. It's nice to play a jrpg that lets you play the game in the first 15 min again.

PS I

• It's simple in a good way. The art leans a bit too close to Star wars at times, but the combat animations and environments do look good. Too many moments where you just mash A though.
• The difficulty is low until you get to the final bosses. We have Lashiec, who is a fucking pain in the ass and inflicts bullshit amounts of random damage. Then there's Dark Force, who has his health bar and damage taken hidden. It's a nice "meta" change since you were able to look at it the rest of the game.

PS II

• This is the most subjective. PSII has terrible dungeons, slow movement, and at times looks worse than I. Using a guide is mandatory unless you love jumping down holes and guessing what equipment also casts spells. Without a guide, I wouldn't have played this.
• What I really like about the game is how minimalist it can be while having interesting ideas. Motavia's dependence on Mother Brain, with most of the civilians lacking the initiative to solve the monster problem was well done with what little dialogue there was. You also get some reactivity once the robots are released, since some NPCs now recognize you, although nothing was done with it.
• The game leans a lot more into sci-fi elements and it's cool to see how much the planets changed since 1. The pacing on Dezolis is terrible though, with Lutz's temple being the worst example.
• The Soundtrack is really warm? Not sure how to describe it but it's a lot more soothing than what you'd expect from a sci-fi game, while still sounding like one.

PS III

• I've heard this was handled by a bunch of newer employees and it shows. My main issue with the game is how aimless the whole experience was. Progression is tied to needing an item and getting cockblocked if you don't have it. It's much more accessible than II, but is substantially worse at doing anything besides giving textboxes that only exist for exposition.
• III's main ideas are way too underdeveloped. The world feels so samey even if they're supposed to be two different cultures. I'm not invested in anything that goes on and I barely remember what happened in each generation. The sci-fantasy clashes with each other and irritates me the more I've been thinking about it.
• The one new idea I liked is the dynamic soundtrack. The overworld theme is more layered the more members you get and the combat theme changes depending on how well it goes.
• Enemy designs suck. The robots look like they came from Earthbound and most enemy groups just look like objects. Overall, this one is a slog and I don't see myself touching it ever again.

PS IV

• If you wanted to recommend an old jprg to someone, this is a good one to show what they did right. Sega threw in a lot of the better elements from the first 3 games while adding some more on top (vehicle combat, combination attacks, a rotating party, sidequests). It's the only one where the party feel defined as characters and it makes a world of difference. Towns also change after certain story events, which is always nice to see.
• Visually, everything is well done and there's a lot of beautiful environments. The final dungeon being this seizure inducing psychedelic nightmare makes up for how simple it is. I also find the screen turning to red and black when you kill a boss really satisfying.
• The soundtrack is amazing.
• I think the pacing is too slow midgame and the main villain Darkforce, is not interesting. They should've introduced Lashiec earlier or killed Zio later.

 

[Puukko]

'tism swung particularly hard and I've been in a Pokemon mood for a while now. Usually I have very little interest in these games, last time I actually beat one was in 2020. Picked up Sacred Gold, an older HGSS hack. It's very good, the difficulty is just right and having access to that team variety with every mon available is basically a requirement for me to enjoy these games at this point. I honestly don't think there's much point in playing anything other than hacks other than specifically for a nostalgia trip. They elevate these games from babby's first JRPG to something actually engaging. This game has plenty of content, I'm just past the midway point after the league.

 

[flyingjohn]

Picked up Sacred Gold, an older HGSS hack

Good choice and Drayano is making a new version.

the difficulty is just right

Th beginning is great but it kind of falls off difficulty wise all the way until you reach the Elite four.

I honestly don't think there's much point in playing anything other than hacks other than specifically for a nostalgia trip.

Agreed and it is one of the reasons I can't enjoy modern Pokemon games, no proper romhacks. That and the atrocious graphics.

 

[Puukko]

I tried Scarlet with the SV+ hack and even when upscaled on an emulator, it looks very rough a lot of the time. The draw distance is very low and many scenes are lacking in basic lighting and shadows. It just looks bad, and apparently it's still a marked step up from SwSh. These games are just too much for the Switch it seems. Nintendo isn't really in the business of remastering previous gen stuff on newer hardware (to my knowledge) but if they made the Switch 2 not only backwards compatible but also able to easily upscale and maybe even enhance Switch games, that would be very nice.

There are UE4 games with graphics tweaks mods on the Switch but I'm not aware of such mods for other engines. I used those with SMTV and it had a marked improvement with stuff like shadows and grass.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Currently running through Suikoden I for the first time, reached my first big army battle.

I watched some random youtuber's PSX RPG tier list and realized there are several I've never played through. Suikoden always seems to get high marks.

So far my opinion is mixed. Recruiting all these characters is novel and as a sucker for talking head portraits I'm just generally appreciative of the artwork and pixel art the game's offered so far. I would probably have bought Octopath Traveler if characters had portraits in their dialogue windows- it's a weird thing, but I think it adds a lot to the aesthetic of dialogue-heavy JRPGs. Some games just feel very dry without them.

On other hand I can't say I'm impressed with the gameplay loop so far. Combat is very much an auto-attack fest and very easy overall. There was a single dragon battle to earn my keep that was somewhat difficult, but outside of that it's been more or less a snooze. I was running through Dragon Quest 3 NES just prior to this, and the battles in Suikoden just pale in comparison so far. In DQ3 even in its first dungeon when you're sub-level 6 you have to carefully prioritize your targets in random encounters. A party of 4 enemy magicians can wipe your team mercilessly. Occasionally you might run into a battle with an overwhelming number of enemies where you have to weigh the risk of failing a flee attempt and the onslaught it would invite. DQ3's combat encounters were interesting and (relatively) tactical from the jump.

Maybe the game gets better difficulty-wise, but I'm guessing the game is not as revered as it is for its combat system. Maybe I should try some of these PSX Saga games instead. When I was like 7 years old the folks bought me a gameboy with Kirby, Link's Awakening and Final Fantasy Legend. Had never realized it was actually a Saga game.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Suikoden was "that one game you played before FF7 came out."

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

For S1 I had to retry a couple story boss fights near the end but otherwise it was easy.

The main feature of the Suikoden series is that you can mix and match your favorite party members from a humongous roster. The exp scaling mechanic was implemented so that if you changed your mind about who you wanted to bring (or were forced to bring someone for a story segment) or recruited a new character who was your favorite, you wouldn't have to waste a lot of time grinding them up with the rest of your team. It is disappointing that the combat system never become more sophisticated, not even in 3 or 5 (they never did anything interesting with the skill system), and the game designers erred on the side of caution making it so that you can beat the game with whoever. The Trails series later on managed to take Suikoden's concept of mixing and matching huge playable character rosters but apply more indepth combat and character building to it and higher difficulty levels, with almost the entire character roster still being viable even on the highest difficulty setting of nightmare/abyss (Swin in Reverie is often regarded as meh due to his redundant toolkit, but at least he has a 4S S-craft like everyone else so can deal viable damage. I think the only truly useless character on higher difficulties would be Josette in 3rd).

 

[Rahdulan]

Currently running through Suikoden I for the first time, reached my first big army battle.

On other hand I can't say I'm impressed with the gameplay loop so far. Combat is very much an auto-attack fest and very easy overall. There was a single dragon battle to earn my keep that was somewhat difficult, but outside of that it's been more or less a snooze. I was running through Dragon Quest 3 NES just prior to this, and the battles in Suikoden just pale in comparison so far. In DQ3 even in its first dungeon when you're sub-level 6 you have to carefully prioritize your targets in random encounters. A party of 4 enemy magicians can wipe your team mercilessly. Occasionally you might run into a battle with an overwhelming number of enemies where you have to weigh the risk of failing a flee attempt and the onslaught it would invite. DQ3's combat encounters were interesting and (relatively) tactical from the jump.

Maybe the game gets better difficulty-wise, but I'm guessing the game is not as revered as it is for its combat system. Maybe I should try some of these PSX Saga games instead. When I was like 7 years old the folks bought me a gameboy with Kirby, Link's Awakening and Final Fantasy Legend. Had never realized it was actually a Saga game.

With couple of standout battles in every game the entire franchise is on the easy side. In part precisely because the game accounts for 70+ playable characters where you can just take the best ones and clean house. The most challenging battles tend to be those where game saddles you with a sub-par character you can't replace. First Suikoden is short and essentially dev team testing the waters.

 

[Puukko]

I've been curious about the one with the vampire chick, for no particular reason at all.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I've been curious about the one with the vampire chick, for no particular reason at all.

Sierra? Just so you know, she might not be a virgin. In Suikogaiden, you learn that she was the first vampire, and took pity on a dying knight who stumbled towards her shack and she vampired him, and they were pretty close for hundreds of years before Neclord stole the true rune and caused all the vampires to either die or go crazy.

In Suikoden 3, Nash claims to be married (while sneaking into a girl's bedroom). A popular fan theory is that Sierra is his wife.

 

[AdamReith]

Hour 50 of At Tonelico 2, long long time since I've been so deep (oo-er) in a jrpg.

Enjoying all the characters, maxed out all the diving and crafting bollocks. Hopefully can get this promised land created and some kind of vaguely satisfying ending soon.

Low point so far is a supercharged synchronicity enabled replika augmented top tier song hitting for a total of 0 damage because hard mode thought it would make sense for all bosses to have 100% elemental resists. Important life lesson learned, never settle for a Cloche because a Jakuri could be just around the corner.

Other than that though it's a very nicely balanced JRPG and really hits the sweet spot between autistic gameplay and retarded melodrama that I crave.

Also, am using the Metalbat relocalization patch which seems to be decent.

 

[Puukko]

The Ar Tonelico OSTs are absolute bangers and if you haven't heard them you're missing out. And they didn't stop with the Nosurge games.