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Star Ocean 3 was my first Star Ocean game and while I thought the plot twist was really sloppily written, I didn't think it was overly horrible like some people were saying. I took the advice of others and played through the first two games which a good number of people had said that they had better gameplay and a much better plot than the third game. When I played the first game I found the gameplay to be a confusing, button mashing-y mess. I did kind of like the plot to begin with however, it reminded me of a rather cheesy B-episode of Star Trek and I liked that. Where everything fell apart though was when Jie Revorse got introduced to the game. It seemed needlessly tacked on to artificially increase the length of the game and to go back to the Star Trek analogy, it was as if a completely unrelated episode of Trek got tacked on to the end so the game could have a satisfying enough endgame. I ended up kind of disappointed but hey, everyone kept praising the second game more. Surely that'd be good! Nope. I played the second game and while the gameplay was more fun than the first, it still was largely button mashing without any depth to it. The item creation was fun enough however. But I honestly couldn't believe people were praising the story of this game. It was cliche, the entire first half of the game was completely pointless, pretentious by adding in Biblical references with no greater meaning or symbolism, the lead characters were stupid and aggravating to watch, the lead villain's motivations were literally as The White Dragon said except the best part is, unless you do a sidequest you don't even know what his motivations are (which is just poor design no matter what, sidequests to flesh out characters are fine but don't put the entire reason the game is happening in a sidequest). Then the fourth game happened and it was basically everything I hated about the second game except magnified and fetishized, without any of the fun item creation or decently designed dungeons. As such, I never understood why the third game seemed to be hated so much, it was terribly written sure but no moreso than the second game and not nearly as bad as the fourth. SO 3's "plot twist" didn't cheapen anything because the universe was so paper thin there was nothing to cheapen to me.
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Oct 20, 2011 22:13
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I could stomach Star Ocean 3 enough to at least finish it and I thought it had some neat ideas behind some awful, awful execution. But Star Ocean 4? I played 2 hours of it before I couldn't take it any more. What an awful game in every way.
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Nov 25, 2012 15:55
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This talk of Breath of Fire makes me wish GOG got the rights to publish the PC version of BoF IV. Won't happen though because it's Capcom.
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Aug 8, 2013 16:24
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I dunno, while I liked Shadow Tower Abyss I actually thought it was one of the easier FROM Software games, next to Eternal Ring. It's hard going early on but the game didn't seem balanced for guns at all and made around 2/3 of the game a joke. The original Shadow Tower is pretty fiendish though and still has much of the same mechanics though again, if you're using ranged weapons like crossbows then you kind of remove any difficulty the game has.
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Sep 11, 2013 23:37
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a medical mystery posted:Yeah the ranged weapons are rather disproportionately strong, and a big part of that is how awkward the KF-style controls are. If you go in for melee attacks you're just so much more likely to be punished for it. Blowing off limbs or the head of enemies with an M1911 was so satisfying. But as much as I liked the gameplay of Shadow Tower Abyss I didn't really get what was going on with the plot or setting.
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Sep 12, 2013 00:51
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Seeing how some here have played Shadow Tower Abyss, has anybody here played Hungry Ghosts for PS2? It was a Japan only title and I'm wondering if it is worth picking up. Some more information on it here: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/hungryghosts/hungryghosts.htm
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Sep 24, 2013 01:52
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BoF4 is probably my favorite game in the series next to Dragon Quarter. But it was also the first Breath of Fire game I ever played so nostalgia probably influenced that. I still want a digital release of BoF 4 for the PC but knowing Capcom, that probably won't happen.
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Jan 23, 2014 18:13
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Levantine posted:Breath of Fire 4 PC already exists. It came out years ago in Europe. It's fully in English and would run fine on any modern pc. As far as finding a copy now I'm not sure how you'd do that but it's out there. I know it exists, I just think it'd be nice for it to be available digitally on Steam or GOG or something.
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Jan 23, 2014 18:50
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I dunno, I actually preferred Wild Arms 4 over 5. 4 may have been short and had a really weird moral that I think was mangled in translation maybe... or something, but I liked the gameplay enough. 5 was just irritating with a cast that I couldn't stand and one of the worst endings you could have for a JRPG you spent hours on. Neither hold a candle to 3 though, which did almost everything right.
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Apr 9, 2014 11:10
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ImpAtom posted:No, the translation is fine. XSEED (I think it was them) did a fine job with it. WA4 is just a hosed-up game. Huh. I always assumed that the intended moral was that adults in power should be less petty and have a responsibility to improve things for future generations, that somehow got mangled into "Kids know best, Adults are dumb and evil".
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Apr 9, 2014 22:29
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ImpAtom posted:I think that was probably the intended message but they mangled it beyond all comprehension, especially since the ending is the various protagonists largely retreating from responsibility or world-shaping in favor of children or childlike things. All I remember about the ending is Arnaud and Raquel getting married and trying to live the last few years of her life in happiness. I don't recall what happens to Jude or Yulie.
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Apr 9, 2014 23:20
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Forest Thief Pud posted:From what I remember, Jude runs off into the woods and becomes a hermit/ranger and communes with animals because he's an awful person. Yulie ends up teaching children in this one forest town while she's waiting for her dead brother to come back to her, because Jude left her brother's music box on a fence before he ran off. Huh. I don't remember any of that. I still find him more tolerable than Dean though, every single word out of Dean's mouth was agonizing and he was the most obnoxious kind of JRPG naive protagonist who thinks everything will be okay because he said so.
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Apr 10, 2014 05:00
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I'm looking to get one of the Etrian Odyssey games on 3DS. But which one would be better to start with? I know Millenium Girl is a remake of 1 and I'm not too bothered by story connections or anything so, which of the two plays the best? Thanks.
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May 17, 2014 14:19
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Kild posted:Has anyone played Conception 2? How is it? Dumb eye rolling stuff aside, it's a game that has a lot of needlessly complex mechanics that you you will never have to use because the game is so easy and boring. If you're really starving for JRPGs then pick it up cheap down the line but otherwise avoid.
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May 19, 2014 11:28
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Rascyc posted:Have there been any remakes at all of DQ7? Can you believe the three main reasons I got a 3DS were because of DQ7, SMT IV and Rune Factory 4? And I live in Europe. I thought this kind of thing stopped towards the end of the PS2/Cube/original Xbox era.
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May 19, 2014 15:54
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BadAstronaut posted:I recently got a PSP that came with the Sega Megadrive Collection and I felt like trying out Phantasy Star III. I watched a friend play hours of II and I have played a ton of PSIV which I really enjoyed, but how does III hold up? III is quite easily the worst game in the series and it's only very barely connected to the other 3 mainline Phantasy Star games. The visuals are ugly, the music sounds awful, it looks like a really low effort and unfinished game. The only kind of cool thing about it is that it's set over 3 generations and who you choose to marry at the end of each generation dictates who the protagonist for the next part of the game will be.
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Jul 20, 2014 12:56
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The GBA versions have extra content but the colors and sound take a downgrade from the SNES versions. There are fanmade patches that fix the color scheme and improve the sound to SNES levels which would make them the best versions but that'd only be useful for you if you're playing them on an emulator.
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Jul 20, 2014 13:14
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BadAstronaut posted:Maybe I'll do just that. I'll do some googling later. Thanks for the advice. I think it's Dragon Quest for now and then I'll look into patching the GBA versions. How does V compare to VI? Isn't the latter one of the most popular in the series? They're pretty different. V doesn't take itself seriously at all and has a host of Job classes to use and abilities to learn. It's all about the gameplay. VI is more about the story and while there is some character customization, it opens up a fair bit later on than V and it's all about magic spells than abilities itself. They're both good games but trying to compare them is a bit like trying to compare apples and oranges.
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Jul 20, 2014 13:51
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theblackw0lf posted:Playing through Lunar Silver Star Story (PS1 version) and I absolutely love how your party members will respond to what even minor NPC characters say, which is actually pretty unusual in most RPGs I've played. Usually either the NPC will say something and there will be no response at all, or any response just comes from the main player character. Grandia 1 and 2 did it. They were made by the same developers as the Lunar series too, go check them out.
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Aug 9, 2014 03:01
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WrightOfWay posted:Jansen is the perfect example of a character that would be completely insufferable if his voice actor didn't sell his goofiness so well. Yeah seriously. I'm amazed the guy doesn't get more work. Though it is funny to think that he voiced Knuckles in Sonic Adventure 1 too.
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Aug 11, 2014 08:36
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It wasn't even really the twist of 3 I had trouble with per se, it was the execution of it that was sloppy. But it's still preferable to Star Ocean 4 and Edge Maverick being a mopy whiny prick for causing the destruction of a fake Earth that never happened.
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Aug 20, 2014 15:40
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Dross posted:The Leena that joins your party is not your ex-girlfriend, although she does weirdly claim to have had a crush on a dead seven-year-old you. It's going to be quite a while before home world Serge and home world Leena see each other again. Suddenly the choice to be an rear end in a top hat to her and get Glenn makes more sense.
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Sep 4, 2014 14:31
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RadicalR posted:I hear that the EE version is just the GoG version with some mods. Comfirm/Deny? Not quite. It certainly incorporates a few things mods can do but the EE have scalable fonts, the ability to zoom in and out and new NPCs and areas that mods don't have.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:43
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a medical mystery posted:Each iteration of Persona 2 was relatively self-contained but even then there were tons of moments in EP where I felt confused or that I was missing something important when I originally played it on the PS1. Returning after IS it was much more enjoyable and fulfilling because all the little nods to IS added up to feel like you neglected something if you hadn't played it. I dunno, I think you could have a different but equally interesting experience if you played Eternal Punishment up to where Tatsuya talks about the events of Innocent Sin, then play through Innocent Sin, before finishing Eternal Punishment. Sort of gives it a mystery vibe as you try and piece everything together.
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Sep 17, 2014 14:24
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Ayup. This sure is an old school dungeon crawler. Got wiped out pretty quickly. Going to need to plan my party better I think.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:18
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From what I could tell online, the 3DS Remix has a bunch of extra classes and races that the PSP and PC versions don't have, but it's also a much easier game too and there's no difficulty selection. So it depends on if you care more about extra classes and races or a challenging game.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:45
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Genpei Turtle posted:Wait, so is the PC version a straight PSP port then? I've read a lot about the 3DS vs PSP versions on Amazon reviews and the like (3DS is pretty much universally considered better with lots of quality-of-life improvements...nothing about difficulty though) so if it's just a port that pretty much seals it, unless it really is that much easier and I just haven't seen that mentioned. Yeah, it's a straight port of the PSP version except the art is redrawn for HD displays.
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Sep 22, 2014 23:01
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ImpAtom posted:I have no played AT3 so it is possible I may need to redo my math to compensate for this staggering new information! AT3 is so much worse. Like, I could put aside the creepy stuff in the first two games for the fun gameplay but 3 not only intensified the creep factor, the gameplay became so much worse too that nothing redeemed it. So E&L is like a 0, AT 1 is a 6-7, AT 2 is a 10, AT 3 is like 27 and Star Ocean 4 is 30 on the creepiness scale.
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Sep 24, 2014 22:56
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I've heard that visual fanservice aside, Ar Nosurge is far less creepy than Qoga and has much better gameplay than Qoga too but I was so disturbed by Qoga that I really don't want to take the plunge.
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Oct 11, 2014 12:45
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What's the gameplay like in Ar Nosurge? I liked the gameplay in Ar Tonelico 1 and 2 well enough, even if it was really easy and simplistic but Qoga's gameplay combined with the excess of creepy stuff was too much for me to stomach. If the gameplay is less poo poo than Qoga and if what others say about Ar Nosurge being less creepy are true, I might give it a shot.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:08
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Icedude posted:Take Ar tonelico 2's gameplay, remove one of the vanguards, and change the time limit with unlimited attacks to simply having a set number of attacks each attack phase. Then add in that you can only defend from a limited number of attacks and you have Ar nosurge's combat. Turned out surprisingly fun to play, even if it is pretty easy (but then again, so is the rest of the series) Sounds interesting enough, it's funny that every game they try to balance the gameplay and end up not fixing anything except for Qoga where by being balanced, the gameplay was a boring slog.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:20
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HiveCommander posted:Looks like I opened up one hell of a worm can with that question Haha, no they aren't. They can be pretty drat creepy. I mean, the last few Compile Heart games aren't irredeemably awful like their older games but they're still creepy.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:20
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although Edge Maverick is a name dragged from the darkest depths of the caverns of Pretentia.
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Endorph posted:please don't try to make some sort of 'dumb anime game' tier list. Nobody here's going to revoke your Goon License because you like Neptunia or whatever. You don't need to convince people it's actually only somewhat dumb. I mean, I actually kind of like the more recent Neptunia games, at least at the price I got them at but that's in spite of the creepy stuff and not because of it. It's fine to enjoy them, I just don't see how anyone can claim they aren't skeevy.
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Oct 13, 2014 22:13
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The Black Stones posted:My refusal to buy Compile Heart was isn't just because they're creepy. I mean, they are, but I've played Ar Nosurge, so I can handle a little poo poo (gently caress the monster rubbing game though). I played Hyperdimension Neptunia though, and by the time I finished the game I hated myself for putting up with a completely shoddy battle system, a poo poo as gently caress story, and a game that felt like it was being held together with paper clips and dental floss despite having the graphical capabilities of a Ps2 game. The original Hyperdimension Neptunia must be one of the worst JRPGs on the PS3. I mean, they're still not amazing, just merely okay but the leap in quality between the original Neptunia and it's sequels is ridiculous. It's also ridiculous Neptunia even became a franchise because the first game was so bad.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:32
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Polite Tim posted:I remember watching a video review for Time and Eternity where the dude doing the review said that once you get past a certain point in the game it gets a lot better, but I think he had a FFXIII's 20 hour tutorial length in mind and really if you can't get someone interested in the literal first half of the game then what the gently caress are you doing? The gameplay of the Neptunia sequels is completely different and much better. Not amazing mind you, but there's a reason the first Neptunia got remade for the Vita.
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Oct 19, 2014 10:35
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Polite Tim posted:Yeah, I can't quite put my finger on why i like it and not neptunia since they're so similar, but i guess its the Disgaea-lite elements what with levelling up weapons etc. Do you like fanservice of both girls and video games with gameplay similar to Mugen Souls and the occasional actually funny moment drowned by some creepy stuff? If so, go for it.
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Oct 19, 2014 19:06
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I didn't sign it because the only game in the Xenosaga series I could stomach playing again would be 3. I know it's got a cult following and all but I just don't think the series is any good as a whole.
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Oct 21, 2014 12:15
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I wonder why they chose Valkyria Chronicles? I doubt they'd port 2 or 3 to the PC given that they were more limited PSP games.
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Nov 1, 2014 12:10
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U-DO Burger posted:I often have to remind myself that Xenosaga I actually had a fantastic soundtrack, because whenever I think about the music this is always the first thing I think of. This is all I think of when I think back to Xenosaga I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyYM1ks_V7U It's what you'll hear 95% of the time actually spent playing the game. It's torturous.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:02
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I think the first two Xenosaga games are about as bad as each other really. II made a lot of improvements, but also made a lot of dumb mistakes that episode I didn't make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the only worthwhile game in that trilogy was the third game.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:47
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