Random thoughts on whatever JRPG you're currently playing?

[Frank Capicoli]

Finished the main story for Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout.

This was my first Atelier game and the first thing I'd say is that I'd agree with the criticism that the game is a little too far on the easier side, though I don't have the frame of reference veterans of the series do. Lately I don't play many jrpgs due to the time investment but the first Ryza game managed to pace things well enough to not over stay its welcome and become a drag.

The most notable thing was how refreshing it was to play a jrpg that had a bulk of the character progression come from exploring the world and gathering instead of mindlessly grinding thousands of random encounters.

Hopefully the sequels add enough to be worthwhile but I'll probably wait a couple of months before starting them.

 

[Puukko]

Ryza was my first ( ) and after I played others in the series it cemented itself as my least favorite. Well, there's Sophie 1 which just didn't impress me at all, but I'm not going to judge it the same as a game I actually beat.

After 45 hours, I beat the main story in Fate Samurai Remnant, or Crippling Food Stand Addiction Simulator. The first DLC is up next. It's a fun enough game, if a bit on the grindy/HP spongey side. The combat has several layers and trying out all the different servants is a highlight. I think it veers too strongly into item abuse. Usually it's a matter of "I'm nearly certain I can beat this, but how many items do I want to burn?". I think they should've limited uses in battle and instead tweaked the relevant gauges to charge faster through damage. The servant special moves were very flashy, but could have used more to distinguish themselves since the vast majority just deal damage in a circle, line, etc. The fact that the cheapest moves are enough to immediately shut down the scariest boss moves leads to excessive cheese at times. I just fought Gilgamesh, and he spammed very deadly moves that made him invulnerable... except to specials which also immediately canceled his moves.

Also, the final boss sucked ass. Bit of a shame since they put effort into it, but big sweeping area denial bosses are never as fun to fight as strong humans.

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

I checked out Ryza some time ago too but had to leave it after 5 hours or so. There were too much meaningless walking and I just couldn't stand its combat, it gives me a mixed feeling between anxiety, confusion and frustration, imo Dusk's combat system still had plenty venues for improvement, they didn't have to go for something this experimental. Ryza's thighs couldn't make up for this, sadly.

 

[deuxhero]

Did another playthrough of Final Fantasy V with custom classes mod (which basically just gives every job Mime's three commands+class command thing and reshuffles some abilities around).

Five still holds up in plot, some translator jokes that don't land well aside. All the dialog comes off as though it were a fantasy action comedy manga (Gilgamesh going from villain's cowardly henchmen to a guy who loves fighting the heroes so much he joins them to slap a mid-boss together) rather than try to be an epic drama in a fantasy world, and it works. Tiny sprites are quite expressive. Small party is used well, with all five party members playing off each other well.

Job system is still great. The jobs themselves are kinda unbalanced but still surprisingly good considering this created the idea of learning abilities from jobs. It's nice to see how little it wastes your time. Abusing fast forward (thus wasting a lot of "game time") and doing everything while fighting most encounters I was still sub 30 hours. It discourages grinding for job abilities by sharply increasing how much AP you get from encounters as you progress, which was a great call: In World 1 most enemy formations give only 1 AP on victory, and the best rate is only 3 (common) or 5 (rare and deadly), World 2 starts around 2 AP per fight and quickly goes up to 5 per. In the final world you're getting at least 5 per, with the final dungeon having stuff that gives over 20 per. It's unfortunate Tactics and its spinoffs didn't copy this AP rate thing and instead made it so a character was fucked on learning if they joined late (I haven't played BD1 in years and never played any of its sequels. Don't know how it did it.).

One thing that's underlooked is that there's a room in the Pyramid of Moore that experiments with all encounters being visible on the field, which is years before (Dec 1992) pioneers in that concept in Idea no Hi (March 1994), Earthbound (Aug 1994), or Chrono Trigger (August 1995). FF6's World of Ruin and its non-linearity gets praised, but people miss how much it's based on FFV's third world: While Island Shrine>Barrier Tower>Undersea trench has to be done in that order, everything else post-airship can be done in any order and you can just skip to the final boss if you feel like it.

As for the mod: It's generally an improvement, but it doesn't really overhaul the game. You can experiment a bit more with the whackier jobs since they now need less AP, and a few commands you'd otherwise never touch are a lot more useful since you can get them early and it's not as much a waste to assign them (!Gaia and !Call are now the first thing their job learns and great at replacing Attack on a mage character. It works so well I'd seriously recommend not buying the early summon options till world 3 to always trigger something useful with !Call)

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's unfortunate Tactics and its spinoffs didn't copy this AP rate thing and instead made it so a character was fucked on learning if they joined late

You're doing it wrong; you're supposed to stab Lavian in the back and let Mustadio eat the delicious crystal she left behind.

FF6's World of Ruin and its non-linearity gets praised, but people miss how much it's based on FFV's third world

To be fair, FF5 didn't get released in the west for a long time, and the first time it did was in a godawful PSX port that lagged like hell. Lots of grognards played 4 and 6 but not 5.

If you're into romhacks, I suggest giving Free Enterprise a try. It's been getting polished for a long time now and has just a metric fuckton of cool features. Depending on settings and familiarity with the game, a playthrough is gonna be somewhere between 2-10 hours. Personally I like doing it the way the gnarlier tournaments have been run; it basically plays like a non-linear boss rush with a character and loot hunt along the way.

 

[Reinhardt]

anything good released lately? spent march and half of april on unicorn overlord and dd, now need to kill some time until eiyuden chronicle.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I own Dragon's dogma 1 since it was basically free in several sales now. I put another hour into it to see if I could discover if I was missing something and I clearly was not. Boring map design and packs of wolves assaulting you randomly is not interesting or fun. Bandits pose little threat and the cyclops was just a bullet sponge. I've put 4 hours into it now and I wish I hadn't. It seems like it's a coop game for people who don't have others to play coop with. And the minions will not STFU making even that an annoying experience.

 

[Abu Antar]

Tried a few demos. First one was Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. Game is fun, but starts out very easy. I like the monster collecting, and it seems like exploration could be fun. Performance is all over the place, though. It was on sale a few weeks ago, but I didn't pick it up. Next time, I will probably grab a copy. Best case scenario is that the game gets a PC release.

On PS5, I tried out Granblue Fantasy Relink. Objectively speaking, I won't call the game bad, but after playing the demo, the game is competently made, but not for me. It looks good, sounds good, and combat is solid, but I am not in the mood for the format of the game.

Sand Lands demo was okay, but nothing amazing. I don't see myself getting this anytime soon. Maybe if I feel in the mood for something post-apocalyptic with vehicles. I did one dungeon where vehicles weren't needed, and I hope you get more moves when you fight just as your character. Fights were too basic.

Fate/Samurai demo was also decent, but I am not in the mood for a Musou style game, atm. I could see myself playing this at some point, but this is a style of game that I really need to be in the mood for.

Stellar Blade demo feels like a mix of Nier, mixed with a bit of Fromsoft design. My impressions of it are fairly positive, but not day one purchase positive. This is another game that I can wait for.

I'm happy that demos are getting more common than in previous years, because these ones saved me the desire to get the games any time soon, but not completely ignore them.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

anything good released lately? spent march and half of april on unicorn overlord and dd, now need to kill some time until eiyuden chronicle.

Trails into Reverie. One last ride with the Erebonian characters. Culmination of the battle system. Solving the boss fights on abyss difficulty was really fun and beating the final boss felt like an accomplishment. Had a lot of fun building my characters for the Reverie corridor. Good music as usual. Good visuals. Downsides are that damnable Crossbell and its people show up again, and the English localization quality has declined further.

Kuro no Kiseki 1 (has been out for a couple years with the fan translation patch) was okay. The characters are pleasant enough and the visuals are nice, but the rest of the game was a mixed bag. Story goes nowhere, is very repetitive and unsatisfying. Setting is very boring. Calvard feels wasted compared to Erebonia. Can't trek across the country like in the prior games. Battle system was dumbed down from Reverie and every boss fight except maybe one or two had no design or challenge. I played on the highest difficulty available, nightmare, and only gameovered once. I never had to buckle up and get into the nitty gritty of character building. One of the worst Trails games IMO, though not quite as bad as Crossbell. Again this one has better visuals. I'd rather play the worst Trails game than whatever Western AAA slop has been coming out over the past 15 years.

Granblue Fantasy Relink. As a gacha player, I was looking forward to this franchise finally getting a real RPG, and this really fun. Short but fun story, and I spent a hundred hours in the postgame going up the difficulties and building my character and then defeating Lucilius. Fantastic visuals that translates Hideo Minaba's art into 3D, great music by Nobuo Uematsu and Tsutomu Narita. I typically don't like action games, but I found this pretty enjoyable and wound up cranking up the difficulty to the max. Hope Cygames makes a Relink 2. Only downside is - again - the English voice dub, but that can be fixed by switching to Japanese voices, which how I was used to hearing the characters anyway.

 

[Reinhardt]

One last ride with the Erebonian characters.

dropped rean after first game.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Tried a few demos. First one was Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. Game is fun, but starts out very easy. I like the monster collecting, and it seems like exploration could be fun. Performance is all over the place, though. It was on sale a few weeks ago, but I didn't pick it up. Next time, I will probably grab a copy. Best case scenario is that the game gets a PC release.

I like that you get to play the bad guy and not just any bad guy but the BIG bad guy from the main Dragon Quest games, but as a child before he became fully evil. More games should take this unusual "dark prince" approach. I fired it up in Yuzu and it runs exceptionally well, far better than DQM Joker 3 did in Citra. People say the Dragon Quest Monster series is the best monster rancher/catcher games around. To me, it looks like a very elaborate and much more open Pokemon-type genre where you can have multiple monsters fighting at the same time while roaming and exploring an open world. Sold!

 

[wolfbane]

Gilgamesh going from villain's cowardly henchmen to a guy who loves fighting the heroes so much he joins them to slap a mid-boss together

I played FFV for the first time and I beat it about a week ago. Gilgamesh was by far and away my favorite part of the game lol. He was amazing. Neo Exdeath was a pain in the ass to kill, but probably I just suck at JRPGs. I ultimately killed him but I had to grind up DualCast and Mimic first lol.

Other than that, I also played and beat Ys I for the first time and I absolutely loved it. I started Ys II and it’s similarly great. I’m excited to see how they resolve the loose threads they left in Ys I. The gameplay of Ys I is sublime. It’s so fast paced and you never have to stop moving. It’s the same reason I loved Metroid Dread.

 

[wolfbane]

Oops double-post but I’m pretty much at the end of Fire Emblem Awakening, and even though I like it, it’s probably my least favorite Fire Emblem I’ve played through. Chrom and Lucina are great characters, IMO, but the map design and reinforcement spam makes the latter half of the game not very fun.

For what it’s worth, I had more fun with Echoes, even with its somewhat bland maps. I’m sure this topic has been discussed to death. I’ll play Fates soon enough, so not sure how I’ll place that against the other 2 3DS FEs.

 

[Puukko]

Oops double-post but I’m pretty much at the end of Fire Emblem Awakening, and even though I like it, it’s probably my least favorite Fire Emblem I’ve played through. Chrom and Lucina are great characters, IMO, but the map design and reinforcement spam makes the latter half of the game not very fun.

For what it’s worth, I had more fun with Echoes, even with its somewhat bland maps. I’m sure this topic has been discussed to death. I’ll play Fates soon enough, so not sure how I’ll place that against the other 2 3DS FEs.

Are you really quite sure about Fates?

 

[wolfbane]

Like am I sure about playing it? I’ve heard the map design in Conquest is actually pretty good, though I have started to notice that people mean the graphic design of the map, as opposed to the mechanic design lol.

I think I have the highest opinion of the GBA FE games of the ones I’ve played, but 3 Houses has a special place for me, since it was my first one. Though overall weapon triangle usually means better gameplay, in my experience with the series.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I found Fates to be quite enjoyable. I liked the story ("Turn against your family and do the right thing, or become culpable in evil and remain loyal"), even if there was a lot of missed potential in the execution. The character personalities are pleasant. The game stands out in the franchise with the Japanese aesthetics of the Birthright units. The music is good. Gameplay is not frustrating like earlier FE games. You also get a tremendous amount of content if you really enjoy the gameplay. It's three campaigns in one and more. I think I spent 150 hours playing Fates, and I didn't even touch Revelation or the DLC content (I bought the special edition that had everything). Fates is not my most favorite SRPG (I liked Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword, Sakura Wars, Valkyria Chronicles, and Utawarerumono more), but I enjoyed it enough I can recommend it.

 

[Puukko]

I will admit to being a certified appreciator of Fates girls, but I've never really felt like playing even the supposed better bits, considering how many other games in the series I've yet to play. Now this comes from someone who liked Engage which has positively brain damaged writing, but also probably the best gameplay in the series, so...

 

[Zero CHAR]

I found Fates to be quite enjoyable. I liked the story ("Turn against your family and do the right thing, or become culpable in evil and remain loyal"), even if there was a lot of missed potential in the execution. The character personalities are pleasant. The game stands out in the franchise with the Japanese aesthetics of the Birthright units. The music is good. Gameplay is not frustrating like earlier FE games. You also get a tremendous amount of content if you really enjoy the gameplay. It's three campaigns in one and more. I think I spent 150 hours playing Fates, and I didn't even touch Revelation or the DLC content (I bought the special edition that had everything). Fates is not my most favorite SRPG (I liked Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword, Sakura Wars, Valkyria Chronicles, and Utawarerumono more), but I enjoyed it enough I can recommend it.

There's a mod that restores content and fixes the awful translation.

 

[jungl]

class of heroes 2g is a solid dungeon crawler. I dismissed the first game like a decade ago cause of the randomly generated maps. 2 does not have the randomly generated maps but the main draw of the game is the mechanics. Stuff like money is useful for a good chunk of the game in crafting items and donating for xp. Crafting is lot of fun cause u can enchance and add affects to all the gear u find.

 

[Puukko]

Playing the expansion to Xenoblade 3, Future Redeemed. Initially put it on the shelf to see if emulation improved, AMD lacks a hardware feature it uses on Vulkan which means using OGL which means stutter and lower framerates. It's actually better than I expected now, though cutscenes suffer the most. Also a prime showcase of how much mods can improve Switch emulation, there's a host of graphics improvements available. Current best version to use is 2.1.1 rather than the latest patch 2.2.0, as not all mods have been updated as far as I know.

https://github.com/theboy181/switch-ptchtxt-mods

It remixes the gameplay and progression systems from the base game well to suit the shorter length. You do world activities to gain points upgrade characters. Art, gem, skill and other slots need to be unlocked per character using special items found from exploration and uniques. Really incentivizes to not just skip a new pack of monsters and whatnot.

Ouroboros forms are replaced by pair up moves that inflict burst, smash, etc. These can actually be changed by switching up the pairs which also grants useful group wide passives. So it's a balancing act of what reaction moves and passives work best for the current situation. Protip, on hard you can live without smash even if it isn't optimal, but you cannot live without burst for the enrage removal.

And let me tell you, the difficulty is there. The chapter 3 end boss took me several attempts and forced me to fine tune my approach. Hard control on the healer, get those few extra upgrades and buffs, figure out how to recover from tanks reliably getting deleted. Sleep can just shut down the whole team for an absurd length of time.

The story is pure Xenoblade (and possibly broader Xeno series?) fan service, they really tug at those XC1 memories. Makes me wanna get back to the older games I started or skipped.

 

[n0wh3r3]

I am going through The Last Remnant, Trinity Trigger and Shadows of Adam, SaGa Realms Beyond and Crystal Project. Plus multiple others retrogaming session.

The Last Remnant: I really can't understand all the criticism and the hate. I find it to be an awesome game on almost every aspect. Yes there are a lot of loading screens but it's only for a bunch of seconds. Another stuff that I cannot get a sense of it is the difficulty: how is the game hard? I am still pretty early in the game (lvl 17 iirc), but all it's going smooth.

Trinity Trigger: not even 2 h of playtime. Seems marvelous in style but all depends on how good the combat will turn out to be. Feels a bit on the easy side.

Shadows of Adam: I have no words. How can people praise stuff like that? The writing it is like a cheesy 80's children comedy show.

SaGa Realms Beyond: I just LOVE it.

Crystal Project: see above. I even bought it on a second platform once I found out what was going on on the Steam workshop.

And.... I have decided to give a try to KEMCO games Got Ambition Record that seems shameless effort to develop a game just to sell something and make a living; Legend of Ixtona (still haven't tried) and Monochrome Order (that actually looks like it got something going for itself).
Another questionable purchase it's Rainbow Skies... I think I got extremely fooled by some review that listed a huge plethora of activities and possibilities, but when I got to try it I didn't last 10 mins. I'll go back to it for sure since I am so curious about what the game really is.

Can anybody help me decide which game should I buy next? These are the candidates: Actraiser Renaissance, Rise of the Third Power and LEGEND OF MANA. The choice seems obvious, but I fear that Legend of Mana would be a big letdown...

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Last Remnant: I really can't understand all the criticism and the hate. I find it to be an awesome game on almost every aspect. Yes there are a lot of loading screens but it's only for a bunch of seconds. Another stuff that I cannot get a sense of it is the difficulty: how is the game hard? I am still pretty early in the game (lvl 17 iirc), but all it's going smooth.

The Last Remnant came out in the late 2000s well into Western games journalist's seething hatred for all things Japanese. You had reviews coming out literally saying "it's only for Japanese weirdos with no life".

A slightly more valid criticism is that TLR does not explain its mechanics and what it expects out of the player very well. The usual way the player expects to beat a JRPG (as conditioned by Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Suikoden, Pokemon, etc) is to grind mobs and become very powerful and then crush story fights. Well in TLR, you are actually punished for mob grinding (unless you execute a very specific kind of farm in the volcano level way later on the game, when you mass pull all of the beetles in the level into a single battle), as your battle rank (the level scaling of the mobs) will rise faster than your characters are growing. Meaning that players who went to their usual strategy of level grinding quickly made their game too difficult and got walled by Gates of Hell, the first very difficult story boss of the game. IIRC the game's tutorial only briefly namedropped the battle rank thing and didn't emphasize the full implications of this mechanic and tell the player to not attempt levelgrinding.

Even if players do not level grind, they usually encounter frustration when they reach the very tough Gates of Hell boss fight and don't know how to beat it. People softlocked their save because you cannot leave that area until you beat the boss, and ofcourse there is the issue that you can't levelgrind until you reach the volcano, so people can get stuck and don't know how to get past that boss so they put the game down there. And then for the lategame superbosses like The Fallen, you need to have trained at least two specific characters to have learned the Cachexia spell to be able to beat The Fallen within the 10 turn hard enrage timer, but you can only have learned the Cachexia spell if you had ahead of time knowledge and had acquired those specific party members and had been training them in a very specific way so they would learn the Cachexia spell by the time of that boss fight.

Lastly, the RNG is very frustrating. TLR is a 100 hour long game but the story is only 20 hours max. The other 80 hours of the game is side quests, and all of TLR's sidequests are about going into a field and either killing X number of monster that has a random chance to spawn whenever you zone into that map, or farming X number of mats from a specific monster which have a chance to spawn (sometimes from a monster that has a chance to spawn whenever you zone into the map). So the 80 hours of sidequesting quickly becomes extremely tedious as you zone in and out of maps and walk all the way to the end of a cave only to find that the monster you are hunting hasn't spawned, so you have to walk all the way back out and rezone and hope it spawns this time, and then when the correct monster finally does spawn you kill him only for him to not drop any of the mats you need to complete the quest. Rinse repeat for 80 hours. Not fun. The game is thoroughly unenjoyable to play without the TLRplanner mod to force spawn quest mobs and to force drop their entire loot tables.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the original release of the game was actually pretty bad, having a lot of features that the PC port would later add, and had a lot of bugs. So that impacted reviews and gave TLR a bad rap that stuck around even when the improved releases came out and people did not bother to rereview the rereleases, presuming that they were the same experience. TLR was also not available on Playstation, which was the JRPG console. Most JRPG fans weren't going to drop hundreds of dollars (especially after the 2008 recession) to buy an Xbox (or a $1,000+ PC) just for two JRPGs, so lots of people heard of TLR's bad rap and then that was the reputation it was stuck with.

 

[n0wh3r3]

The Last Remnant: I really can't understand all the criticism and the hate. I find it to be an awesome game on almost every aspect. Yes there are a lot of loading screens but it's only for a bunch of seconds. Another stuff that I cannot get a sense of it is the difficulty: how is the game hard? I am still pretty early in the game (lvl 17 iirc), but all it's going smooth.

The Last Remnant came out in the late 2000s well into Western games journalist's seething hatred for all things Japanese. You had reviews coming out literally saying "it's only for Japanese weirdos with no life".

A slightly more valid criticism is that TLR does not explain its mechanics and what it expects out of the player very well. The usual way the player expects to beat a JRPG (as conditioned by Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Suikoden, Pokemon, etc) is to grind mobs and become very powerful and then crush story fights. Well in TLR, you are actually punished for mob grinding (unless you execute a very specific kind of farm in the volcano level way later on the game, when you mass pull all of the beetles in the level into a single battle), as your battle rank (the level scaling of the mobs) will rise faster than your characters are growing. Meaning that players who went to their usual strategy of level grinding quickly made their game too difficult and got walled by Gates of Hell, the first very difficult story boss of the game. IIRC the game's tutorial only briefly namedropped the battle rank thing and didn't emphasize the full implications of this mechanic and tell the player to not attempt levelgrinding.

Even if players do not level grind, they usually encounter frustration when they reach the very tough Gates of Hell boss fight and don't know how to beat it. People softlocked their save because you cannot leave that area until you beat the boss, and ofcourse there is the issue that you can't levelgrind until you reach the volcano, so people can get stuck and don't know how to get past that boss so they put the game down there. And then for the lategame superbosses like The Fallen, you need to have trained at least two specific characters to have learned the Cachexia spell to be able to beat The Fallen within the 10 turn hard enrage timer, but you can only have learned the Cachexia spell if you had ahead of time knowledge and had acquired those specific party members and had been training them in a very specific way so they would learn the Cachexia spell by the time of that boss fight.

Lastly, the RNG is very frustrating. TLR is a 100 hour long game but the story is only 20 hours max. The other 80 hours of the game is side quests, and all of TLR's sidequests are about going into a field and either killing X number of monster that has a random chance to spawn whenever you zone into that map, or farming X number of mats from a specific monster which have a chance to spawn (sometimes from a monster that has a chance to spawn whenever you zone into the map). So the 80 hours of sidequesting quickly becomes extremely tedious as you zone in and out of maps and walk all the way to the end of a cave only to find that the monster you are hunting hasn't spawned, so you have to walk all the way back out and rezone and hope it spawns this time, and then when the correct monster finally does spawn you kill him only for him to not drop any of the mats you need to complete the quest. Rinse repeat for 80 hours. Not fun. The game is thoroughly unenjoyable to play without the TLRplanner mod to force spawn quest mobs and to force drop their entire loot tables.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the original release of the game was actually pretty bad, having a lot of features that the PC port would later add, and had a lot of bugs. So that impacted reviews and gave TLR a bad rap that stuck around even when the improved releases came out and people did not bother to rereview the rereleases, presuming that they were the same experience. TLR was also not available on Playstation, which was the JRPG console. Most JRPG fans weren't going to drop hundreds of dollars (especially after the 2008 recession) to buy an Xbox (or a $1,000+ PC) just for two JRPGs, so lots of people heard of TLR's bad rap and then that was the reputation it was stuck with.

So would battling every enemy found on the map (one time) be risky or even totally wrong?

 

[Anonona]

So would battling every enemy found on the map (one time) be risky or even totally wrong?

I think the idea is that you have to try to fight as many enemies at the same time as possible without dying to make your characters stronger without ranking too much your Battle Rank, as the latter is what dictates how strong the enemies will be. Is a reward/risk system, the more enemies and the stronger they are, the stronger your characters will be in relation with their battle rank. At least that is what I understood, I may be wrong.

 

[Zero CHAR]

The Last Remnant: I really can't understand all the criticism and the hate. I find it to be an awesome game on almost every aspect. Yes there are a lot of loading screens but it's only for a bunch of seconds. Another stuff that I cannot get a sense of it is the difficulty: how is the game hard? I am still pretty early in the game (lvl 17 iirc), but all it's going smooth.

The Last Remnant came out in the late 2000s well into Western games journalist's seething hatred for all things Japanese. You had reviews coming out literally saying "it's only for Japanese weirdos with no life".

A slightly more valid criticism is that TLR does not explain its mechanics and what it expects out of the player very well. The usual way the player expects to beat a JRPG (as conditioned by Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Suikoden, Pokemon, etc) is to grind mobs and become very powerful and then crush story fights. Well in TLR, you are actually punished for mob grinding (unless you execute a very specific kind of farm in the volcano level way later on the game, when you mass pull all of the beetles in the level into a single battle), as your battle rank (the level scaling of the mobs) will rise faster than your characters are growing. Meaning that players who went to their usual strategy of level grinding quickly made their game too difficult and got walled by Gates of Hell, the first very difficult story boss of the game. IIRC the game's tutorial only briefly namedropped the battle rank thing and didn't emphasize the full implications of this mechanic and tell the player to not attempt levelgrinding.

Even if players do not level grind, they usually encounter frustration when they reach the very tough Gates of Hell boss fight and don't know how to beat it. People softlocked their save because you cannot leave that area until you beat the boss, and ofcourse there is the issue that you can't levelgrind until you reach the volcano, so people can get stuck and don't know how to get past that boss so they put the game down there. And then for the lategame superbosses like The Fallen, you need to have trained at least two specific characters to have learned the Cachexia spell to be able to beat The Fallen within the 10 turn hard enrage timer, but you can only have learned the Cachexia spell if you had ahead of time knowledge and had acquired those specific party members and had been training them in a very specific way so they would learn the Cachexia spell by the time of that boss fight.

Lastly, the RNG is very frustrating. TLR is a 100 hour long game but the story is only 20 hours max. The other 80 hours of the game is side quests, and all of TLR's sidequests are about going into a field and either killing X number of monster that has a random chance to spawn whenever you zone into that map, or farming X number of mats from a specific monster which have a chance to spawn (sometimes from a monster that has a chance to spawn whenever you zone into the map). So the 80 hours of sidequesting quickly becomes extremely tedious as you zone in and out of maps and walk all the way to the end of a cave only to find that the monster you are hunting hasn't spawned, so you have to walk all the way back out and rezone and hope it spawns this time, and then when the correct monster finally does spawn you kill him only for him to not drop any of the mats you need to complete the quest. Rinse repeat for 80 hours. Not fun. The game is thoroughly unenjoyable to play without the TLRplanner mod to force spawn quest mobs and to force drop their entire loot tables.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the original release of the game was actually pretty bad, having a lot of features that the PC port would later add, and had a lot of bugs. So that impacted reviews and gave TLR a bad rap that stuck around even when the improved releases came out and people did not bother to rereview the rereleases, presuming that they were the same experience. TLR was also not available on Playstation, which was the JRPG console. Most JRPG fans weren't going to drop hundreds of dollars (especially after the 2008 recession) to buy an Xbox (or a $1,000+ PC) just for two JRPGs, so lots of people heard of TLR's bad rap and then that was the reputation it was stuck with.

You're partially correct about battle rank. While enemies scale battle rank with you, they have a limit so you can eventually out grind them if you try hard enough, but it's not encouraged.

I've seen plenty of people that played the game without thinking too much about it's mechanics and without min maxing and they finished the game just fine (including me, I'm fucking dumb). Did they 100% it? Of course not, but you are not supposed to do that in your first playthrough either.