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Morpheus posted:I'm trying out some older games on SNES, gameboy/color/advance, etc, at the moment looking for recommendations of good games that were never officially translated but got translation patches later on. All those "Hidden Gems of X System!" lists never take those into account. The Cyber Knight games for SNES were pretty interesting as obscure fan-translated stuff goes; sci-fi RPGs where you explore the galaxy in a spaceship and have mecha battles. Tonally they kinda feel like Star Trek TOS, with mysterious space gods and planets where everybody is weirdly dedicated to one specific idea and all of that kind of thing.
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Dec 8, 2023 01:12
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Omi no Kami posted:I can't get a bead on Age of Decadence... all of the reviews seem to either say it's awesome or god-loving-awful, with very little in between. Is it worth grabbing next time it goes on sale, or should I just start with Colony Ship? The best way I can paint a picture of what it's like to play Age of Decadence is that a common piece of gameplay advice is to leave as many skill points unspent as possible in case the path you're on throws a surprise skill check at you for a skill that you haven't trained up yet. There are a bunch of different ways to get through the game and in between all of them are even more ways to fail to get through the game.
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Dec 9, 2023 02:58
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ImpAtom posted:Skip to 4, maybe go back to 3 if you are still hankering for more. Pretty much the only thing 3 introduces that has any relevance is Wren-type androids. There's also one easily missable optional dungeon and one sidequest that include callbacks to PS3, but yeah, PS3 effectively takes place in a completely different setting (for reasons that are endgame spoilers for PS3) so you're not going to miss anything that's actually important to PS4's plot.
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Dec 14, 2023 02:34
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A lot of people were also pretty enthusiastic about getting to play as the Traumatized Edgelady characters in Octopath 1 and 2 despite the fact that the execution of their stories was not always so great. Even with so-so writing quality, players will forgive a lot if you at least take the characters seriously as people in their own right. Like, Primrose's ending sucked but it wasn't just because the writing was bad, it was because it was written in a way that took away Primrose's agency. Throne's ending was just as weirdly written but she got to be an active character in it so it was fine.
Thuryl fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Dec 17, 2023 |
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Dec 17, 2023 07:27
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Tequila Bob posted:So you don't think FF7R is an action RPG when played in "classic" mode? Eh, Parasite Eve meets both those criteria but I'd feel weird calling it an action-rpg.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:50
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Poppers posted:The gambits soothe me. Insane dopamine rush getting my rear end kicked by a hunt repeatedly until I tweak my gambits just right. There was a game I worked on years ago called Tactical Chronicle, which is all about setting up gambit-like tactical programs for your party to execute in combat. It looks like rear end and is never coming out of Early Access so a bunch of quest and item descriptions are missing flavour text, but on the other hand it's fully playable with dozens of hours of content and costs like 3 bucks.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:10
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Ofecks posted:Ran across this yesterday: https://archive.org/details/Popixel-PhantasyStar/mode/2up Wow, that's a lot of effort. 112 pages. Speaking of weirdly high-effort Phantasy Star paraphernalia, I found the time to get through that "Working Designs" Phantasy Star 4 romhack that I mentioned earlier in the thread, and it was... almost disappointingly normal? It's not a retranslation so much as a heavy edit of the official English script; a fair bit of incidental text like item descriptions is unchanged. The dialogue has obviously been punched up a fair bit, sometimes in ways that feel unnecessary, but on the other hand some of the more stiff and awkward lines from the original read more smoothly now. Raja's jokes actually make sense and some of them are even funny -- and there was one point where the music cut out for a second to provide a dramatic pause right before a punchline, which got a chuckle out of me even if I'm not 100% sure it wasn't just my emulator hitching. There are also a few minor Easter eggs for examining random stuff in towns. The famous "It's not nice to open cabinets in other people's houses without their permission" message gets rephrased a few times in increasingly snarky ways as you progress further in the game and continue to insist on rifling through people's cabinets. A few items that previously had no description have been given one, some character and place names have been changed (sometimes to bring them closer to the Japanese names, sometimes to keep them in line with the translation choices used in Phantasy Star 1), and there are a few minor mechanical tweaks: a couple of dummied-out items are reintroduced to the game by replacing random junk in treasure chests, and some pieces of equipment are usable by a wider range of characters now. Demi is probably the biggest beneficiary of this, since she can now equip the strongest single-target gun, but none of the changes really have a major effect on game balance. This was not a hack that needed to exist, but it's not offensively bad and it gave me an excuse to replay Phantasy Star 4, so on balance I'm kinda glad it does.
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Jan 5, 2024 09:49
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Leraika posted:I'm enjoying it but I ran hard into a somewhat embarrassing roadblock that I'm gonna have to figure out a way around lol AGI, INT, and VIT are generally the most important stats since they affect your defenses and it does the SMT thing where you lose a fight if your MC dies (although at least it's not a game-over). You can pretty much get away with raising those three stats and ignoring the rest completely; you can still use support skills and do okayish damage, especially since guns aren't affected by your stats at all.
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Jan 14, 2024 05:27
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Ethiser posted:When I got the Phantasy Star Collection for GBA as a kid I beat 1 and 3, but I could never muster up the effort to play 2. Something about the dungeons just made them unplayable. According to a developer interview, the dungeons were mostly made by one guy who was an overenthusiastic new hire and just sort of designed them all without checking in with anyone else. They were in a hurry to get the game out as a release-window title for the Mega Drive and had already burned up some time on story rewrites early in the project, so they figured they'd keep his work rather than try to redo it. If nothing else, it's an interesting proof-of-concept showing that you can make a hard dungeon crawler with a top-down perspective (and maybe also showing why people usually don't). Clarste posted:Persona also heavily discourages you from taking the weird/funny dialog choices, which is bad. The best thing about the Devil Survivor games is that there are a ton of weirdo dialogue options and the penalty for picking them is mostly negligible since you get 90% of your relationship points just from hanging out with people
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Jan 22, 2024 04:51
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The Colonel posted:most of the time the reason a cutscene song only exists in the cutscene is because being composed for that scene it only really makes sense in the original pacing and framing. different from the kind of track you could more generally reuse across the game. that's probably part of the reason they got yuki kajiura for those games, and why xenosaga 2 had a split between her on cutscenes and the supersweep composers, people more familiar with composing regular video game music, handling everything else Yeah, developers that are Really Big on music as a selling point, like Gust, will have a bunch of songs that just exist for one battle or one cutscene, complete with liner notes in the OST about how they timed out the pacing and dramatic pauses to match the flow of the scene
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Jan 28, 2024 03:01
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Kanos posted:PS4's spell system is exactly like something like SMT's, where once you understand what the weird prefixes and element names are it's very simple. I remember PS2 had a handy reference sheet on the back of the included world map to tell you what all the techniques did and who could learn them; I'm not sure if PS4 had anything that convenient or if your only option was to look in the manual. (Of course, in PS2 the different attack technique types were just for flavour; elemental resistances and weaknesses didn't actually exist until PS4.) The PS2 manual also had really over-the-top descriptions of how powerful the higher-level techniques were. Nagra was described as crushing enemies until nothing was left. It actually did about 70 damage, which was less than a normal attack with the best weapons, and was only learned by one character in the game at way beyond normal endgame levels, but that kind of stuff got me hyped up when I was 8 years old and first picking up the game so I guess it served its purpose. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 28, 2024 13:24
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Araxxor posted:7th Dragon 2020-II's Idol is one of the most unhinged classes I've seen in a video game. I'd love to describe what makes it so nuts but it'd be way too many words because what the gently caress is this class. It's an absurdly chaotic support unit that's ridiculously flexible with absolutely bizarre mechanics. They have a secret special live concert move that you can only see if you made a party entirely of idols, which is something a sane person would not do outside of a gimmick run because as noted they are mostly a support class
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Jan 31, 2024 08:02
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The original DS game is pretty skippable but everything from 2020 onwards is a good time if you like games where you build your own party and accumulate a bunch of random NPCs at your base to chat with/date. They're not very complicated or difficult but they don't waste your time either. also the game set in 2021 is called 7th Dragon 2020 Part II, correctly predicting how time would work in the year 2020
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Jan 31, 2024 08:07
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The Colonel posted:for some reason this game also literally cannot be played on a gameboy color or gameboy advance. it crashes instantly if you try. I got curious and looked it up, and apparently the reason is that it relies on a hardware bug in how interrupts are processed that was fixed in later revisions. That and Road Rash are the two known games that depend on the buggy behaviour. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 12:33
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The Colonel posted:there's an optional castle you can visit in XERD NO DENSETSU. the only thing in it is a ten floor tall tower and when you get to the top there's just a princess who says "you're so naive! you thought you had a chance with me?" i have been playing 2ch rpgmaker shitpost games lately and your descriptions are increasingly reminding me of those
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Feb 6, 2024 06:55
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Barudak actually just wants to play dungeon crawlers but he ran out of those so now he plays other RPGs and ignores the plot oh yeah that reminds me, go play Path of the Abyss, it's a cool low-budget dungeon RPG where you can freely build a party and then send them out to die a lot. It's machine translated but it's comprehensible enough and the dev is planning to get a real translation done eventually Thuryl fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 04:34
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Endorph posted:the visual designs are fairly interesting but they arent really that mechnically interesting. like the centaurs are just taking the place of cavalry in normal SRPGs. werewolves are just unarmed fighters. theres like maybe two or three characters who are that oddball mechanically per game. Kiwi in SF2 is one of the coolest characters both design-wise and mechanically and it's tragic that he's almost unusably bad
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Feb 15, 2024 03:54
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You spend at least one arc of Yggdra Union as a villain; in the normal ending you eventually knock it off, but the ending where you gently caress things up for everyone and start a massive war for no reason is the canon ending that leads into Riviera.
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Feb 24, 2024 09:50
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Library of Ruina probably counts as an RPG where you play as the bad guys (it's a slightly weird sort of RPG gameplay-wise, but it's still more like one than not). You run a dungeon that kills visitors and turns them into books. Your reasons for doing this are entirely self-interested. The people you kill are raiding the dungeon for loot and know what they're getting into, so you're not exactly going out of your way to murder random innocents, but you're still playing as the kind of people that the player characters in an average RPG would feel okay about killing.
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Feb 25, 2024 11:52
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Junpei posted:This game was in the Japanese Nintendo Direct only: I was trying to figure out whether "juvenile" in the game's genre description was a bad translation of "seishun" or an actually-kinda-good translation of "chuunibyou", but it turns out it was literally just the English word "juvenile" spelled out in katakana
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Feb 26, 2024 11:22
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I've decided that FF3 is the best Final Fantasy because you get an airship within the first five minutes of the game No, but seriously, I just played through it for the first time and it holds up surprisingly well (with the quality of life features and balance tweaks added in Pixel Remaster, anyway). It's always so refreshing to play an RPG that had to fit into less than half a megabyte of cartridge space. Every character has like 1-2 text boxes worth of dialogue, which they generally spend either giving you meaningful setting details or useful gameplay tips. There's an interesting dynamic to the job system where sometimes the game will just kind of throw you a bunch of treasure chests full of up-to-date equipment for a job it wants you to try out, so I was often swapping jobs just to make use of the cool new stuff I found. My biggest gripe is that the in-game information about what each job can actually do is pretty incomplete unless you actually swap to one and test it out in battle.
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Mar 1, 2024 00:35
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Annath posted:I know Stranger of Sword City exists, and I remember it being decently well reviewed when it originally launched on the Vita, but I don't know how well it meets your criteria because I haven't played it lol. I liked it, but it's pretty unforgiving. The biggest culprit is the LP system: your party members have a very limited number of Life Points, lose one if they die, permadie if they hit zero LP, and can only regain them by either sitting out of your active party for several battles or using rare consumable items. Your main character is exempt from this system, but every other party member basically needs to have a stand-in who can fill in for them in case they die. The combat is also more about attrition and risk management than complex tactics; you have some control over what fights you pick and how hard they are, and strategy mostly revolves around figuring out how hard you can push your luck without getting killed. Plotwise there is definitely Stuff going on, but it's presented in the old-school tradition of having story revelations hit you in the back of the head with a hammer once or twice per dungeon rather than through in-depth character exploration or interaction. (Not that the characters aren't there, but each of them has maybe a few paragraphs worth of text spread throughout the story explaining what their deal is and then you move on.) But if none of that scares you off, sure, give it a try. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 12:03
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Barudak posted:Operencia is on sale for like 7 USD buy it and then come up with a scathing summary that so thoroughly roasts me I slink off into the shadows to stop recommending it to people I tried that out a while ago and felt like I was spending more time watching battle animations than actually playing the game, which is pretty prohibitive for a dungeon crawler
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Mar 15, 2024 11:47
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Nick Buntline posted:related videos on this are how I learned that you can actually win the final fight against Leo by breaking all of his swords instead, which leads to you sparing him and a bunch of alternate dialogue in the fight/epilogue? what the gently caress I didn't mess around much in that fight since it's one of the few battles in the game where you have a real chance of losing; once I figured out the mechanics and what I was supposed to do, I just finished it as soon as possible. Guess I should have messed around a little bit more. watching that version of the fight now and marvelling at the very specific energy it takes to make a game where a talking mouse makes an F/SN reference and it feels totally natural Thuryl fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 02:32
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Tequila Bob posted:I think the Suikoden series makes 6 person parties work really well. Also Wizardry and the earlier Shin Megami Tenseis. I can even think of a few 80s/90s computer RPGs that went up to 8 (Ultima 4, a couple of the Might & Magic games, Wizardry 8); like you said, in most of those, each individual character didn't really have a lot of different customization options. Labyrinth of Refrain/Galleria did 15 (divided into 5 squads of 3 that normally had to do the same action as their squadmates), but that's from Nippon Ichi where every number has to be bigger.
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Mar 23, 2024 08:09
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Just finished False Skies; around 40 hours to get all the endings and most of the other optional side content. It's designed to look and play like an old Gameboy Color RPG, and that commitment to the bit includes an intentional lack of quality-of-life features (your walk speed on the world map is slooow, and while there are a couple of different fast-travel options they always remain just a little bit inconvenient to use), and awkward abbreviated names for items and places. The clearest encapsulation of the philosophy that I can come up with is that the best sword in the game is Caledfwlch (the Welsh name for Excalibur), except item name lengths are limited so it gets abbreviated to "Calfwch". They gave it a more obscure name just so they could mangle it better. If you find that more obnoxious than charming then you should probably make a mental note to avoid this game. You build your own party out of a selection of classes, and then unlock multiple tiers of advanced classes that you can promote into. I would strongly recommend using a class guide and planning out builds in advance at least a little bit, because it's easy to make irreversible decisions that you'll regret later. On the other hand, if you don't want to do that but you end up with a build that doesn't quite work out, you can change the difficulty level at any time (it's balanced around Hard, and Easy difficulty doubles all of your stats, which is enough to let you brute-force most things). The dungeon design gets pretty harsh as you go on; several late-game dungeons are huge, non-linear, and full of puzzles. It's some of the most complicated dungeon navigation I've seen in a top-down JRPG (and this is coming from someone who's played through Phantasy Star 2 multiple times). Hope you're good at spatial reasoning and memory, because the game loves the "figure out which pit to fall into in order to land in the right spot on the floor below" trick. This is not a text-heavy game, but there's a fair amount of thought and effort put into the worldbuilding, and a few mysteries to uncover with pretty cool and satisfying answers. If your ideal amount of story in an RPG is "snippets of text that explain just enough for you to eventually mostly get the picture of what's going on in the world, plus a few recurring characters that you run into every couple of dungeons and exchange a paragraph or two of dialogue with", this may be the game for you. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 07:56
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BabyRyoga posted:Saga: Emerald Beyond not really resonating well on first impressions with me. I don't hate the art style at all, I think it actually seems kinda cool. But, RS3 stands out in my head as some of the best sprite art to ever grace a game. With Octopath's success in recent years, I kinda wish there was a new SaGa series game that uses that same aesthetic, being that it feels like SFC era SaGa was the greatest source of inspiration for Octopath's aesthetic, at least as far as character and enemy sprites go. Hat World: New Testament is pretty directly a SaGa knockoff, complete with the sparking mechanic.
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Apr 27, 2024 02:43
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GateOfD posted:least favorite dungeon type? Dungeons where you're not allowed to use a major combat mechanic (no-magic dungeons, dungeons where you're forced to use specific subpar equipment, etc) FF4 is the only game I can remember that actually pulled those off well and that was because the frustration had a point to it
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Apr 28, 2024 04:13
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:pit traps. TheMightyBoops posted:It was already mentioned, but I can’t stress enough how much I hate Phantasy Star 2’s dungeons. c'mon how can you hate this  (yes, those numbered spots are all pits that you have to fall into to proceed deeper into the dungeon; yes, it is bad)
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Apr 28, 2024 08:47
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Araxxor posted:From the post-game of Etrian Odyssey 1: To make things even more fun, the original DS release of the game didn't actually support placing enough icons on the map to mark them all.
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Apr 28, 2024 09:44
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C-Euro posted:The quest to unlock the Vampire job in Bravely Default 1 sounds like a pain in the rear end, is it worth it? Or do I not have to do it right when it unlocks? If you do it right when it unlocks and look carefully at the journal afterwards, you can actually get spoiled on some story stuff that your characters will continue to act like they don't know until a little later. It's worth it to do it when you can, though. Turn off random encounters in the vampire castle if you need to; they're actually harder than the boss.
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May 9, 2024 04:30
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