RPG Thread: SaGa Emeril Beyond

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > RPG Thread: SaGa Emeril Beyond

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

SyntheticPolygon posted:

Ranking stuff is hard so I don't post in the goty thread but if I did troubleshooter would be on my list. Probably not number one though because as said ranking is tough.

https://www.pubmeeple.com/ranking-engine

Let the computer do the ranking for you

# ¿ Dec 16, 2022 07:29

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 7, 2024 01:15

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Has anyone here played Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia? I had the original Brigandine game for PS1 back in the day and I thought it was really cool except I never got very far in it cuz I was a dumb kid who didnt understand what i was supposed to do and it was too hard. I'm smarter now I swear and wouldnt mind revisiting it, but I'm not sure if it's actually any good or w0rth looking at? Its £20 now in the latest psn sale which is cheap enough for me if it's a decent game, but too much for me to just take a blind punt.

Anybody play this game have any words to share about it? Thankssss

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 13:41

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Honest Thief posted:

i got it on steam some time ago, it mystifies me and i havent figured out how to play it but it's on my backlog to try it again eventually
so i wouldnt be surprised your reaction today would be similar as to when you were a kid

Hmm maybe I'll wait and see if it gets any cheaper later in the year. Plenty to play for now. Thanks for your thoughts!

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 16:26

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Jack Trades posted:

I'm in the mood for an RPG (or something adjacent) with a good and interesting story but I'm having a hard time finding anything new that catches my eye. I'm pretty picky to how I like my stories.

Here's some games that I did enjoy for their story:
Witcher 3, Tales of Berseria, Disco Elysium, Nier series, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (couldn't stand the gameplay in this game but played it all the way through anyway because I got engrossed in the story).
Honorary mentions to Divinity Original Sin 2 and Mass Effect. I wouldn't have played those if they didn't have great gameplay but I found the storytelling to be fairly entertaining in those too.

Things that I don't like:
Persona games (ALL anime tropes and annoying teenagers), Final Fantasy X (played 30 hours of it and is easily my most disliked game I have ever played), Every single shōnen jrpger ever made probably.

Any recommendations?

loquacius posted:

Elden Ring

# ¿ Dec 23, 2022 17:44

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Been playing some Valkyrie Profile. This game owns and is weird as hell.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2023 21:31

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Artelier posted:

My favourite PS1 RPG by a mile! Hope you're playing on Hard mode, please post impressions, and if you're going for like the good ending maybe have a guide handy

Yeah, I'm play9ng on hard and checking with a guide. Game is obtuse as hell. Brings me back to the days where games expected you to spend a lot of time with them, not just play through once and be done with it

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 08:31

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Is the trails series any good? I've never played any of it. I dont really care about the big overarching narrative or whatever that requires u to play every single game in the series in order to be able to understand, but I can play trails of cold steel 1 thru 4 on playstation and wondering if they're half decent chunky jrpgs I can just work through in between games over the course of however long it takes me to finish them

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 17:31

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The overarching narrative thing is about how the series has a reputation for having one that spans all 69 entries in the series but if I play any of them it looks like it's cold steel only so

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Trails of Cold Steel 1&2's fine on their own. Cold Steel 3-4's a bit of a different matter, as it starts blending in Sky and Crossbell plot and expects you to know the characters and events from them as it wraps everything up.

If I find myself enjoying cold steel 1&2, the extra plot stuff probably wont dissuade me from playing 3 and 4

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 17:58

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Nate RFB posted:

All of the sub-series (as within Cold Steel, Sky, Crossbell, etc.) have their own self-contained narratives that work towards a conclusion that resolves the stories of the involved characters. Some games mid-series may end on cliffhangers but by the end of the last Sky or last Cold steel game you will have completed a fairly thorough adventure with whatever cast in whatever setting. They may go on to get involved in other adventures in the other games (hence the ongoing narrative aspect) but it is has never been the case that you needed to do anything extra as a "requirement" to see the story through to a satisfying end.

Okay cool, that sounds perfectly reasonable. I might pick up cold steel 1 since it's on sale atm and see what's up

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 18:10

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Sweetgrass posted:

I will say that come march will be the best moment to dive into the current series arc as a whole simply because there will finally be official english versions of sky through cold steel once trails to azure releases, never a better time to take the plunge

as far as the whole needing to know about prior games bits, nothing about their stories requires having played any of the past games; falcom goes out of their way to make sure a player is more or less up to speed. but the trails series stakes a ton on following dozens of little side stories and npc moments that flow along each game, and theres lots of cool payoffs and callbacks if you're willing to start with sky, and imo it enhances the experience a fair bit

Which comes first in the continuity sky or cold steel?

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 19:18

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

Sky is first (all three games in order), then Zero, then Azure, then Cold Steel (all four games in order) -- though Cold Steel 1 and 2 overlap a bit with Zero and Azure.

Hmm....

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 19:43

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

RillAkBea posted:

I really enjoyed the first Sky game and have been meaning to play the others someday. On the other hand, I tried playing Cold Steel a few times but felt it was a little too high school harem anime, what with it being in a high school with a harem.

Hmm....

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 21:23

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Starting to think the Trails games are not a good idea haha

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 21:33

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Snooze Cruise posted:

yeah you are not going to like it, you can play minstrel song instead

Oh hell, I completely forgot about minstrel song!

# ¿ Jan 7, 2023 21:53

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Zore posted:

Cold Steel 1's worst bits are when the main character's sister decides to tell her best friend she's attracted to him and the best friend decides it is a good idea to egg her on and encourages her to hit on her brother repeatedly. And also feigns interest in the brother to try to spur the sister on. And this is a long running subplot we cut away to multiple times.

Or the part when the protagonist (who is oblivious to his sister crushing on him) casually turns her down for a date so she runs off crying and everyone is like 'wow what kind of monster makes their sister feel that bad? (by not being romantically interested in her)'

I did not give the rest of the series a shot

Gross

# ¿ Jan 8, 2023 08:45

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The Colonel posted:

also why would you want the girls to fawn over jusis and gaius. jusis is there to be another dude you can pair rean with and who in the world cares about gaius. give fie and laura more explicit romantic text or something, don't attach more of the girls to characters they have no reason to care about in that way. yeah i don't like how much of a harem this story is... so i'm going to dramatically subvert it by making all of the girls straight for different guys instead

That would own actually

# ¿ Jan 8, 2023 16:24

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The Colonel posted:

it, depends on how you define it. it's insanely vestigial in western rpgs and games like persona because western rpgs have to balance romance options with every other part of the game and don't want to simulate enough about relationships to make it meaningful. mass effect can barely handle conversation mechanics that require an ounce of thought, its morality system may as well be if you created two separate skills called "good speech" and "bad speech" and made them both equally effective but when you use one you kill a baby, so of course when it comes to simulating deeper emotional relationships it utterly fails to carry the writing or mechanical depth to portray those, and mass effect arguably has an actual character to work with for that in commander shepard, something most other wrpgs don't quite have. in persona's case, modern persona started out taking the bare fundamentals of a game like tokimeki memorial and rather than evolving on that in their own direction, they've basically sanded it down to the bare fundamentals so now all that remains is the part where there are scenes, and you are encouraged to find the right things to say because if you say the wrong things you'll... have to waste slightly more time to unlock the next scene. and persona protags basically share the problem of western rpg protags when it comes to romance in that, most of the time they do not really have enough personality to carry a meaningful or understandable relationship.

now if you're speaking strictly narratively, i don't think it's really that vestigial in jrpgs for the same reason it's not that uncommon in vns. if you have actual characters, you can write actual character dynamics. as long as you can do that well enough, you can make romance a major part of a game without strictly having to base a ton of mechanics around it, and if you really want to make it a matter of player choice it's possible to split a story into separate routes as long as the scale of the game can manage it, that's why you see it a bunch in games with less fancy presentation. vns and rpgs have a bit of an interconnected history, and this is arguably one reason for that. writing distinct lines, sometimes recording new voiced dialog, isn't the cheapest but if you don't have to make a ton of unique cinematics, then yeah it's not nearly as hard to make different romantic options work narratively.

now mechanically it gets more complicated if you want to go beyond route splits. route splits are what vns do, people conflate them and dating sims but system-wise they are not as comparable as people like to think. a proper dating sim is a lot more than route splits, it's basically a full-on life management game. i mentioned that persona uses a lot of heavily sanded down ideas from tokimeki memorial, and the reason that's a problem is because tokimeki memorial does follow that basic design of interactions boiling down to "figure out the right thing to say and then say it". but that's because tokimeki memorial is like, the most simple, game-ified take on the concept, and the challenge of the game is just figuring out what other characters' personalities and interests are and learning to get along with them well, and making time in your schedule to spend time with everyone while raising your stats, going to your club and placing priority on who you want to get together with. your punishment for failing at any of this is getting bombed and having your relationships with everyone get nuked hard. tokimeki memorial 1 is interesting because, in some ways it is the basic pejorative thing people envision dating sims as, but in actuality it is so not just a wish fulfillment game where it's easy to get everyone to love you. those games exist and they are, more often vns because tokimeki memorial shows how having actual dating sim mechanics at all complicates the pace and structure of your game in a way those kinds of narratives don't want, and in tokimeki 1's case specifically results in a game so stressful and single minded in its design that the entire series after it is filled with meta commentary about how weird and weirdly punishing 1 is, including even 1's own vn spinoffs that seek to flesh out characters the game treated as more throwaway, and they all make its most brutal mechanics much less brutal and remove the entire idea 1 sets up of having a singular canonical best girl you want to hook up with in favor of making the entire cast more fleshed out and likable.

but they do still keep the bomb mechanic and the generally tight scheduling and such, because those mechanics still encourage you to view the game as an actual reactive life sim to a degree. bombs get you to spend time with the cast, they make sure you won't just memory hole someone away and never consider them again. persona... kinda had that, in 3, with how social links could reverse or even break. its implementation was weird and imperfect, infamously for how it's tied into the actual dating social links, but i do think the absolute removal of it is a part of why the "romance" mechanics of the series just continue to be kind of weird afterwards, because yeah it does effectively just open the gate for you to romance multiple characters anyway still, even if they made that optional now, and it took them until persona 4 golden to actually start adding a new element to even acknowledge you doing that. obviously persona can't go deeper in copying tokimeki's mechanics, tokimeki's daily life system moved at a much much faster pace and it didn't need to worry about a full jrpg to tie into at the same time. but it does stick out how much persona copies from tokimeki without really creating innovations of its own, and while lacking a lot of the context around those systems that make sense of them. even in the fact that social links are a defined short story with a beginning and end, that has the natural result of the end of a romantic relationship having... nothing? afterwards. there's nowhere left to go. you've reached the end of your mechanical incentive to spend time with this character, if you try doing it again you will just get an utterly generic disposable scene. that's not really a thing, in dating sims, the relationship continues to the end of the game and you stumble into more unique moments and have to work to keep up your relationship with that girl.

with relationship systems as presented in games like cold steel it's a little more basic than that and doesn't always necessarily tie into romance, it's more about some idea of representing specific bonds within the group. a lot of games just hide the values straight-up, ffx and tales of symphonia are some big examples brought up earlier. the summon night games do it and nobody complains about it in there even though their approach is roughly the same as cold steel's, i think trails' problem is pretty much entirely just one of the approach not fitting within the scale of the games, whether it's due to the sheer number of characters involved or the continuous nature of the series. nobody complains about this kind of thing in a one-off rpg because in a game like that you're usually not around the system long enough to notice its issues. in trails, you can be around that system for four games straight and be there to see the values reset mid-saga

Sure, but have you considered that maybe it, depends on how you define it. it's insanely vestigial in western rpgs and games like persona because western rpgs have to balance romance options with every other part of the game and don't want to simulate enough about relationships to make it meaningful. mass effect can barely handle conversation mechanics that require an ounce of thought, its morality system may as well be if you created two separate skills called "good speech" and "bad speech" and made them both equally effective but when you use one you kill a baby, so of course when it comes to simulating deeper emotional relationships it utterly fails to carry the writing or mechanical depth to portray those, and mass effect arguably has an actual character to work with for that in commander shepard, something most other wrpgs don't quite have. in persona's case, modern persona started out taking the bare fundamentals of a game like tokimeki memorial and rather than evolving on that in their own direction, they've basically sanded it down to the bare fundamentals so now all that remains is the part where there are scenes, and you are encouraged to find the right things to say because if you say the wrong things you'll... have to waste slightly more time to unlock the next scene. and persona protags basically share the problem of western rpg protags when it comes to romance in that, most of the time they do not really have enough personality to carry a meaningful or understandable relationship.

now if you're speaking strictly narratively, i don't think it's really that vestigial in jrpgs for the same reason it's not that uncommon in vns. if you have actual characters, you can write actual character dynamics. as long as you can do that well enough, you can make romance a major part of a game without strictly having to base a ton of mechanics around it, and if you really want to make it a matter of player choice it's possible to split a story into separate routes as long as the scale of the game can manage it, that's why you see it a bunch in games with less fancy presentation. vns and rpgs have a bit of an interconnected history, and this is arguably one reason for that. writing distinct lines, sometimes recording new voiced dialog, isn't the cheapest but if you don't have to make a ton of unique cinematics, then yeah it's not nearly as hard to make different romantic options work narratively.

now mechanically it gets more complicated if you want to go beyond route splits. route splits are what vns do, people conflate them and dating sims but system-wise they are not as comparable as people like to think. a proper dating sim is a lot more than route splits, it's basically a full-on life management game. i mentioned that persona uses a lot of heavily sanded down ideas from tokimeki memorial, and the reason that's a problem is because tokimeki memorial does follow that basic design of interactions boiling down to "figure out the right thing to say and then say it". but that's because tokimeki memorial is like, the most simple, game-ified take on the concept, and the challenge of the game is just figuring out what other characters' personalities and interests are and learning to get along with them well, and making time in your schedule to spend time with everyone while raising your stats, going to your club and placing priority on who you want to get together with. your punishment for failing at any of this is getting bombed and having your relationships with everyone get nuked hard. tokimeki memorial 1 is interesting because, in some ways it is the basic pejorative thing people envision dating sims as, but in actuality it is so not just a wish fulfillment game where it's easy to get everyone to love you. those games exist and they are, more often vns because tokimeki memorial shows how having actual dating sim mechanics at all complicates the pace and structure of your game in a way those kinds of narratives don't want, and in tokimeki 1's case specifically results in a game so stressful and single minded in its design that the entire series after it is filled with meta commentary about how weird and weirdly punishing 1 is, including even 1's own vn spinoffs that seek to flesh out characters the game treated as more throwaway, and they all make its most brutal mechanics much less brutal and remove the entire idea 1 sets up of having a singular canonical best girl you want to hook up with in favor of making the entire cast more fleshed out and likable.

but they do still keep the bomb mechanic and the generally tight scheduling and such, because those mechanics still encourage you to view the game as an actual reactive life sim to a degree. bombs get you to spend time with the cast, they make sure you won't just memory hole someone away and never consider them again. persona... kinda had that, in 3, with how social links could reverse or even break. its implementation was weird and imperfect, infamously for how it's tied into the actual dating social links, but i do think the absolute removal of it is a part of why the "romance" mechanics of the series just continue to be kind of weird afterwards, because yeah it does effectively just open the gate for you to romance multiple characters anyway still, even if they made that optional now, and it took them until persona 4 golden to actually start adding a new element to even acknowledge you doing that. obviously persona can't go deeper in copying tokimeki's mechanics, tokimeki's daily life system moved at a much much faster pace and it didn't need to worry about a full jrpg to tie into at the same time. but it does stick out how much persona copies from tokimeki without really creating innovations of its own, and while lacking a lot of the context around those systems that make sense of them. even in the fact that social links are a defined short story with a beginning and end, that has the natural result of the end of a romantic relationship having... nothing? afterwards. there's nowhere left to go. you've reached the end of your mechanical incentive to spend time with this character, if you try doing it again you will just get an utterly generic disposable scene. that's not really a thing, in dating sims, the relationship continues to the end of the game and you stumble into more unique moments and have to work to keep up your relationship with that girl.

with relationship systems as presented in games like cold steel it's a little more basic than that and doesn't always necessarily tie into romance, it's more about some idea of representing specific bonds within the group. a lot of games just hide the values straight-up, ffx and tales of symphonia are some big examples brought up earlier. the summon night games do it and nobody complains about it in there even though their approach is roughly the same as cold steel's, i think trails' problem is pretty much entirely just one of the approach not fitting within the scale of the games, whether it's due to the sheer number of characters involved or the continuous nature of the series. nobody complains about this kind of thing in a one-off rpg because in a game like that you're usually not around the system long enough to notice its issues. in trails, you can be around that system for four games straight and be there to see the values reset mid-saga

# ¿ Jan 10, 2023 09:32

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The only good rpg romance is rosa/cecil/kain

# ¿ Jan 10, 2023 09:37

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Finished Valkyrie Profile yesterday. What an amazing game. Next up is Star Ocean First Departure R.

The Year of the JRPG continues

# ¿ Jan 15, 2023 17:33

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The Colonel posted:

there is no objective conception of higher or lower dignity between artists. maybe between people who care about the arts and people who are purely in "the business" for commercial reasons but i think an independent japanese author writing clunky and weird art based around sexual themes has as much dignity as a celebrated stage actor. the idea of one being better than the other is silly and only exists for the purpose of empty validation rather than a genuine desire to explore what art can express

Even if an independent author writing clunky and weird art based around sexual themes can have as much dignity as any other artist, the art they express can still be bad, or expressed poorly

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 11:41

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Jay Rust posted:

I wrote it wrong on purpose haha!

So dignified...

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 15:10

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The Colonel posted:

anyway to step back and respond to this

this is beyond obvious to state but. bad is a subjective term and writing that touches on themes of sexuality bluntly and honestly, even if you might say they express it poorly, is worth more to me than how sheepish or downright avoidant of touching on sexuality most commercial art is, or how some stories will treat things like sexual abuse as an awkward footnote or, a "detail". and nasu's writing has connected with people through multiple truly awful english translations, some 2000s eroge-rear end sex scenes that i frankly would not be surprised if he was not completely that invested in writing in, and some parts of the original tsukihime that i would actually agree are just poorly conceived and incongruous with the actual overall direction of the story and what kind of note it ends on for some of its characters. some of my favorite writing is from authors who on a bad day i might say i utterly hate because of issues i have with other pieces of work they've written, i like umineko and the original run of higurashi vns a lot but if you asked me about some of ryukishi's other writing or even just, most of higurashi after those initial vns, i might not always have the kindest words. same with a guy like kotaro uchikoshi or kazutaka kodaka. but at the end of the day i won't personally condemn individual writers taking an honest shot at writing something interesting with specific themes they want to convey. there are so many writers out there who aren't even capable of doing that much, and that's much more embarrassing to me

What if we were to compare type moon guys writing to writers who have written things other than visual novels tho?

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 18:02

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

The Colonel posted:

i am doing that. scared?

Are you? Who are you comparing him to? The only names you've dropped are other visual novel writers

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 18:23

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Okay, my point is that there are plenty of writers who do all that stuff but are also good at writing

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 18:27

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Snooze Cruise posted:

Sorry I only read V so I am actually not the best to make this post, I plan on reading more pynchon later this year so maybe stay tune for then when I compare the writing of nasu to pynchon

Mason & Dixon is perhaps my favourite pynchon. It is deeply emotional and affecting! I hope you enjoy

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 18:46

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Speaking of rpgs and writing, I cant stop thinking about valkyrie profile since i finished it and how much it reminds me of george saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 18:50

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Sakurazuka posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvoueEiVyWE

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 20:25

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Endorph posted:

have you read NYT best selling genre fiction? nasu is in the top 1% of writers currently alive

I don't read nyt best selling genre fiction no

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 21:35

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

I'd rather read some skeevy horned up visual novel than anything by the likes of Jonathan franzen et al. but actually I dont have to read either

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 21:45

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Cat-shaped Witch posted:

I like role playing rpg games

Hell, same

# ¿ Jan 16, 2023 22:04

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Snooze Cruise posted:

can we keep the thread title but add a 2 at the end?

Actually it's the year of the JRPG now

# ¿ Jan 18, 2023 09:47

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

exquisite tea posted:

I guess you'll be saying "Nomura" that!

# ¿ Jan 20, 2023 09:30

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Mr. Fortitude posted:

Honestly, kinda love that WA3 has the protagonist be a woman and she isn't involved romantically with anyone at all except Maya and the group dynamic is more wholesome instead.

WA3 is a blessed game indeed

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 00:27

fridge corn: Apr 2, 2003; NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN

Yeah, I have an aborted playthrough from a few years back and I dread going back to it. I will probably just start over, but since I played through the first game last year I'm holding out hope that we'll see some kind of rerelease of the second game sometime...

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 00:49