Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

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

Post by EmperorIng »

Remember how six (!!!) years ago now, a team announced a translation of Falcom's Legend of Xanadu 1 and 2, claimed they had completed all the text, and were waiting on doing a dub and did a casting call.... and here we are six years later with nothing to show for it? Sengoku's post made me remember, and get sad about how another project just seemed to stall out at a fairly inconsequential part.

I guess if nothing else the amount of fan translations coming out these days is staggering (maybe too many machine translations but hey).
Sengoku Strider wrote: Anyway. I've heard WD messed up the sequel, but that the Japanese version's not so bad, so I'll probably check that out at some point down the line.
If there's an Unworked Designs patch, try that out, but having played the Japanese version I can say that it's not very good, sadly. It's blatantly unfinished and buggy and the story doesn't really have any of the charm of the bizarre original.
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BryanM
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Looking into it, looks like the start of that effort was originally announced twelve years ago.

I don't really get why it's so difficult. On a technical level all you really need is a blog post an e-mail address for volunteers to apply. Scatter-shoot a bunch of starving youtube anime voice people/dweebs/dweeb-people emails and maybe a nice cast can be assembled.

Looking back at these retro style systems like the Master System and the Pico-8.... man, the NES really got screwed over in the color department. I'm a little obsessed with understanding the technical reason they chose to implement it like that. Maybe 3 or 4 bits per pixel was too much for the little chugger or something, that's the only thing that makes sense. 7 or 15 global colors would have made a world of a difference. You've heard me complain often about how bad having to reuse black in every palette is.

(JRPGs suffered from this perhaps worse of all: they used that "trick" of having a black background filling in the transparent part of sprites. The scene on that console suffers from an extreme overload of black; not to the same degree as "star" games on the 2600 but still way too much. DQ1 is an oasis in a desert, honestly.)

I guess pixel processing speed had to be the reason. It's kind of amusing the palette designating dibit is basically like a byte code, a number that causes the numbers that come after it to behave differently. It's a wonderful little trick modern systems just never have to use any more, sadly..

I'll never give them any quarter on the actual palette colors chosen. It's a hideous monstrosity against all good taste. A kusoge of color palettes. Only some computer perverts back then were able to surpass them.

Anyway, the PC-Engine isn't that far removed from the Color Gameboy, really. Stuff like 16 sprites per line are only around a step better overall. I guess that has a lot to do with Strider's critique on the graphics, they really didn't have that much to work with hardware wise.

Seems like trade-offs always had to be made back then, doing this with your bits won't let you do that with them. The PC consoles like PC-98 are infamous for having absolutely gorgeous still visuals, but as soon as they begin to move things begin to get a little... less great.
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drauch
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by drauch »

I never understood why they wanted English dubs anyway. So much extra work. And with amateur voice actors? Good god, I can't imagine how that would have turned out.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Doing subtitles would have taken more work and would have required mangling the game to some degree or another. Not doing either would leave large unfinished voids of dialogue in the game. And releasing sub quality work is horrific: everyone uses the trash version and moves on, and the trash becomes the version of the file that's everywhere.

It's a huge issue in the comic translation scene; it's a massively depressing seeing something you like done by someone who doesn't speak english and just copy-pasted google translate raw in mspaint in there. Aggregators cement that work in stone.

It's not like Scott McNeil is the only man on the planet who can speak; even old half-assed dubs by people who don't care have their charms. ("To really fuck things up you need a computer.")

(Heck, that would only make the translation even more authentic, like it really was localized back in the 90's. Wouldn't it?)

They coulda found some people, they just didn't want to do that kind of thing. Not wired for it.

Worst case scenario, there's always good 'ole AI Voice. If that Scott McNeil jerk won't voice my MSPaintanime, I'll get his non-union tulpa equivalent instead.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Kino »

drauch wrote:I never understood why they wanted English dubs anyway. So much extra work. And with amateur voice actors? Good god, I can't imagine how that would have turned out.
You have played a PC Engine CD game at some point, right? So then you know how they tend to cram as much spoken dialogue in there as they possibly can. "Just add subtitles" is in fact more of a hassle than fandubbing, and in some cases, not even feasible. According to an expert on this topic:
Despite what the graphics might make you believe, the PCE is ultimately an 8-bit system from 1987, and it provides exactly one layer of background graphics and one layer of sprites. If you want subtitles, the only viable option in most situations is to add them in as a sprite overlay, which gets complicated very quickly: you have to find space in VRAM to load the graphics for the text, rework the sprite table generator routines so your subtitle sprites show up where needed (and appear on top of everything else in the scene), and try to achieve all this while somehow not disrupting the existing visuals. And keep in mind there's an inviolable limit of 16 sprites per line and 64 sprites total, so there are plenty of situations where you just plain can't add subtitles without destructively editing the scene in some way
This leaves one with two choices: either go the Ys IV route and dub it with aspiring ASMR actors, or the Xak III route where you leave the voices alone & let the audience guess what's being said during those moments. Safe to assume most people would opt for the aforementioned. (Wasn't much of a problem in Xak III, since the only thing you're missing out on is lore. But if it was a game that relayed, say, mission objectives during its voiced scenes? Yeah....)
BryanM wrote: They coulda found some people, they just didn't want to do that kind of thing. Not wired for it.
???

The English overdubs were completed over 5 years ago. Last I heard, the translator got caught up with Real Life™, and never finished matching the lip-flap to the overdub voice tracks. He's a good dude, just desperately needs to hand his projects off to somebody else. His translation for Princess Crown is similarly a decade in the making.
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BryanM
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Ah, my apologies.

I missed that post and just assumed no one would quit while two inches away from the finish line. Keep forgetting the world has all kinds of people in it, orthogonality thesis and all that..
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

I beat Dungeon Explorer, the first one, the 1989 Atlus (published by Hudson) Gauntlet/adventure game mashup. It fails the "does it have xp?" test so I guess it's technically not an action rpg, but that is how NEC marketed it, and for whatever reason it feels like it belongs here. This another one that's not too tough; it's quite generous with the lives, since you get them all back any time you continue with a password. The only thing is you lose all your stat upgrades when you die (except I think for the stat buffs you get from bosses), so the natural inclination of anyone here will be to go at it until you can 1LC the game properly. The issue with that is that you also lose all your upgrades and items if you use the password to continue, meaning you have to clear all 14 dungeons in one sitting to get it. Hard pass on that for now. I can definitely see coming back to it to play through with other characters down the road though.

Funnily enough, with Dungeon Explorer down, the only PC Engine rpg I have left unfinished is the first Legend of Xanadu. I was asking here about the game's save system a while back; I've started it multiple times, but even though it says it's saving, whenever I go back to it, it tells me the save file is empty. But everything else loads fine on the console, and I see the save in the system file manager. I'm wondering if this is one of those games that only "saves" when you finish a chapter or something.
BryanM wrote:Looking back at these retro style systems like the Master System and the Pico-8.... man, the NES really got screwed over in the color department. I'm a little obsessed with understanding the technical reason they chose to implement it like that. Maybe 3 or 4 bits per pixel was too much for the little chugger or something, that's the only thing that makes sense. 7 or 15 global colors would have made a world of a difference. You've heard me complain often about how bad having to reuse black in every palette is.

(JRPGs suffered from this perhaps worse of all: they used that "trick" of having a black background filling in the transparent part of sprites. The scene on that console suffers from an extreme overload of black; not to the same degree as "star" games on the 2600 but still way too much. DQ1 is an oasis in a desert, honestly.)
Have you seen what it was up against? The Sega SG-1000 of course, launched the same day:
Spoiler
Image
Flicky's dead eyes must have haunted little 1980s Japanese girls for weeks.
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BryanM
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Sleeping on it, part of the answer's pretty obvious: RAM and ROM cost.

The SMB1/Zelda/Metroid etc tile map were this big:

Image

Moving to 3 bit color would have shaved 33% of the tiles off of the sheet, using the same amount of memory. (And using more was impossible at the time, when they wanted this thing to be as cheap as buying two toasters.) Woulda been almost SNES-level good looking if they got it working tho.

(The SMB1 tilemap always makes me feel like looking at the work of an illustrator/animation guy. Naturally they'd want to invest most of the map into the 1 thing the player will be looking at constantly. It's all very clearly Pop-eye, the inspiration shines through.)
I was asking here about the game's save system a while back
I 'memba. I'ma assuming this is on CD, so a dead card battery wouldn't be the culprit.

Thinking about it now, if there was something unique to say about the save system the FAQs at GameFAQS would have said it, but my googling suggests there wasn't anything there. I think this may be a defect of some kind, or some wonderful issue unique to you and this particular game.

Let me tell you a couple tales of fucky hardware stuff. They'll sound like made up BS, spooky copy-pasta attention seeking nonsense. Like seeing a UFO or bigfoot. They are 100% true, they're not the mandala effect, they weren't brain hallucinations. They wouldn't have been this consistent.

My Sega Genesis's AV cable was slightly cut, and repaired by wrapping some electrical tape around it. The game Shining Force has a cheat code you can input to enter a battle select menu. The code is rather complicated and time sensitive to put in. For some reason it activated a couple of times while I was doing stuff with the AV cable. The code requires hitting the reset button, pressing some buttons at certain times. I had no idea it existed, I wasn't touching any buttons, and I think it entered the battle menu at a time it shouldn't have been allowed to.

Naturally, when I tell people this no one believes me. (I guess this sort of thing isn't literally impossible, which is why some were willing to give some credence to that "human element" Dragster, but only on his machine. But I'm telling the truth damnit. ;_;)

Another is that time the sound "fell off" of some of my Firefly discs. Played fine for weeks, one day the audio just stopped working. Other discs worked fine.

We tend to romanticize hardware a bit, but they're fallible imperfect beings made of coarse matter as well.. one or two bytes dying or flipping weirdly somewhere can have strange outcomes in digital systems. One stupid bit being wrong in your save file might make the game invalidate it completely. One number being wrong oftentimes doesn't hurt much in most instances, until it causes a disaster.

It's... feasible that your save memory is working fine except for one corrupted byte that only becomes a problem with this game. ... one way to narrow it down I guess is to try some other external form of memory, if your system supports a save card or something. Dunno if those will be littered with dead batteries or if they have some nonvolatile state options, I'm not familiar with the hardware which is why I didn't say anything before.
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Sumez
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

BryanM wrote:
Moving to 3 bit color would have shaved 33% of the tiles off of the sheet, using the same amount of memory. (And using more was impossible at the time, when they wanted this thing to be as cheap as buying two toasters.) Woulda been almost SNES-level good looking if they got it working tho.
The NES already uses only 2bit color depth for all graphics. :)
3bit would use up 50%,more space and not be possible to realistically read in an effecient manner for the graphics hardware. (the next logical step up is 4bpp. 3bpp can be very efficiently decompressed to 4bpp tho.

The tile limitation isn't a question of graphics storage however, as its a limitation on the sprite table and background tilemap. Each set of graphics has exactly 256 tiles which cam be defined by a single byte. The nes hardware is designed from the ground up around this approach.

Most nes games eventually ended up using way more storage for graphics, too. Some use an on-cart ram chip to load in new sets, but since the NES maps these graphics directly to the cartridge connector, bank switching can very easily be used to switch in alternative subsets of graphics at a splitsecond's notice. As in, in the middle of a frame while it's drawing, potentially making every pixel visible on the screen map to a unique position on the source ROM, which would be wasteful but is quite cool.

The Snes can't even do this, since all graphics need to be copied to the console's own video ram. I'm assuming the PCE is the same, otherwise adding in subtitles would have been a lot more trivial.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

A tile with two bits uses 16 bytes. The closest tile in three bits would be 15 bytes, but would need to be 5 x 8 pixels.

Parsing the pixel stream on a byte-per-byte basis would indeed require a strobe pattern or math operations as you say. Instead of almost-blopping down 4 pixels at a time.

Am curious about the more expensive proposals that got shot down. The price of an extra toaster or two would have completely changed things.

... eh, now this has brought me from thinking about the cool trade-offs all the quirky old consoles used to make to stand out, to being sad about how maybe it really is only people in positions of power that make the history books.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

It is blowing my mind how much of that Super Mario tile set is taken up by the title screen logo. Now I get why 2600 games almost never had them.
Sumez wrote:Most nes games eventually ended up using way more storage for graphics, too. Some use an on-cart ram chip to load in new sets, but since the NES maps these graphics directly to the cartridge connector, bank switching can very easily be used to switch in alternative subsets of graphics at a splitsecond's notice. As in, in the middle of a frame while it's drawing, potentially making every pixel visible on the screen map to a unique position on the source ROM, which would be wasteful but is quite cool.

The Snes can't even do this, since all graphics need to be copied to the console's own video ram. I'm assuming the PCE is the same, otherwise adding in subtitles would have been a lot more trivial.
Hudson initially designed the PCE to be pitched to Nintendo in 1985 as a 'Super' Famicom using similar parts to the original, I'm not sure how different it is in that regard. Doesn't it need to do something similar to pull off SF II' with its huge sprite tables coming off that phat HuCard?

Image
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BryanM
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Watched the FF6 remaster final battle on youtube to see how they butchered it. Eh. Could have been worse.

The way Dancing Mad was made up of a bunch of smaller songs that connected to one another as the fight progressed in phases has been one the composer has followed up on in his later works. I sure know Granblue Fantasy is a big fan of doing things this way. It's kind of a little reward in the middle of a battle, "oh, this is the cool part of the song."


(This wide screen nonsense is getting way out of hand. These FF's were not designed to fill that space; the empty voids in the remasters are heinous. It's bad enough when diablo clones and the like give you three thousand miles left and right and two inches up and down.... Crop something sometime, mass market normies..)

(This bothers me enough I've documented some of them in this science diagram)
Spoiler
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This is violence.

Battles are even worse. The true ultimate darkdeathexsoulpodgergodbastard final boss? The size of a postage stamp.
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TransatlanticFoe
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

Finished up Octopath Traveler 2

While it is more of the same, it does go a long way to correct the flaws of the first game. Chiefly there is a lot more interaction between your party members. Travel banter is more frequent in pubs and occurs during story chapters, making it feel like they're actually interacting with each other this time. The new "crossed paths" stories, which pair up characters for short skits are also welcome - while the story connections are obvious from the individual chapters, these flesh it out and give a little more personality to the party. I'd prefer them to be meatier and more frequent (there's two parts to each - one at the start and one after clearing the characters' chapters, which is a bit sparse) though.

Characters are all good this time round, I found Alfyn to be a bit of a non-entity last time. Here even when the odd character is a bit plain (Hikari, Castti), their story and crossed paths more than make up for it. The stories are also quite varied, some go to pretty grim places while others are more lighthearted. Partitio's in particular is just completely insane and comes up with a couple of great boss fights.

The extra jobs also feel unique - less like overpowered versions of the base jobs, instead are unique and vary from attack, utility and support. Skills are mixed up a bit and some of the more overpowered ones are removed, plus each character's unique ability is much better: Apothecary's offensive elemental side actually does damage, hunter's beast summons are unlimited, the warrior's learned skills ability allows for supreme flexibility. There are also new "latent powers" which need to be charged up, by either taking damage or breaking enemies. Some are more useful than others and they're rarely strictly necessary - just an extra tool available.

Almost feeling like it's influenced by the Live A Live remaster, there's now a proper final chapter leading to the boss fight - not a complex series of steps to unlock a superboss and text lore dump. No annoying repeat boss gauntlet. And some surprising revelations! This is a big plus, and there are more obvious elements in most of the stories which make it feel like it's all building up to something.

No more chests you need the thief to unlock! This is so good, because it was annoying to either permanently have the thief or risk finding a chest you have to come back to.

What's not so good... or rather not improved from the first game:

Your party is still absent from individual stories. I get it, you can pick up or not pick up anyone when you like, so it's hard to make them do anything due to all the possibilities. But one moment in Hikari's story has him go "ah but I have my friends" and the party rocks up. That. That's what it needs. A short "wait outside" scene to your party, then another scene showing them turn up. That's all it takes to make it feel a bit less weird when the party comes and goes.

It's not especially difficult. It sort of feels like it's balanced to only pick up half of the available party members. By the endgame chapter I made short work of the final boss without breaking a sweat - I hadn't deliberately gone grinding and I'm sure I left/forgot about a couple of optional dungeons

Minor, but sidequests are often really vague. It's easy to pick one up and just not have clue where to go to progress it, then others are obvious "knock this guy out". They're largely inessential but a bit more info would have been nice for those where you fuck off to do something else and are supposed to remember to pick up a random NPC you come across, then take them back somewhere.
Spoiler
Galdera is back, and I'm glad he's not story-related because the fight is absolute bullshit. This coming off the back of destroying the final boss with relative ease. I feel like it's been designed for people to figure out a cheese - because frankly he hits too hard and is too difficult to fight normally. The souls now reflect damage that isn't a weak spot and only share two weaknesses, so the first attempt is literally trial and error just to find the weaknesses. They still resurrect if not killed at the same time too, so need to be broken and then killed at once.... and still Galdera respawns them all after a time.

I got it into the red by cheesing the souls (Ochette can capture a monster than does multi-hit wind damage and a chance to insta-kill the target) but Galdera's eye takes a lot of punishment even with buffs/debuffs in play... and then gains a silly amount of shields while acting multiple times per turn. With no easy way to overheal in this game, I did not survive.

It's not story-related so I have no issue leaving it, it's just a shame that it's not so much of a challenge as it is about finding a way to break the game in order to win. Maybe there's enough demand in the JRPG player base for this sort of thing and it's just not for me.
Cracking game. Doesn't change the basics, improves on the original and doesn't make anything worse.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by ryu »

I like that Octopath 2 fixes the party interactions somewhat. But I thought the combat and townsfolk interactions with all those character skills were a little tedious. Not like any of that makes Octopath a terrible game, so I might still check out 2 eventually.

Recently started Xenoblade 3. Cool so far, but I only just got past the opening chapter. I expect this will take me a few months to clear.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

I have a pile of Shining games that I'd been meaning to go through. I had been partway through both Shining in the Darkness & Shining Force on the Genesis Classics Collection but managed to lose all my saves like a genius when I got my OLED switch, so I started again with the JP versions on cart.

I wound up getting caught up in Shining Force & finishing that first. I actually beat it years ago on the Sega Smash Pack on Dreamcast, but couldn't remember much except for elves, really big boots & armadillo people. It comes across as pretty simplistic nowadays, but the formula & pacing were still compelling enough to push me through it. And I gotta say, playing with the map it came with really does a lot to contextualize the story. Despite having beat it 1.5x before, I never had any sense of geography or a larger campaign. But with the map you can see how you start at one end of a major island, work your way up freeing kingdoms, cross over to another major island and then work your way down. It also makes the story resonate better, as you find out the two main kingdoms are mirrored in history.

After that I went back to continue with Shining and the Darkness (original JP title). I was a little down on this one for a while, it felt like I got way ahead of the game's difficulty curve after the first or second dungeon floor, and the game's entire economy after the 3rd or 4th. I was just running around mashing through perfunctory battles. But then I read that aside from the programming & art basically the whole game was put together by one guy because Sega was cheap, and my disappointment turned to respect. By the time I had cleared the trial caves and reached the rest of the main temple, it felt like the curve had regained its bite and I was having to make strategic choices about resources and how long to push my explorations again. And damn, is it just me or is this game crazy long for its era? I got through Shining Force in about 10 days, but I've been going at Darkness for 3 weeks solid and I'm only now at the end (3/4s of the way through the final floor). Though granted, a lot of the play time comes from either drawing your own maps or constantly using the project spell, which shows you a map of the footsteps you've taken in your immediate area. These mazes are much too compex to get through otherwise unless you have omega-level spacial memory. But overall I've been having fun with the latter portion of the game, which says something because I almost always seem to burn out & quit on dungeon crawlers part way through (RIP my SMT Strange Journey & Stranger of Sword City saves).
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Finished Shining and the Darkness. Is there more than one ending to this game? I never did anything with the rainbow fountain or become the warrior of light, which seems kind of important. I was level 60-something so I was able to tank Darksol's big mega spell and take him down the old-fashioned way.

Also, I love that they literally used hobbits in this game and named your healer Bilbo. 80s-90s Japan just didn't care.

I have Shining Force II on deck next, but I think I might finish up Monster World IV first for a change of pace.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Squire Grooktook »

ryu wrote:I remember when Trails in the Sky was relatively recent and received a lot of praise wherever I saw people mention the game. These days I hear about how you need to play the entire series to get the full experience. Which today spans across more than ten individual games.
Very late reply but don't listen to those people.

I played Trails in The Sky 1 and 2, which ended that little storyline. I was completely satisfied by the ending, said to myself "yup! That was fulfilling, that was a perfect ending to the best video game storyline I ever played. I am satisfied." and aside from a brief stab at 3rd, I've not bothered with the rest of the series at all.

A friend keeps harping on me to play the rest. I steadfastly tell him that the look of the newer games doesn't appeal to me and I only really cared about Estelle and Joshua's personal journey.
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................

Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
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Sumez
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

Fwiw I'm playing TITS2 myself right now, and it's not very good. It basically takes everything that made the first game great and throws it out the window.

Not sure I'm gonna do the rest of that series, I can probably use those years of my life in better ways.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

Let's not use that acronym again :lol:
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Sumez wrote:Fwiw I'm playing TITS2 myself right now, and it's not very good. It basically takes everything that made the first game great and throws it out the window.

Not sure I'm gonna do the rest of that series, I can probably use those years of my life in better ways.
Sky 2 is a masterpiece and a game that will live in my heart forever. All the big character moments you'll see a mile away but all of them hit like a truck and do exactly what they need to do. I got into TTRPG's specifically because after I finished 2, I realized "nobody is going to make a character driven rpg storyline that good again for another 10-20 years ago, I guess I'll just have to make my own".

I see a lot of people claiming the opposite about the game, that the first one is "just okay" or "a decent start" and that the second is "where it gets good"...but to me the slice of life moments in Sky 1 are imperative to the story and vibe of the game and part of what makes everything in 2 work. They should really be considered 1 big game split into two, and I could see Sumez possibly losing the thread if it was 5 years ago that he played the original...not experiencing them back to back could lose something perhaps.

*edit* I will also say Sky 2's "villain introduction / monster of the week" arc midway through is a bit weak. If you're stuck at the part where the cast runs all over the country bumping into the various Enforcers, I could see thinking its a step down compared to Sky 1's very organic plot...but it all becomes well worth it once the plot kicks into gear and the characters start getting the real climaxes to their arcs and development.
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................

Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by drauch »

I'm not huge on turn-based RPGs of its ilk, but I did love TITS 1 (love this acronym). Almost instantly went on to two and faded after ten hours. I'd like to give it a shot again, but it's way too much of the same thing again, at least in that time span I played. Perhaps I'll feel differently after some time away and things feel fresh again. Just felt like all the same areas, but the difficulty ramped up. I just seem to recall that first fight to be about as randomly hard and punishing as that overly long endboss from the first. Prettttty sure I already whined about it in the past and someone assured me it gets better. I'll give it another shot in time, 'cause to echo Squire, that first one left some great memories in my cold, dead heart.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BIL »

TITS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX_6_R1NsoQ Image

shumps exparts PLS halp, my grandchildren bought me a crazy FARCOM jarpig from market and i'm not sure if it's correct??? 3:

Spoiler
Image


pls advise these acronyms are getting crazy! regs biruford ;3 ;3 ;3 (i would hate 2 accidentally play a "shump" and catch TISM like main forum :O)
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

Squire Grooktook wrote:I could see Sumez possibly losing the thread if it was 5 years ago that he played the original...not experiencing them back to back could lose something perhaps.
I watched a very thorough recap before playing it to prevent this. But honestly, I think a part of TITS2's shortcomings are directly related to how long you're stuck just repeating setpieces from the first game before the game wants to let the story progress even slightly, so I'm not sure it benefits that hard from having the first game fresh in your mind.
Squire Grooktook wrote:*edit* I will also say Sky 2's "villain introduction / monster of the week" arc midway through is a bit weak. If you're stuck at the part where the cast runs all over the country bumping into the various Enforcers, I could see thinking its a step down compared to Sky 1's very organic plot...but it all becomes well worth it once the plot kicks into gear and the characters start getting the real climaxes to their arcs and development.
Well yeah, admitted, I'm stuck at that part. But I've also played over 30 hours so far, and I'm still stuck at "that part" which has been the entire game so far.
TITS1 did start out boring and generic, and then massively changed its pace and came back from that, so I'm completely open to TITS2 doing the same thing. If the story does become more appealing "once it kicks into gear", I'm all for it, and I'll be back to say that I was wrong about the game.

But the game has been very busysubverting pretty much every single element that made 1 appealing to me, so whatever the story does after this point, it needs to go hard as fuck!
And even then, at this point it's hard to see how much a good ending to the game would be able to redeem it. The first game kicked into gear once you got past the prologue chapter, but in the sequel I'm 5 chapters in, and it's still refusing to get anywhere. If it takes that long to "get to the good part", that makes it a very hard game to recommend to anyone.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Sumez wrote: Well yeah, admitted, I'm stuck at that part. But I've also played over 30 hours so far, and I'm still stuck at "that part" which has been the entire game so far.
My playthrough clocked 100 hours, so rest assured there's quite a bit of plot, events, and new stuff after that sophomore slump is over :wink:
Sumez wrote:TITS1 did start out boring and generic
I strongly disagree on this one.

There's nothing generic about even Sky 1's early game. Unless you take it in the absolute broadest strokes of "boy and girl in a village are shoved into a bigger adventure", and there is the vibe of that certain kind of late 90's japanese roleplaying game (the type of which is extinct and was far too shortlived even in its heyday to be called "generic" IMO), but Sky 1's slice of life early game is utterly inimitable in its sense of warmth, atmosphere, character and setting building, etc.
Sumez wrote: If the story does become more appealing "once it kicks into gear", I'm all for it, and I'll be back to say that I was wrong about the game.

But the game has been very busysubverting pretty much every single element that made 1 appealing to me, so whatever the story does after this point, it needs to go hard as fuck!
And even then, at this point it's hard to see how much a good ending to the game would be able to redeem it. The first game kicked into gear once you got past the prologue chapter, but in the sequel I'm 5 chapters in, and it's still refusing to get anywhere. If it takes that long to "get to the good part", that makes it a very hard game to recommend to anyone.
As I said, the big crucial character moments that both this game and the entirety of the first are building to - are done to absolute perfection. I don't think I've ever seen a game make such moments feel so genuine.

That being said, I didn't even find the The Enforcer Boogaloo to be particularly unengaging. Yes, the baddies aren't as interesting as they could be for how long it takes to introduce them, and the "villain of the week" plot structure of the arc feels tediously predictable after a point, but I didn't particularly care because the game continues to build up its setting and characters the entire time. At the end of the day I liked the series because I liked the main characters, both for the innocent slice of life moments and the more dramatic adventure moments, and how both of these gradually build up a real sense of progression, character development, and maturation of the cast.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

I didn't particularly care because the game continues to build up its setting and characters the entire time
Did we play two different games? Pretty much no character progression has happened at all so far in the game, rather it's just reveling in each character's devoted archetype ad infinum.
Which is pretty egrerious considering the character progression of the first game was really eminent, and one of the things that really elevated it above its peers. Sure, the characters were clichés, but (most of them) seemed to have a real human character behind it.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Sumez wrote:
I didn't particularly care because the game continues to build up its setting and characters the entire time
Did we play two different games? Pretty much no character progression has happened at all so far in the game, rather it's just reveling in each character's devoted archetype ad infinum.
It's been like, 6 years so I can't like cite entire passages of the script, but I do know there's some important character scenes at least. The one with Estelle in Luciola's introduction arc is pretty notable. I wanna say more but my memory is hazy.

At the end of the day though, the characters and their interactions entertained me, and I specifically like Trails for being a game that takes its sweet time fleshing out the cast throughout...even if that means plenty of moments that are "merely" comfy or slice of life (in fact, I'd say those moments are my favorite...Estelle shoving a sandwhich into Joshua's face is still one of my favorite scenes in the first game). So I didn't have issue.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by BryanM »

Super Mario RPG, eh.

I did love the art style, there's just something about isometric prerendered art from that era that really tickles my math brain. I did like how they had minigames and physics for walking around the world map. The sense of humor was nice.

The only things I didn't like was the battle system and world design. If there were more skills, and the theme was more like Earthbound meets Dragon Quest or something, I would have loved the entire thing.

Well, those waiting to replay it again but only if it had more pixels should be happy I suppose.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Lander »

SMRPG getting some love at long last is great, pretty unexpected given that Mario & Luigi has been MIA, and Paper Mario has lost most of its color. The dozens of Geno and Mallow fans can finally rest easy :)

Surprised to see them keeping fairly faithful to the original aesthetic in terms of proprortion and such; if anything I'd have expected it to be redone regulation-style, but nope, everyone's just as stocky as I remember. And those old-school isometric spinaround emote animatons, grand.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by Sumez »

Given Mario Bros Wonder, it seems regulation is out of the window :P

I find it hard to subscribe to the idea that "paper Mario has lost its color". Its tough to think of a game thats more wacky, fun and colorful than Origami King.
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Re: Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

Just pleased they can be fucked to translate it this time. There was so much hype for it back in the day and then "nah, not coming to PAL regions" was a footnote. The N64 was still a year away for us, it's like ditching Star Fox 2 - you have a huge install base and nothing else to sell, what are you doing?
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