Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Sumez
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

The only thing I know about Jaseiken Necromancer is that it's one of those games that's always a part of cheap bundles of "junk" games unloaded by Japanese sellers. I probably have at least two copies of it. And also I can't play it because it's *shock* all in Japanese.
Steamflogger Boss wrote:FF6 box is actually the last thing I really want for my small-ish CIB SNES collection. Recently got a CT box to finish that off.
Funny, those two exact same games were the very first thing I bought back when first got the means to import video games a few decades ago. :D
I thought they were expensive then, but I'm glad I don't have to get them now.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Sumez wrote:The only thing I know about Jaseiken Necromancer is that it's one of those games that's always a part of cheap bundles of "junk" games unloaded by Japanese sellers. I probably have at least two copies of it. And also I can't play it because it's *shock* all in Japanese.
It's basic enough that if you had a guide to explain the menus, weapons & spells you could get by. At least from what I've seen so far, the plot barely exists. But due to the encounter rate, it's only really worth it if you're ever hankering for this sort of old school jrpg experience.
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BrianC
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BrianC »

Jaseiken Necromancer also has nothing to do with this game.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by WelshMegalodon »

So I just made it to the World of Ruin.
Spoiler
Until today I had no idea it was actually possible to keep Cid from dying. The fact that the cutscene you get for doing this is a generic "thank you" when the alternative is Celes' suicide attempt is just... lame.

And I know complaining about the "leap of faith" censorship is old hat at this point, but man. If there's one reason to prefer the GBA remake over the original, it's Slattery's translation.
Indie hipsters: "Arcades are so dead"
Finite Continues? Ain't that some shit.
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Sumez
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

... it was censored?
I don't think that ever made it through to me. The meaning of the scene seemed clear as day.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Looking at the scene now, the old man's remarks about everyone else killing themselves does seem pretty dissonant, tonally. Though I suppose doing it did technically in fact "perk her right up" out of emo mode. Benefits of being a PC with 3000 hp versus an NPC with like 5 I guess.

The branch state on this fork is indeed as cheap as it gets in typical jRPG fashion. All you get for catching the speedy fish is a signpost that sits there and goes "thanks for saving me! I'm not plot relevant tho!" Its only real purpose to make you paranoid about whether or not you can save other doomed bastards in FF games.

That branch is rather jarring and does break any illusion you're in an actual world of any sort. The level of simulation bar is so low, we were impressed with Star Ocean 2 at the time because party members would hang out in towns and be all like "hello, I am a person that actually exists and not just a faceless combat unit" when you talked to them.

ooo... Star Ocean 2, now there's a game where the obtuse choices you make without even knowing you're making them matters right where it hurts the most: your party roster!
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

With Virtual Console winding down, I've started buying up around $20 worth of games monthly before they're (potentially) never purchasable again. A staggering number of things vanished when the Wii's wrapped up, never to be seen again (you could buy Commodore 64 games!). The Wii U's sunsetting won't be anywhere near that dramatic, but it is the only non-piratical avenue out there for getting DS - excuse me, NintenD00DS - games on a TV. And seems that it will be for the foreseeable future. Not sure if/when the TurboGrafx-16 & PC Engine stuff will resurface either, it's worth it just for the Konami & Hudson shooters.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (along with FE7 & Sacred Stones), Zelda Phantom Hourglass & Spirit tracks, Dungeon Explorer, Neutopia I & II, there's a lot of interesting stuff on there.

Anyway. I grabbed Ogre Battle 64, which I had never touched before. Holy cow, does this game look fantastic. Like I get it, everyone was bitter about Nintendo's 3rd party policies and the economics of the cartridge format made no sense, but it still seems like a waste Nintendo never went harder after rpg developers if this is what the system was capable of putting out. I'm sure their marketing people told them spending a dime on pushing anything 2D was money wasted, but they were dummies and will go down in history as PART OF THE PROBLEM.

I don't even know if I like the game yet, I've never played an Ogre Battle before. I was just flabbergasted at how far ahead of similar efforts on the PSX it looks.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sima Tuna »

Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre are amazing games for srpg fans. I'm quite fond of both the gba Knight of Lodis and the og Tactics Ogre. I haven't played march of the black queen or ogre battle 64 nearly as much though.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Tactics Ogre & Ogre Battle have both been on my Saturn 'to get' list for a while. They might have to stay there for a while longer too, the Saturn rpg library is absurdly deep. There are still a lot of things I want to get first, like Dragon Force II, the Konami duo (Suikoden & Vandal Hearts), the five Langrisser games, Terra Phantastica (an srpg by the Phantasy Star team? How did this get left in Japan!?), the third Legend of Heroes game, etc.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

It was probably a lost battlefront after losing both Enix and Squaresoft. Unless Nintendo plopped $20 million on your head, it'd be the dumbest thing in the world to not make RPGs for the platform that had RPGs on it. And paid better royalties.

Mother 3 is probably way more fun than Mother 64 would have been anyway. Also note they also cancelled a Fire Emblem 64 project.

One can make an argument that they 'ought to have made more jRPG franchises than just Mother and Pokémon, starting in the NES days. But the competition was fierce and the profit margins on these giant games often very comparatively smol. Their content preference for marketing to children, it's hard to imagine they'd have made something like Persona before Persona. (Life sim + Dating Sim + jRPG.) The SNES could have done it, but they wouldn't have done it.

Thankfully... they still got Harvest Moon 64? I'm going to vote Harvest Moon 64 as the best jRPG for the N64, no contest.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Gamer707b »

Went back to XenoGears after a couple weeks off. No spoilers, but the story is getting pretty heavy. Don't even play Rpgs anymore, but this game is a gem. Don't even know what graphics style it uses. The character models look like sprite based but the backgrounds might be polygons. The characters are really appealing, the combat is so good and unique and the music. WOW!! Why can't an indie company make a sci-fi, futuristic setting like this instead of fantasy all the time?
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sima Tuna »

Xenogears uses 2d sprites and 3d modeled backgrounds, yeah. The mechs are fully 3d models though. So mech sequences/mech dungeons are just in full 3d, as far as I know. Minus the enemy sprites, which are 2d for human-sized enemies and 3d for mech-sized enemies. I can't remember how much pre-rendering XG uses. In some ways, I think the game's palette has allowed it to age more gracefully than a lot of 3d ps1 games. It uses pastels, greens, tans and browns very effectively. The visual style is similar to one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. Which also employs a mix of 3d backgrounds and 2d sprites.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Gamer707b »

Sima Tuna wrote:Xenogears uses 2d sprites and 3d modeled backgrounds, yeah. The mechs are fully 3d models though. So mech sequences/mech dungeons are just in full 3d, as far as I know. Minus the enemy sprites, which are 2d for human-sized enemies and 3d for mech-sized enemies. I can't remember how much pre-rendering XG uses. In some ways, I think the game's palette has allowed it to age more gracefully than a lot of 3d ps1 games. It uses pastels, greens, tans and browns very effectively. The visual style is similar to one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. Which also employs a mix of 3d backgrounds and 2d sprites.

Yea I think the graphics have aged well for me too. The character models especially are charming. Also the gameplay is very good. Very different. FF7 and Skies Of Arcadia are my favorite Rpgs of that time, but this one so far is every bit as appealing.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

BryanM wrote: That branch is rather jarring and does break any illusion you're in an actual world of any sort. The level of simulation bar is so low, we were impressed with Star Ocean 2 at the time because party members would hang out in towns and be all like "hello, I am a person that actually exists and not just a faceless combat unit" when you talked to them.

ooo... Star Ocean 2, now there's a game where the obtuse choices you make without even knowing you're making them matters right where it hurts the most: your party roster!
Lol yeah, the well produced titles have come a way in that regard. It mostly doesn't bother me anyway but trying to make a living game world is nice.
Sengoku Strider wrote:NintenD00DS

Anyway. I grabbed Ogre Battle 64, which I had never touched before. Holy cow, does this game look fantastic. Like I get it, everyone was bitter about Nintendo's 3rd party policies and the economics of the cartridge format made no sense, but it still seems like a waste Nintendo never went harder after rpg developers if this is what the system was capable of putting out. I'm sure their marketing people told them spending a dime on pushing anything 2D was money wasted, but they were dummies and will go down in history as PART OF THE PROBLEM.

I don't even know if I like the game yet, I've never played an Ogre Battle before. I was just flabbergasted at how far ahead of similar efforts on the PSX it looks.
I love that this became a forum meme.

As far as Ogre Battle 64 that is one of those games I have started probably at least 6 times and never finished. By all accounts I should like it based on other things I enjoy, but that franchise mostly misses for me and I don't know why.
Sengoku Strider wrote:Tactics Ogre & Ogre Battle have both been on my Saturn 'to get' list for a while. They might have to stay there for a while longer too, the Saturn rpg library is absurdly deep. There are still a lot of things I want to get first, like Dragon Force II, the Konami duo (Suikoden & Vandal Hearts), the five Langrisser games, Terra Phantastica (an srpg by the Phantasy Star team? How did this get left in Japan!?), the third Legend of Heroes game, etc.
Dragon Force 2 is excellent, like the original. Suikoden 1 I still think is great. Langrissers are okay, it's been...good lord at least 15 years since I played them all so it's hard to remember a ton but they were competent. I remember not liking them quite as much as Growlanser 2/3. Terra Phantastica is another one I played with a printed off translation guide many years ago. If you like srpgs (seemingly you do) then you will probably enjoy it.
Gamer707b wrote:Went back to XenoGears after a couple weeks off. No spoilers, but the story is getting pretty heavy. Don't even play Rpgs anymore, but this game is a gem. Don't even know what graphics style it uses. The character models look like sprite based but the backgrounds might be polygons. The characters are really appealing, the combat is so good and unique and the music. WOW!! Why can't an indie company make a sci-fi, futuristic setting like this instead of fantasy all the time?
Yeah it's an incredible game.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Steamflogger Boss wrote:As far as Ogre Battle 64 that is one of those games I have started probably at least 6 times and never finished. By all accounts I should like it based on other things I enjoy, but that franchise mostly misses for me and I don't know why.
Ogre Battle does have an inherently flawed game design. The biggest core issue being it's supposed to be this war game with massive armies clashing against each other.... but the actual optimum way to play is to have one super powerful squad and send it to assassinate the boss. There's no real benefit of having multiple units bully the same enemy, you can just attack over and over with the same one again and again, there's no cooldown or penalty for taking on swarms. You're just spreading your time and EXP earned out if you use multiple squads. (And then the original game punishes you for leveling up your dudes too much. What fresh hell is this.)

It's really not anything like a game of Warhammer.

(Could you even imagine a game of Warhammer using Ogre Battle's combat system? "You chaos knights can't flank these spearmen until they're done fighting these other dudes, wait your turn. Eh, what's this? You're slaughtering your opponent's weak dudes with your strong dudes? That's very not cool. Papa Nurgle shows up and gives you minus five charisma points for that, mister. Think about that next time you, you know, try to win a war or something.")

There are other annoying things about it. Having a healer in a squad often means you'll always be pushed back after combat (not having a healer means your d00ds are gonna diiiie). Peaking out on around map four and having not much to look forward to getting. Massive anxiety in wondering if you're missing out on something permanently missable on a map. The automatic combat. It's kind of an anti-jRPG!

A really great game gets cloned massively. Super Mario Bros. Wizardry. Street Fighter 2. The only thing I'm familiar with that copies much of Ogre Battle is the Disciples series. I guess games like Soul Nomad And The World Eaters and Bahamut Lagoon are kind of similar, squad based war combat..

I think isolated squad units like this are a great concept for an incremental idle game or a city building game. Not so much for raw combat games. (See, that's another jRPG thing Ogre Battle lacks. Downtime where you can chill out in town and do other things. In the grimdark world where ogres fight, there is only war.)
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

So, I was planning to play through FF VI this summer, but the cart doesn't seem to play nice with OSSC. So I started up FFV last night instead. I was only actually planning to test if it worked, but ended up getting sucked right into it. I think I'm really going to like it.

I was kind of surprised by how simple the Japanese was. Not that English FFs are Shakespeare, but I have an image of them as more complex than this; it's very clearly written for an all-ages audience, whereas things like Romancing SaGa use vocabulary at a higher level. Because of how written Japanese works, you can pretty clearly tell what ages something is aimed at by the grade level of words they use, and if/when they use kanji. This game literally has bracketed hiragana pronunciations for the few kanji introduced (I guess the font used & resolution wouldn't allow for furigana surtitles).

I thought this was weird, because I'd read about translation difficulties and multiple attempts at localization having been made back in the day and abandoned. I tried looking up why it wasn't localized. Reading between the lines on its wikipedia page, as near as I can tell they just thought Westerners would be too dumb for it?
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

I've been watching a lot of a pokémon youtuber's videos these days.

It made me think of how cool it would have been for the most hardcore Pokefans, if Gamefreak actually supported moving your units forward into new games and had max level hardmode content for them. You spend all this time in their games to catch a legendary, and you barely get a chance to do anything with it before it goes to pokeheaven.

It would be a kind of play that is rarely seen on console games but all the time on PC games: that your hundreds of hours of labor will matter for something hundreds of days from now.

In a sane world you would be able to interface with your external server pokestorage from within the game, without needing an stand alone app for it. It's altogether a mess for something that should be as simple as breathing: to move your 3ds pokemon forward, you need to download Pokemon Bank. It's going to be free to use next year, but conversely, you won't be able to officially download it next year either. (Bet you knew that, huh.) Then you need to download Pokemon Home for your Switch, pay them a million dollars to pass a few bytes back and forth for you, then port your 3DS guys into Switch mode and you're done! Easy.

It's kind of a miracle anyone was dedicated enough to do this at all, when you think about it. Just hacking in the critter you want to use is a trillion times less hassle.
Sengoku Strider wrote:I thought this was weird, because I'd read about translation difficulties and multiple attempts at localization having been made back in the day and abandoned. I tried looking up why it wasn't localized. Reading between the lines on its wikipedia page, as near as I can tell they just thought Westerners would be too dumb for it?
I can only talk about translations in generalities and as an observer; it really did take years for the RPGe patch to drop.

English text, as you know, requires roughly twice the display area to say the same thing. If you have a good text parser in a game, it just requires a number for a carriage return feed and everything is beautiful and wonderful. If you don't, well, it becomes a bit of a nightmare where everything an NPC utters needs some ASM work. Fitting stuff in without reshuffling the underlying source, and sometimes without expanding the ROM (the suits would rather prostitute their mothers on the street than foot the bill of a bigger ROM) well... it leads to unprofessional results, we'll say.

Secret of Mana is a good example of a game that was absolutely butchered, being forced to fix inside a breadbox too small for it. Ted Woolsey always lamented the hackjob he was forced to do on it.

But I don't think technical difficulty per-se was an issue for SquareSoft, Final Fantasy 5 isn't anything special in that regard. It's no Tokimeki (something that just finally got translated this year! You can finally experience that historic game in perfect english.)

The lack of manpower with the necessary expertise was probably a contributing factor. They literally smacked Ted Woolsey with a bullwhip and forced him to translate everything from that era all by himself, I doubt they had more than a couple programmer monkeys fulltime on localization projects; they were probably all busy on other projects during this window, such as SoM, SaGa 3, Breath of Fire etc. Also consider how they didn't consider the Final Fantasy series as anything special, they didn't localize 2 or 3 either. Or a TON of their other SNES games like Live a Live, Bahamut Lagoon, etc. They're just interchangeable product to the suits.

We sure did get Mystic Quest, though, didn't we.

Dragon Warrior 1 is an example how there wasn't much of a market for jRPGs back then. It was big in Japan, Nintendo assumed it'd do well here, Nintendo overprinted the things and ended up giving them away with Nintendo Power subscriptions.

Now... Dragon Warrior games on the NES. Those are some good localizations, minor censorship notwithstanding. They added in an extra line for items in your inventory. They inserted special opening scenes in most of the games. Dragon Warrior 1 had directional facing and a save system added. That wasn't trivial work, especially with the limited tools they had developed for themselves back then.

It's neat seeing the engine upgrades as the series went on. NPC sprites will never walk into or out of a tile where a menu is open, up until DQ4 where they'll walk right in there, their sprites set to not display but the walking AI still running on them while they're invisible. I assume the SNES DQ games use a fresh engine: the facing of characters after walking on stairs is always downwards, instead of the direction that the stairs lead toward.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BryanM wrote:Also consider how they didn't consider the Final Fantasy series as anything special, they didn't localize 2 or 3 either. Or a TON of their other SNES games like Live a Live, Bahamut Lagoon, etc. They're just interchangeable product to the suits.


You think so? I think they made a big push with the franchise with the first game, but it didn't meet expectations and they (or publisher Nintendo) were left holding the bag with a ton of extra copies that were ultimately written off as marketing expenses by being given away free with Nintendo Power subscriptions. But they still rebranded SaGa & Seiken Densetsu in the West as Final Fantasy titles, indicating they felt the name had traction.

Bahamut Lagoon being left in Japan is understandable if you assume the standard 12-ish month turnaround; it released in Feb 1996 in Japan. June '96 was the North American N64 release, and the SNES was dropped like a rock the moment that year's holiday season was over. It only saw 12 retail releases across all of 1997, like 3/4s of which were low-effort shovelware.

Live-A-Live was probably in a similar situation, it was a fall '94 release. Square's fall '95 slate was Chrono Trigger and Secret of Evermore. With FF III still on shelves, Secret of the Stars & Breath of Fire II hitting, and the early adopter segment of the hardcore crowd out buying brand new PlayStations (and maybe Saturns and possibly even 3DOs & Jaguar CDs), they probably thought they'd be selling into a tightening rpg market. A quirky game like L-A-L, which had pretty basic visuals and good but not great reviews in Japan likely wasn't going to stand out enough to be worth the investment at the time.
We sure did get Mystic Quest, though, didn't we.
It seems pretty clear that North American publishers had market and focus group research saying the average console gamer of the time didn't get rpgs, or thought they looked boring or graphically simplistic. So it makes sense that they gave us Mystic Quest as an entry-level rpg. It did sell decently, Square said ~400k outside of Japan at the time.

When you break it down, most of the stuff they left in Japan was released there in '95 or later, too late for localization into a shrinking SNES market given the necessary turnaround:

Romancing SaGa 3 ('95)
Seiken Densetsu 3 ('95)
Front Mission ('95) & Gun Hazard ('96)
Bahamut Lagoon ('96)
Rudra no Hihō ('96)
Treasure Hunter G ('96)

Then you look at the exceptions, released earlier in Japan but passed over for Western release:

Romancing SaGa
Romancing SaGa 2
Hanjuku Hero
Alcahest
Final Fantasy V
Live-A-Live

Final Fantasy V & Live-A-Live have been addressed.

Romancing SaGa was probably (correctly) seen as too complicated and unconventional. Even when games in the series did release in the PS1 & PS2 eras into a burgeoning rpg market, they largely went over reviewers' heads and under the radar.

Hanjuku Hero was a strategy rpg, which nobody but Sega (Shining Force) and Treco (Warsong/Langrisser) had even touched in the West. I don't think Nintendo were even hinting at bringing Fire Emblem over, despite its Japanese success. And Hanjuku Hero was a wacky Japanese comedy. Not a strong localization candidate for 1993.

Alcahest - I don't get passing on this one. It's an action rpg by the legendary HAL, with fantastic visuals. Its shortcoming is that it's only a couple of hours long, but that sort of thing doesn't usually stop anyone.

Overall though, stranding rpgs overseas was far from just a Square thing; before Final Fantasy VII, most rpgs were left in Japan. Prior to FFVII hitting in late '97, the PlayStation only had 3 or 4 rpgs in its first 2 years (two of which were Beyond the Beyond & King's Field). Almost the entirety of the Saturn's substantial rpg library was left in Japan. How many people even know there was a Dragon Force II? Or that the Phantasy Star team made a highly rated strategy rpg? Neither one even has a Wikipedia page. And the poor old N64 got like 4 rpgs total in its Western lifespan, two of which were apparently terrible (I've only played Ogre Battle 64 & Paper Mario, so I can't comment directly).

We know there was always an audience there, but I'm guessing the higher localization expense compared to other genres made the opportunity cost a bad bet to MBA types. Unless you worked at Koei. Given all of the above, that company's Western back catalogue and continued stability is kind of amazing. Though from EGM's published Babbages top 10 sales charts at the time, I know Romance of the Three Kingdoms sold shockingly well for the early 90s.
Dragon Warrior 1 is an example how there wasn't much of a market for jRPGs back then. It was big in Japan, Nintendo assumed it'd do well here, Nintendo overprinted the things and ended up giving them away with Nintendo Power subscriptions.
Just like FF1 mentioned above. I can understand their thinking though. There was no console rpg market in Japan either when DQ1 hit, but it still managed to be a sensation. When it hit North America I think the only rpg on the NES was FCI's Dragon Questy port of Ultima: Exodus, but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own. Japan didn't even have tabletop rpgs when DQ1 hit. Aside from the D&D cartoon, which hit Japan in 1985, it was released largely without wider context.

And Zelda II & Simon's Quest had been big hits in the West the year prior, DQ was an outright phenomenon in Japan, and it was being published by Nintendo with all their market clout and the Nintendo Power propaganda machine (proud subscriber since 1990 here) behind it. So I get why they were projecting big things. It reminds me a lot of the overconfidence NEC America had for the TurboGrafx-16 based on its Japanese success, which released at the same time.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Live-a-Liver is a game I'd really enjoy if I were a better person.

The correct way to play the game is to get in there and let what happens, happens. Not to try to do everything perfectly, that's a miserable way to play the game.

But with my terminal jrpg-brain, I have the compulsion to 100% it. Even if I rationally know that a perfect save file will mean nothing after I beat the game and move on.

It's a very fun little game though. I recommend it to everyone who wants something fresh.
Sengoku Strider wrote:You think so? They still rebranded SaGa & Seiken Densetsu in the West as Final Fantasy titles, indicating they felt the name had traction.
When you have one title to your name in a market.. \/(=_=)\/

Selling the SaGa games under the 3-D Worldrunner brand would have been a real head-scratcher. Even moreso than selling Seiken Densetsu as a Final Fantasy game.

An excuse could be made for the NES games, their company needed time to grow. By FF5? It's like you said, they either thought we were a bunch of big dummies (comments made in Nintendo Power and the existence of Mystic Quest are indeed evidence of that), or they didn't care and were just throwing different stuff out to see if anything stuck.
Sengoku Strider wrote:Romancing SaGa was probably (correctly) seen as too complicated and unconventional. Even when games in the series did release in the PS1 & PS2 eras into a burgeoning rpg market, they largely went over reviewers' heads and under the radar.
RS2 seems to really have a special place in people's hearts in the Japanese side of the internet. The Seven Heroes coming back from the dead for revenge or whatever was going on with that plot...

I probably would have loved it, if I had gotten to play it when I was 10. Maybe more of us would have developed differently, not into boring robots that crave linearity and perfect completions..
Just like FF1 mentioned above. I can understand their thinking though. There was no console rpg market in Japan either when DQ1 hit, but it still managed to be a sensation. When it hit North America I think the only rpg on the NES was FCI's Dragon Questy port of Ultima: Exodus, but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own. Japan didn't even have tabletop rpgs when DQ1 hit. Aside from the D&D cartoon, which hit Japan in 1985, it was released largely without wider context.
Hm. A bit of this leans perhaps a bit too much into the mechanical side of reasoning. And discards the emotional.

Dragon Quest got its start thanks to the followers of the people who made it. If not for Dragon Ball, would you say it would have taken off as it did? If not for Dragon Quest, would the jRPG's that came after it been as viable? I don't think I've ever seen a game explode to that degree, outside of Super Mario and Streetfighter II.

That seed audience is like the tritium in a nuclear bomb, you need it to set the other stuff on fire. I see hundreds of webnovels wither and die every day for a lack of those initial ~30 readers.

Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy had nothing when they were launched. No characters, creators, or clone games anyone was connected to. All they had was Nintendo Power and little prepubescent nerds like me (like us?). Of course as those nerds grew up, they'd infect more people with their mind virus and the genre would grow.

.. urgh. Now you gave me the idea that in an alternate universe, Nintendo was happy with the performance of these two games. Which led to them actually botherin' to release Mother after they translated it 100%. Which led to them actually trying to make another RPG franchise or two.

... wait, that brings us back around to Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Nevermind.

Anyway, maybe a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or similar, jRPG could have boosted the adoption curve of these games if one had been made back then.
but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own.
The console D+D games, ugh. Pool of Radiance was good, but if you were a hardcore dedicated moody teen, you'd already played it on PC.

The Dragonlance games... Heroes of the Lance is made up of all the suffering in the world. This one might have had a seed audience, from the best selling books it's an adoption of. That it was based on one 30-minute long action sequence in the middle of the first book, was perhaps wrong, conceptually. That it was absolute dogshit...

I don't think it even deserves the title of "kusoge". Kusoge is art, things that should be remembered. The eye-melting blue on green trees of Stargazer. Takeshi's Challenge. HotL doesn't deserve to be remembered.

The silly HotL memes on GameFAQs, though. Those are gems. Nude midgets that kick you in the shins. Mountain dew-spewing dragons. Becoming invulnerable by using Michael Jordan cologne. The extreme fixation on how HEROIC Sturm's mustache was. Hah...
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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Sengoku Strider wrote:Secret of the Stars & Breath of Fire II
The "PS1 on the horizon" angle I can get behind, but, though it'll never happen, I'd really love to know how much of an effect the existence of these games and other also-rans like them actually had on Square's localization decisions back in the day. Especially Secret of the Stars, even as a kid that one absolutely reeked of doomed trend-chasing when I read about it in Nintendo Power (note: I never actually tried it, but I would be very surprised if anyone told me my initial impression was wrong).
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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Advance Wars Days of Ruin Nintendo DS

People talk about Fire Emblem being tough but I never have much trouble with those. The last 5 missions of this game are a hellscape. On the cart I got there is a save from 2008 where someone quit after mission 21 and I can't say that I blame them at all. I'm a psycho so I finished. I didn't do any of the trial maps and got I think 19/26 S Rank on missions. Might be able to get all S ranked if I replayed missions, but meh.

Started Solotarobo and it was fine but I had some games arrive in the mail and I haven't been able to put Code of Princess down. This game is a fine example of why you should ignore reviews. 67 on metacritic apparently, but this game is solid gold.

Speaking of SaGa, a series almost no one cares about, it was one of two branded DSis I was able to get dirt cheap from Japan. Waiting on it and a Final Fantasy CC one in the mail.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BryanM wrote:
Sengoku Strider wrote:You think so? They still rebranded SaGa & Seiken Densetsu in the West as Final Fantasy titles, indicating they felt the name had traction.
When you have one title to your name in a market.. \/(=_=)\/

Selling the SaGa games under the 3-D Worldrunner brand would have been a real head-scratcher. Even moreso than selling Seiken Densetsu as a Final Fantasy game.
Hey, King's Knight was available! But still, it's not like companies didn't release games without prior brand ties all the time. It indicates to me some faith & expectation for the brand name.
An excuse could be made for the NES games, their company needed time to grow. By FF5? It's like you said, they either thought we were a bunch of big dummies (comments made in Nintendo Power and the existence of Mystic Quest are indeed evidence of that), or they didn't care and were just throwing different stuff out to see if anything stuck.
One other possibility is that Nintendo had published the previous two Western console titles, so I wonder if they just passed on it or weren't willing to offer the splits Square wanted on it.
Dragon Quest got its start thanks to the followers of the people who made it. If not for Dragon Ball, would you say it would have taken off as it did? If not for Dragon Quest, would the jRPG's that came after it been as viable? I don't think I've ever seen a game explode to that degree, outside of Super Mario and Streetfighter II.
I'm not sure how to quantify that one. The Dragon Ball manga started mid December 1984, and the anime launched February 1986. Dragon Quest was March 1986. So when DQ hit, the DB manga had existed for all of 16 months, not even a year and a half, while the anime had only been on for a couple of weeks.

I know the manga was a huge hit, but I don't know what the sales curve looked like or when it started to peak, so I don't know what kind of currency Toriyama's name really had in early 1986.

The Sugiyama influence is another one I'm not sure how to judge. He was a composer/songwriter/producer/director, rather than a notable performer. So he'd been prolific, but not really in public facing roles. I don't have time atm to go into an internet deep dive, so forgive the Wikipedia check here - it mentions his ties with Enix started when he wrote them a fan letter for a shōgi game. But here's why I usually avoid Wikipedia for much other than release dates though (and even those are super unreliable). The wiki cites an archived article from the long defunct 1up.com. The wiki states:

"After Enix's staff overcame the shock of receiving a handwritten postcard from a celebrity of Sugiyama's stature, they were so impressed by his depth of knowledge and appreciation of games that they decided to ask Sugiyama to create music for their games."

Except none of that appears in the cited article. The actual quote is:

"I've always liked video games, and long ago I played a game called Morita Shogi which Enix released on the PC-8801," he said in an interview with Famitsu magazine this week. "I wrote down my impressions of it in the little questionnaire postcard in the box, and my family sent it back to them without me realizing it. Whoever received the note recognized my name and gave me a phone call asking if I could compose some music for them. I said yes, and that was how I began making game music."

Okay, so he filled out a questionnaire, his wife or whoever sent it out, and someone at Enix recognized the name and gave him a call asking if he was interested in some contract work for games. The 1up writer tries to frame him as a "huge celebrity" based on having written for commercials & a couple of anime theme songs, but that's very much stretching the definition of celebrity in a pre-internet era without IMDB or an OST sub-industry. It's stretching it even further to place that in the realm of broader kid-awareness.

The 1up article appears to just be farming a Famitsu interview from the time, so if anyone feels motivated they can try & go dig that up. The Japanese wiki page is much more detailed overall, but doesn't really address the issue. It mentions he'd written for pop groups in the 1960s, but was called by a contemporary "King of the B-Sides," not really a ringing endorsement of stardom. Otherwise, he appears to have paid the rent producing radio shows & directing/producing for Fuji TV which in Japan, especially at the time, was not a road to wealth.

Yuji Horii was some rando with some freelance game articles & four NEC PC programming credits to his name, the only notable one of which was The Portopia Serial Murder Case. DQ was what made him a name.

So the upshot of all that is I'm not sure how much the creators helped Dragon Quest, and how much Dragon Quest helped the creators. Toriyama seemed headed for success either way, but with Sugiyama it seems to be the basis for his legacy in the cultural consciousness. And with Horii it unquestionably is. DQ landed at the right moment, as an accessible option when Western fantasy & role playing culture had been booming for years worldwide, and was catching on in Japan. Meanwhile the Famicom was exploding after Super Mario Bros hit 6 months earlier. Also, the game was just really good.
but there was a very well established rpg culture in the West. The US was the very birthplace of D&D after all, which had been a cultural tsunami all its own.
The console D+D games, ugh. Pool of Radiance was good, but if you were a hardcore dedicated moody teen, you'd already played it on PC.
That's totally what I was referring to. Commodore 64s were in plenty of suburban bedrooms. Speaking from experience, Ultima, Wizardry & the D&D gold box games were known quantities for kids interested in that sort of thing even if you didn't have one.
BulletMagnet wrote:
Sengoku Strider wrote:Secret of the Stars & Breath of Fire II
The "PS1 on the horizon" angle I can get behind, but, though it'll never happen, I'd really love to know how much of an effect the existence of these games and other also-rans like them actually had on Square's localization decisions back in the day. Especially Secret of the Stars, even as a kid that one absolutely reeked of doomed trend-chasing when I read about it in Nintendo Power (note: I never actually tried it, but I would be very surprised if anyone told me my initial impression was wrong).
Square had localized & published the first Breath of Fire, and BoF II sold well in Japan despite hitting the same day the PlayStation launched, so that would have been on their radar. Secret of the Stars wasn't something I can see them as having been particularly concerned with on its own; rather just that somebody (or their confused parents) was going to buy it, so it was making the market that much more crowded purely by existing.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Sengoku Strider wrote:But here's why I usually avoid Wikipedia for much other than release dates though (and even those are super unreliable). The wiki cites an archived article from the long defunct 1up.com. The wiki states:

"After Enix's staff overcame the shock of receiving a handwritten postcard from a celebrity of Sugiyama's stature, they were so impressed by his depth of knowledge and appreciation of games that they decided to ask Sugiyama to create music for their games."

Except none of that appears in the cited article.
The composer's popularity did always come across as one of those uncontested early internet myths due to the language barrier. (I'd like to call people who lie on the internet worse than scum... but glass houses.. I've lost count of the times I've told people the cows people feel compelled to worship in the various Abrahamic bibles are the time wizard Nanna... all because I'm secretly a Nanna cultist.... (Reminder the golden calf from Exodus moos in the Quran, and that's why it's the coolest bible.))

Dragon Ball when it was exploding, fresh and new, had to have been had a massive boost to it. You had this game that looked just like your favorite comic/cartoon sitting there on the shelf, gotta buy it. The alternative is that Japan just has a higher nerd ratio for whatever reason. Culture? Urbanity? Phrenology?

The lack of religious families heavily opposed to fun and completely opposed to numbers, (numbers are demonic) probably helped their comparative growth. God, I remember my grandmother calling DND devil worship stuff; here's your satan manual, available to pick up at your local book store. If only it were that cool...

I do find talking about Fighting Fantasy and Sword World to be refreshing. DND... ... it's just like with Harry Potter, right? "Read a different book. Play a different game." The FATAL and Friends somethingawful threads always took me places. The kusoge of the tabletop world. Spoilers on FATAL:
Spoiler
This thing originally started as a DND knockoff, except the big twist is it had comprehensive rules on weird sex stuff. The original title was literally: F.A.T.A.L: Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery. One of many risible features was the existence of so-called "retard strength": characters with low intelligence had a chance to go above the normal strength cap. (This stuff was hidden in the closet in later editions I believe, which I declare both cowardly and boring.)

The myriad icky tables contained within.... looking back on it all, it's kind of a parody of DND's combat fixation. That game, especially in 3rd edition up, had a massive bureaucratic bean counter fetish when it comes to combat rules as it is.

It makes me appreciate how simple and clean Heroquest was with combat. "You are a barbarian. You have three attack dice. Now get on with your life."
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BryanM wrote:The composer's popularity did always come across as one of those uncontested early internet myths due to the language barrier.
Now, I'm not saying that I know for a fact that he wasn't well known, just that the notion seems unlikely and I can't substantiate it. But because Japanese variety shows always need dozens of 'talents'/personalities to fill out the seats on stage throughout the day, the nature of notoriety in Japan can function quite differently. People get desperation-cast into spots on these shows for all sorts of absurd reasons. I was watching a variety show clip a little while back where one of the 'talents' was a young woman whose sister was having a minor meme-moment for being known as the cutest golf caddy (not golfer) on the Japan Women's tour. That was the closest she came to some claim of recognition, which is kind of something considering Japan has enough cute actual female golfers for Yahoo Japan to do top 10 listicles. On the other hand she wasn't obnoxious and desperately attention-seeking like two of the other among the four they had on, so I guess more power to her.
Dragon Ball when it was exploding, fresh and new, had to have been had a massive boost to it. You had this game that looked just like your favorite comic/cartoon sitting there on the shelf, gotta buy it. The alternative is that Japan just has a higher nerd ratio for whatever reason. Culture? Urbanity? Phrenology?

The lack of religious families heavily opposed to fun and completely opposed to numbers, (numbers are demonic) probably helped their comparative growth. God, I remember my grandmother calling DND devil worship stuff; here's your satan manual, available to pick up at your local book store. If only it were that cool...
I mean, if we're talking about Japanese grandmas/moms from the 1980s, pretty much anything other than homework was their satan. But Japan unquestionably does have a higher nerd-to-jock ratio, maybe in part connected to its introversion/extroversion ratio being basically the inverse of the United States', something like 65/35 vs 35/65. But also, 300-odd years of Confucianism at the ideological centre of the culture, with centuries more before that as part of the broader epistéme, made scholarship the most venerated of pursuits. Which kind of makes more sense to me as a way to run a culture than centring it around guns & football, but maybe that's just loser talk.

=========

I picked up Falcom's Legend of the Wind: Xanadu for PC Engine, which at first glance seems not bad, but not what I was hoping for. From screenshots & clips I'd seen I was hoping for something along the lines of a less sadistic Zelda II with anime cut scenes, but so far it's just a light hearted kinda generic-feeling jrpg world with Hydlide "push into the enemies and hope" combat. Which, okay, that's what the original Xanadu was, but Legend of the Wind being kind of its own sub-series (though it does say it's Dragon Slayer VIII on the front) and on a console I was expecting something closer to Faxanadu. It's also one of those annoying Falcom games that runs like a PC-98 game, with choppy character movement. Which makes no sense because AFAIK this game & its sequel were made from the ground up as PC Engine Super CD exclusives, released really late in its lifespan (1994 & 95).

On the other hand, it's nowhere near as bad as Falcom's Legend of Heroes I & II for the Saturn. I'd given this a spin briefly a year or so back and dropped it, but decided to give it another shot after Xanadu for comparison. My memories did not deceive me, it's pretty bad. Falcom Classics vols 1 & 2 on the Saturn feature some really quality remakes of multiple Falcom titles. But somehow, this stand-alone release received zero work aside from a new attract cutscene, and runs exactly like it must have on 8-bit computers. Choppy movement, choppy scrolling, kinda crummy low-colour palette world art. This might all be charming except it's not that ancient, released in 1989, and so is very story-heavy. But the story presentation is bafflingly implemented, like there's a part early on where your character gets busted out of jail. The guy who busted you out becomes the party avatar, and leads you to a conversation in a village. I could swear there are like 5 people taking place in this conversation, but there are only 3 small static characters on screen, none of whom is the main character whom the conversation is centred on.

So I'm guessing this is not the version to play. Maybe I'll get the PC Engine port down the road, unless the Mega Drive or Super Famicom ports are significantly better.

So then I decided hey, let's give Lunar Silver Star Story Complete for the Saturn a chance. I've had it for like two years but never actually put it in the system. I got the MPEG version, which uses the Twin Operator video cd card, and wow, it really makes good use of it. It's a shame Sega never did more to push it or give the Hi-Saturn (which includes vcd playback) a broader release, because the story online is that the PS1 version has better cutscenes. Now I haven't played the PS1 version since it came out, but I don't remember it looking or sounding anywhere near this nice, cutscenes or main game. It really is beautiful. Back in the day I couldn't really appreciate it; I'd heard so much about how it was Sega's answer to Final Fantasy, and Sega-heads talked it up like it was even better. I preordered & got it (with the punching puppet!) right when it came out for PS1. I remember telling my friends how awesome it was going to be, hyping it up, and then as soon as it started...ugh. It was this twee, cringy "Let's go on a magical adventure!" thing that flat out embarrassed adolescent me in front of them. I did eventually get around to finishing it, but I didn't come away with impressions of some legendary game that could go toe to toe with Chrono Trigger & FFVI.

Coming back around to it now I can appreciate it more for what it is, than resent it for what it isn't. There's a definite charm to the wistful childhood fantasy element of it. I still remember the violent debate over the Working Designs translation and its Bill Clinton jokes. I don't know if there were any script changes between the Mega CD & Saturn, but I can tell you that in Japanese this version certainly does have a silly, quirky, self-aware sense of humour right from the outset. I haven't encountered any contemporary-world pop culture references yet though. But I think Nick Rox & the rest of the torches & pitchforks mob were probably unfair to ol' Vic Ireland on this one, wishing, like me, that it was less twee and trying to blame someone other than Game Arts for that. Though I remember Vic made himself into internet rpg public enemy #1 with the tone of his response. He challenged Gamefan & Rox in particular to take a Japanese test at E3. They dodged it, and I was on team Gamefan all the way so I didn't care how weak their excuse was (they said it'd be a biased exam done by Working Designs, even though WD had proposed an independently administered test from the start). But looking back? I kinda do wonder how much Japanese ol' Nick really could read back then. The humour is not hidden in difficult to discern cultural nuance or anything. All that said, I do prefer the original so far, both in script and voice acting.

Anyway, I'll get back to FFV in a while, when I feel like unplugging the Saturn from the OSSC. But for now I'll let Lunar take me along for the ride. I have Eternal Blue as well, which I've never played, but sadly I don't believe they released an MPEG version of that one :/
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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I always reasoned it'd be pretty odd for a 10 or 12 year old to get hyped over a composer, or the weirdos who were getting excited to hear their guy lay down some fat bleeps n' bloops. Seeing comes first, and audio samples in those days came from seeing the game in person, not the box or a magazine.

Even today music is a tertiary feature for sells. Granblue Fantasy got people through the door because it looked like Final Fantasy 6. Only once they were inside did they discover it sounded like Final Fantasy 6, too. And only once they were hooked, did they maybe discover one of the reasons the aesthetics are just so, is that they literally hired an artist and composer that worked on Final Fantasy 6.

... a lot of people like Final Fantasy 6, is what I'm saying.

The presentation layer of gacha games is a particularly vicious arms race, the speed of the escalation kind of ridiculous. Fans will jokingly say "Yostar is a music company", because they do indeed commission a lot of songs. (... not even always for the game, but like... for music videos. Because reasons.) Usually engineered with a lean towards ASMR and an understanding something played on an endless loop shouldn't be repetitive.

The bleeps and bloops have come a long way.
Sengoku Strider wrote:I'd heard so much about how it was Sega's answer to Final Fantasy, and Sega-heads talked it up like it was even better.
Yeah... fanboy propaganda. The only long non-arcade style games that come to mind as being peek in their class on the Genesis, kind of do their own thing. I'd say Shining Force and Landstalker?

Because I've been inundated with that kind of spam, it made me assume the TV series Firefly was not what it was cracked up to be. I was actually really surprised when it was actually good?
Which kind of makes more sense to me as a way to run a culture than centring it around guns & football, but maybe that's just loser talk.
You forgot the awful canned beer : (

What the fuck is wrong with my country, man. Is it because all the other countries took all the good drinks, and we were stuck with this left-over horse swill?
FFV
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by hien »

Sengoku Strider wrote:But for now I'll let Lunar take me along for the ride. I have Eternal Blue as well, which I've never played, but sadly I don't believe they released an MPEG version of that one :/
In case of Eternal Blue, I would suggest the Mega CD-version anyway btw. Especially since you can play it in Japanese and don't have to worry about the western changes. It's visually so much more coherent than the remakes and one of the finest looking 16-Bit JRPGs of its time imo. The PS1/Saturn-versions have an odd discrepancy where some backdrops are digitized paintings, some are classic pixel art and others look like someone had too much fun with an image editing software. While all of it looks good on its own, it just doesn't fit together all that well in my opinion.

It's different for Silver Star though, which wasn't exactly the best looking Mega CD game to begin with and where the remakes really where an upgrade graphically. But with EB I'd always go with the original.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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Funny enough, I recently decided to try out Lunar Silver Star Story complete (PSX un-worked designs hack, which reverts most of the arbitrary gameplay changes made in the localization). Completed the first dungeon, game doesn't seem to particularly stand out for me, but it feels like a good traditional 16-bit era JRPG, and that's what I wanted I guess. Goal is to complete this before Xenoblade Chronicles 3 comes out.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Despatche »

Shame that Lunar gets chosen as "Sega's Final Fantasy" when Phantasy Star literally exists and fucking everyone studied that shit. Lagrange Point is a Phantasy Star fangame, Star Ocean is a Phantasy Star fangame reboot (?), so much of Final Fantasy IV and also Aerith is just fucking Phantasy Star, etc.
Sengoku Strider wrote:It's a shame Sega never did more to push it or give the Hi-Saturn (which includes vcd playback) a broader release, because the story online is that the PS1 version has better cutscenes.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that everything about the Hi Saturn was Hitachi's responsibility.
Sengoku Strider wrote:But I think Nick Rox & the rest of the torches & pitchforks mob were probably unfair to ol' Vic Ireland on this one, wishing, like me, that it was less twee and trying to blame someone other than Game Arts for that.
Correct. The same can be said for the DeJap Tales of Phantasia translation, which is really just some nerd kids punching up already existing silliness (give or take a few typos, it's whatever). Extremely hard to be mad at them. Speaking of which, it's incredible that DeJap's site is still around after all these years...

Of course, it's only now that the WD haters are actually successful in convincing people of their nonsense. Sure am glad the PS2 Goemon localization got leaked recently.
Steamflogger Boss wrote:People talk about Fire Emblem being tough but I never have much trouble with those.
It's specifically Thracia 776 that's obnoxiously hard, not counting the dumb higher difficulties in later games. Harder than Days of Ruin even, though Days of Ruin is still a hellscape.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Blinge »

Despatche wrote: and also Aerith is just fucking Phantasy Star
what's your reasoning?
cave hermit wrote:Goal is to complete this before Xenoblade Chronicles 3 comes out.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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See, the above post is exactly what I'm talking about. People need to know about Nei as much as, if not more so, than Aerith. I'm not even any kind of Phantasy Star fanboy, I did not grow up with Sega. It's just stunning to me how one of the most important series in RPGs ever is perpetually ignored.
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