Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[Harry Easter]

Trails of Cold Steel 1 slow pace does actually help the story more than it hinders it. Because it's so slow I don't rush through the game and take the details of the world better in. And after a while the weird premise of "High School, but with weapons" does work ... but it's still weird.

 

[Puukko]

Ar Tonelico Qoga is probably the epitome of a neckbeard dweeb obsession type of game if old YT comments are of any indication. I was basically exclusively drawn in by the music which I have occasionally listened to on and off, and I was discussing Atelier with a friend when the game came up again. I know it's considered the weakest of the series but I just had to experience it for myself.

I've been lucky enough to avoid NISA games up till now and oh boy, this is what I imagine a prime example of a NISA translation must be like. The game itself is pretty raunchy (it has girls stripping down to their underwear as a core gameplay mechanic) so it can be difficult to tell just what the original dialogue was like, but I am almost certain that every single old dude wasn't a pervert, and that one conversation regarding the mind diving mechanic didn't have like half a dozen virginity references in it. Aside from that, the dialogue is just not serious at all and stuff like item descriptions are completely tongue in cheek, but in a way that just makes me think it was the translator taking the piss.

The character designs are outrageously stupid and if the artist hasn't done some lewd stuff on the side, I will be very surprised.

This is also the first game I've played where Sixaxis controls are straight up required and there doesn't seem to be any way to tweak it in the emulator to make it work with a non-DS controller, you just pick the DS3/4 profile and go. Good thing I invested in a DS5 recently.

The music though, if this game keeps my interest, it'll be because of the music. The range of genres is impressive.





Oh yeah, and a made up language along with an alphabet, of course.

 

[Thac0]

I finished Final Fantasy Legend II somewhere along the way.
Overall I liked it quite a lot. I posted more negative first impressions coming from Final Fantasy Legend I previously, but the game kept unraveling in depth.
Particularily the class balance comes together quite nicely. I played the recommended Human/Robot/Esper/Monster, and no two party members were ever at the exact same power level through the game. Power ebbs and flows.
Sometimes the robot is an unkillable monster tank due to his armor mechanic or by getting a potent new rocket launcher attached, sometimes he is tissue paper due to his bad magic resist.
Sometimes the esper has magic which can oneshot entire enemy stacks, and a potent defense agains spells boot, sometimes all enemies on the level resist his spells and he is a glorified mediocre healbot.
Sometimes the human is the best single target damage dealer with some of the most well rounded defense, sometimes he is borderline useless and needs to grind dex to keep the hitrate up.
Sometimes the monster... Well monsters still vary wildly in power as usual. They felt a lot stronger than in FF Legend 1 however, no longer a hindrance but an asset. The monster was even my strongest unit for most of the midgame as I transformed him into a fairy with extremely high speed and thunder magic that could oneshot enemy stacks.
I think having the total party power distributed in an uneven way, while still having every party member feel valuable, is an underrated aspect of game balance. Makes the party feel much more alive.

Now Final Fantasy Legend III... I dropped it because everyone was too samey in gameplay and power.
Probably back to SaGa Frontier for my next SaGa game.

 

[flyingjohn]

Decided to go through my emulated rpg collection and look for jap only games.
Starting with 3DO Blue forest story.
It sucks.Should have listened to abnoxious post on the game.
-Shit weapon breaking system with limited inventory
-Movement system where once you hit a wall your character automatically just continues up or down.I have never seen this in any game before.
-Boring fights with even more boring bosses
-Too short(less then 10 hours) and even then feels unfinished.
Also what the fuck is with the character animations when selecting a command? They change their stance based on what you select?
Why?Is this some kind of poorly though out accessibility option?

 

[Miner 2049er]

The Caligula Effect 2.

Story, characters and graphics are all horrible shit, but boy am I enjoying the heck out of the unique turn based combat system.The UI is serviceable.
Character building is like in FF IX (certainly other games did this before), where you learn passive skills from items. Once you have mastered them after some combat encounters, you can use them without needing to equip the item. You have 6 free slots for the passives.
Some quests can only be fulfilled by equipping those passive skills/items like salesman for example. With it equipped you will get the information to fulfill another quest. Nice little mechanics.
On normal, I found the difficulty too easy, but the last boss I fought, was a 20 minute, struggle to survive wake up call. I'm only 10 hours in, so the game might turn to shit.

 

[Puukko]

The Caligula Effect 2.

Story, characters and graphics are all horrible shit, but boy am I enjoying the heck out of the unique turn based combat system.The UI is serviceable.
Character building is like in FF IX (certainly other games did this before), where you learn passive skills from items. Once you have mastered them after some combat encounters, you can use them without needing to equip the item. You have 6 free slots for the passives.
Some quests can only be fulfilled by equipping those passive skills/items like salesman for example. With it equipped you will get the information to fulfill another quest. Nice little mechanics.
On normal, I found the difficulty too easy, but the last boss I fought, was a 20 minute, struggle to survive wake up call. I'm only 10 hours in, so the game might turn to shit.

Did it leak, are you playing the JP version, or...?

 

[Miner 2049er]

Unlike the JP version, the Asian version has an english language option...

 

[GhostCow]

The Caligula Effect 2.

Story, characters and graphics are all horrible shit, but boy am I enjoying the heck out of the unique turn based combat system.The UI is serviceable.
Character building is like in FF IX (certainly other games did this before), where you learn passive skills from items. Once you have mastered them after some combat encounters, you can use them without needing to equip the item. You have 6 free slots for the passives.
Some quests can only be fulfilled by equipping those passive skills/items like salesman for example. With it equipped you will get the information to fulfill another quest. Nice little mechanics.
On normal, I found the difficulty too easy, but the last boss I fought, was a 20 minute, struggle to survive wake up call. I'm only 10 hours in, so the game might turn to shit.

I played the original for a bit and holy hell is it one of the worst JRPGs I've ever played. iirc it just plays the same song throughout the entire game nonstop. I can't remember much else about the game other than I hated everything about it except for the swimsuits.

 

[Miner 2049er]

Yeah, stay away. It takes a combat fag supreme connoisseur to extract enjoyment out of this eye cancer and story diarrhea.

 

[AdamReith]

Gave Star Ocean 2 a whack on a whim. Suddenly I find myself on the last boss, getting that legit jrpg "kill me now" experience.

I think the first one had a bit more character development and star trek references but this one had less convoluted dungeons and more interesting combat encounters.

Great series so far, even if I do find myself wishing it was turn based fairly often. When a serious murder boss turns up the albeit mostly okay AI often is the deciding factor whether you get wiped or not.

EDIT: Bailing on the last boss, the game pulled a Breath of Fire 2 on me. Could be if I played for another few hours I'd get lucky enough but meh. Good game overall though, definitely recommended.

 

[spekkio]

Strange Journey Redux a.k.a. best crawler since Dark Heart of Uukrul

I wonder what would typical "OLOLO I don't play japanese rpgs 'cuz all of them are silly like FF7" cRPG-loving hardcoer 'Dexers say if they actually tried this game. Probably they would give up during tutorials...

I sure love it, but in a Severin-Wanda way:

Also - faery village? Capcom should sue...

Current Dirty Dozen (tm):

Over 50 hrs in, and I'm only in sector E:

But as you can see, HD Texture pack looks fucking glorious.

 

[Puukko]

I'm surprised you didn't bump up the difficulty.

 

[spekkio]

Yeah, maybe I will. I've expected "standard" to be challenging, but if the player swims in money, as I do, it becomes trivial. Still, most of the challenge comes from maneuvering the mazes ATM, so maybe I won't.

 

[d1r]

Not too convinced about the HD texture pack, but this game indeed is the apex of dungeon crawlers.

 

[spekkio]

Not too convinced about the HD texture pack [...].

Well, the "artistic aspect" of the AI-enhanced textures is debatable (they sometimes look like something filtered with some cheap filter like xBR or Eagle). But the "readability aspect" is unquestionable. Shit is just sooo much easier to read with HQ textures. Still, skipped the "Animated Sprites" (as I mentioned in the "Emulation" thread), since they look really bad enhanced (the "joints" in the animated segments of the textures are quite visible during animation). Which isn't a wonder, considering how low-res originals are. So shit like that looks really bad ingame:

 

[Duraframe300]

To make AI Upscaling look really good exactly in these edge cases you need manual re-work too, people tend to forget that.

AI Upscaling is a great tool for multiple reasons like

- Reduces the workload massively, thus making a lot of those texture packs even possible
- Keeps close to the original art-style. Hand-made texture packs tend to, as people do, do their *own thing*. Or use different references than the original texture to save time and just go *Well, it's close enough*.

But in the end, it's still a tool. It's a tool that is only going to get better, but it's still a tool. It needs rework. The best texture packs that came out in the last few years recognized that and put a lot of manual work in (still nowhere what it would take to make a pack from scratch) to polish the final product. Others put zero work in afterwards or just fix the most glaring oddities.

 

[lightbane]

I wonder if the low res is such an issue if played on the OG 3DS, which I have. I have to justify having bought it since at the time it had tons of games and emulation capabilities. I mean, it still does, but it is now out of production.

 

[Duraframe300]

I wonder if the low res is such an issue if played on the OG 3DS, which I have. I have to justify having bought it since at the time it had tons of games and emulation capabilities. I mean, it still does, but it is now out of production.

It isn't. Especially if its an OG 3DS and not an XL.

 

[Puukko]

This makes me wonder if we'll ever see uncapped games on Citra. Would be very cool.

 

[spekkio]

^
From my very limited experience (Devil Survivor Overcocked & SJ Redeux) with 60 FPS AR Codes, going over "default" FPS value is pointless, since games' behaviour (animations, movement speed) seems to be directly connected to "default FPS" value. So some (or most) things work at double speed. And I'm not sure if it can be "fixed" just with additional AR codes.

Maybe it's just the engine limitation of these games, though.

 

[GhostCow]

^
From my very limited experience (Devil Survivor Overcocked & SJ Redeux) with 60 FPS AR Codes, going over "default" FPS value is pointless, since games' behaviour (animations, movement speed) seems to be directly connected to "default FPS" value. So some (or most) things work at double speed. And I'm not sure if it can be "fixed" just with additional AR codes.

Maybe it's just the engine limitation of these games, though.

This describes 99% of games on any console. I have no idea why console devs love tying all of their stuff to the fps. We quit doing that on PC decades ago.

 

[spekkio]

And yet, for some consoles (PSP & PS3 come to mind) forcing games to work at 60FPS (or even more) seems to be much easier than for others (3DS).

 

[Puukko]

I dug my teeth into Etrian Odyssey Untold.

Beat the first boss (mantis dude) by the skin of my teeth, with just the survivalist alive. The difficulty level on expert is really good, I never doubt I am one step away from a potential game over. Current team is protector-ronin-survivalist-alchemist-hexer. Biggest weakness is the low amount of heals, but I am working on that.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Not sure if it counts but I'm dweebing it up in Nier: Replicant (PC port). I tried playing it ages ago when PS3 emulation was still shit and gave up.

Gameplay is a little clunky but not enough to be a bother. I'm playing on hard. It's nice to play a game that doesn't feel made by committee for once. Soundtrack is really good.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

I'm playing The Caligula Effect 2.
So far, the dialogue is much better than Overdose/1 , the combat is MUCH better and the OST still a banger.

So far , much better than Overdose/1.