Air Master Burst wrote:I'm game for this, I would love to play a Jarpig that's on the same level as Jagged Alliance! Which would you recommend as the deepest without having to deal with Xenoblade levels of system bloat? ETA: That's on PC, because I only have that or a creaky old launch PS4.
ETA2: I just looked up Labyrinth of Touhou and the level cap of 12,800 is giving me PTSD flashbacks to Disgaea. I prefer tactical challenges to mathematical ones, so I tend to prefer systems with lots of terrain and elevations and environmental effects over traditional Jarpig buff/debuff shenanigans.
Labyrinth of Touhou's numbers eventually become gigantic, but it's balanced pretty well. It's definitely more of a tactics game than a grinding game. Labyrinth of Touhou 2 even has a hard difficulty that forbids you from outleveling bosses. You'll be around level 100 when you're ready for the final boss in either game. I've only completed the postgame of the first one, but you'll be about level 500 by the time you're ready for that, which will take some real grinding.
Some of my favorite TB doujin RPGs:
Labyrinth of Touhou 1 and 2: Dungeon crawlers where you control a party of 12 characters, with 4 in your active party and 8 resting in reserve. You can switch any two characters' positions on any character's turn. You lose if your active party dies even if you still have people in reserve. The 8 reserve characters gradually heal both HP and SP, which is important since your access to active healing is very limited compared to most RPGs. Each game has like 50 different playable characters, and each one feels more unique and mechanically than different classes do in the overwhelming majority of RPGs. The character switching mechanic is amazingly versatile. You use it to manage your health and magic, to manipulate turn order, to allow vulnerable characters to "dodge" incoming attacks, and more. They have very good boss design and frequent boss fights, but most random encounters you just 1 or 2 shot with AoE attacks and move on. Both games are quite long and feature considerable postgame content. If you try them, it's probably a better idea to start with the second game. It's on Steam.
Potato Flowers in Full Bloom: Party-based dungeon crawler where you make a team of 3 characters from a variety of classes. Its two mechanical qualities that make it stand out the most are that it always tells you what the enemy is about to do on the upcoming turn, and it has much, much better-thought out defensive mechanics than one usually sees in RPGs. The basic defense command cuts incoming damage to 1/4, which you will need because enemies deal tons of damage. Different classes have their own special defensive abilities as well. Rangers and rogues can do iframe dodge rolls, warriors and knights can take hits for their teammates. Every character, enemy and ally has a finite stamina gauge that depletes fairly quickly, usually it'll last you for 3 or 4 actions. Every character can rest on their turn, which will fully recover stamina, but leave you defenseless. Running out of stamina while defending also leaves you defenseless, and you really do not want that. Lots of interesting choices on when to push your luck with stamina and when to rest early to stay safe. The playable classes are all fun and doing repeat runs with different setups gives it even more replay value. Another cool thing about Potato Flowers is its experience curve. If you don't like one of your classes, just make a new level 1 character and put them in your team. Their experience levels will shoot up so quickly that after three or four fights they'll basically be caught up to your main team even in the late game. It's an incredibly good game, and extremely charming too. I would go so far as to say that Potato Flowers' tutorial is more mechanically interesting than the average RPG. It's available on a variety of platforms, complete with a free demo, and is about 20 hours long. If you're going to play only one of these games I'm recommending, I think it should be this one.
Helen's Mysterious Castle: Unique combat system where all fights are 1v1 duels and all character building is done through equipment. Helen can carry up to 8 items and every item in the game has some distinct ability. Every action you can perform has a different defense value and startup time. Using a shield gives you a bunch of defense, but that's all it does. The broadsword is slow, does a bunch of damage, and protects you fairly well. The idea is that you want to manipulate your actions and timing so that you land big hits while the enemy's guard is down while preventing them from doing the same to you. The game has great enemy variety and basically no filler content. It's about 5 hours long and a blast from start to finish. It's a steal at $2. Unfortunately, since Playism's store has closed down, I don't believe there's an official way to get a DRM-free copy of the English version. I've got a longer review and a replay up here:
viewtopic.php?p=1399670#p1399670
Demon King Chronicle: The combat system here is serviceable and not much more than that, but the way the game expects you to stretch your limited resources while the enemy AI tries to surround and overwhelm you makes it shine. It also has excellent exploration, and an interesting setting and story, told with minimal dialogue. It's about 20 hours long. It used to be a free download on the Playsm store. Since that has shut down, the English version is no longer officially available, but I've uploaded my own copy which you can get here:
https://files.catbox.moe/l02ghi.zip
I've also got a longer review up here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=23939&start=11940
Liar Jeannie in Crucifix Kingdom: A short, third person dungeon crawler where you control two human characters and can summon two defeated enemies as undead for a party of 4. Quality combat and character building, and in particular its status ailment system stands out as the best I've ever seen in any RPG. I want to say it's about 5 hours long.
You can get it for free here:
https://vgperson.com/games/liarjeannie.htm
Hat World: A perfection of the formula used in Squaresoft's SFC Romancing SaGa games. Great combat and character building. Likable characters and interesting stories (though it is pretty dialogue heavy). Choose from one of six main characters, take the other 5 down in any order and claim their powers, Rockman-style. Unlike most JRPGs, here you explore the game's world in sidescrolling platformer format. It's full of interesting side content (I love the fighting tournaments in the World of Battle) and challenging boss fights. Like in Romancing SaGa, your characters grow faster while facing challenging enemies, so as long as you keep pushing forward you won't need to grind. Your first route should take about 30 hours, beating everything including the unlockable 7th route (of course it has one!) will take about 100 hours.
Here's the translation team's image they've created to advertise the game, complete with a download link.
For Demon King Chronicle and Hat World, you'll want to switch to Japanese locale and/or enable UTF-8 encoding before unzipping the game files. This is not nearly so intimidating as it may sound:
In Windows 10:
Go to the control panel
Click region
Select the administrative tab at the top
Click the change system locale button
That will open a window where you can either check a box to enable UTF-8 and/or change your system locale to Japanese
Personally I just leave UTF-8 encoding enabled permanently. There's no real reason not to.
I've seen a few people worried about changing their system locale, so I'm just gonna say here that it won't do anything bad. You shouldn't even have to restart Windows. It's not going to reinstall windows using the Japanese version or rename any of your files or folders with kana or anything like that.
None of these are bloated messes like Xenoblade or Star Ocean-style cringefests.