Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

[BulletMagnet]

Another RPG Kickstarter headlined by a name you might recognize - this one is more of a tactical/SRPG title and thus not really in my wheelhouse, but for anyone interested it's already passed its (rather modest) initial goal.

[TransatlanticFoe]

The Nintendo Direct today was bananas:

Fire Emblem Engage
Octopath Traveler II
Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song Remastered
Final Fantasy Crisis Core full-on remake
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Expansion Pass
Front Mission 1 & 2 remake footage
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope
New Final Fantasy Theatrythm, with SaGa, NieR, Octopath & Live A Live dlc.
Rune Factory 3 Special
New Rune Factory series announced
Atelier Ryza 3
Raincode (new game from Danganronpa team)
Endless Dungeon from Sega
Tales of Symphonia Remastered
Like 57 rpgs with farming & other Animal Crossing trappings, roughly 8 of them from Square. One of those Square titles, Various Daylife, launches today.
Name of the new Zelda is Tears of the Kingdom, launch date announced as May 12 2023.

To call all of that an rpg overload is an understatement. Non-rpg, but also cool:

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star Boxing

There was a ton of other stuff - new Kirby, Bayonetta 3 footage, cloud versions of RE Village, VII, 2 & 3 remasters, etc. etc. Unless I missed it, no Metroid stuff.

Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

While I love the game from a "getting a fat bloke moving" perspective and lament that the instructors are mostly dreadful (sarcastic Australian is the best of the bunch), I'm not sure this is what I'd want from a sequel

Maybe they should include the awful Mega Drive game as a bonus!

Octopath II though, that's a hell of a surprise. Shame it's new characters as I'd liked to have had more from the first game's cast, as the only interactions between them came in the postgame. That's the one element I hope they've tightened up - some cross-party member side quests and general incidental dialogue to make it feel like they belong together.

[Sima Tuna]

Minstrel Song will be a sweet pickup for me. I've played a lot of saga games, but I missed this one and I'll be happy to see the Switch getting so much Saga love. Nearly the entire... HEH... SAGA... will be playable on Switch.

[Sengoku Strider]

Octopath II though, that's a hell of a surprise. Shame it's new characters as I'd liked to have had more from the first game's cast, as the only interactions between them came in the postgame. That's the one element I hope they've tightened up - some cross-party member side quests and general incidental dialogue to make it feel like they belong together.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, they had a lot of dialogue scenes during the game, though they're mostly optional, you had to follow the button prompt to activate them.

I'm 100% on board for Octo II, but I was kind of annoyed it was an "everyone has an American accent" affair.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Very based Direct.

Octopath 2 is day one.

I still gotta play Three Houses again to try and get hyped for FE. Fucking Fates being complete garbage soured me a bit.

[Sumez]

I'm not quite sure what you mean, they had a lot of dialogue scenes during the game, though they're mostly optional, you had to follow the button prompt to activate them.

Octopath Traveler has the weirdest and most awkward approach to party member "interactions" I've ever seen in any game, don't tell me you don't see it

[TransatlanticFoe]

Octopath II though, that's a hell of a surprise. Shame it's new characters as I'd liked to have had more from the first game's cast, as the only interactions between them came in the postgame. That's the one element I hope they've tightened up - some cross-party member side quests and general incidental dialogue to make it feel like they belong together.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, they had a lot of dialogue scenes during the game, though they're mostly optional, you had to follow the button prompt to activate them.

I'm 100% on board for Octo II, but I was kind of annoyed it was an "everyone has an American accent" affair.

They did, but it was almost exclusively in taverns after clearing a bunch of chapters. You needed to have specifc party members and go to taverns at specific times or you missed it - if I recall correctly you even had to travel to different taverns because simply swapping party members didn't always trigger another if you just watched one. I didn't see many until I cleared several chapter 4s, hence my postgame comment. It was a daft way of doing it and a bloody shame because they were usually fun.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I'm not quite sure what you mean, they had a lot of dialogue scenes during the game, though they're mostly optional, you had to follow the button prompt to activate them.

Octopath Traveler has the weirdest and most awkward approach to party member "interactions" I've ever seen in any game, don't tell me you don't see it

Imagine not skipping the dialogue. Could not be me.

[Sengoku Strider]

They did, but it was almost exclusively in taverns after clearing a bunch of chapters. You needed to have specifc party members and go to taverns at specific times or you missed it - if I recall correctly you even had to travel to different taverns because simply swapping party members didn't always trigger another if you just watched one. I didn't see many until I cleared several chapter 4s, hence my postgame comment. It was a daft way of doing it and a bloody shame because they were usually fun.

I see what you mean. I wasn't really seeking those scenes out, so they were usually just a fun surprise when they popped up. I recall people offering up similar critiques when the game launched, it actually kept me away from it for some time. People were making it sound like there was no overarching story and it was just unsatisfying in the end. But really, it was more a game about the journey and the way threads touch on each other more than saving the world - even though that is absolutely in there for people who want it. But I think they wanted to make something really open-ended, that a person could just pick up and play a couple of characters and explore the world, create their own story. I see that as the role playing aspect of these old school jrpgs, but I'm not sure how many people approach it the same way.

Octopath Traveler has the weirdest and most awkward approach to party member "interactions" I've ever seen in any game, don't tell me you don't see it

The way the party actually comes together feels super random, but like I said above, I think the developers left it to the player to decide why a noble knight or upright scholar or principled merchant would help a random thief they meet on the street. Or, decide that they wouldn't help him at all, there's always the option to refuse them. In another situation I would think that was just making apologetic excuses for the developer, but these guys have made multiple neo-oldschool jrpgs now and are so referential of the 16-bit era that it seems deliberate. The tavern dialogue scenes account for every party composition, so I don't think it's that they were just trying to dodge that with the recruitment scenes.

So no, I wouldn't say it was the weirdest I've seen in any game. I'm sure there are tons of pre-1995 games that would fit that bill. Or Final Fantasy X. Two semi-pro water polo players & a collection of randos travel the world to help a dancer kill herself to prevent an evil giant flying whale who is also an abusive overbearing water polo dad from doing stuff instead of just levelling up and pelting it to death with water polo balls, which they end up doing anyway. Or she's trying to avoid marrying a shady purple guy. Or both. I forget. And one of them is a secret ghost. Except the villain isn't evil whale sports dad or purple guy it's a random goddess who comes out of left field at the end. Because the story framework is all based on neo-platonic gnostic Christianity except the Sophia part is backwards for some reason so they felt like they had to do it that way even though they didn't.

But anyway, remember Tidus' laugh? That was weird interaction.

[Sengoku Strider]

Like 57 rpgs with farming & other Animal Crossing trappings, roughly 8 of them from Square. One of those Square titles, Various Daylife, launches today.

Dunkey just posted a pretty hilarious takedown of this, contrasted alongside the Sony direct (or whatever they're called):

https://youtu.be/nlLT2SHL_lg

[Sumez]

The way the party actually comes together feels super random, but like I said above, I think the developers left it to the player to decide why a noble knight or upright scholar or principled merchant would help a random thief they meet on the street. Or, decide that they wouldn't help him at all, there's always the option to refuse them. In another situation I would think that was just making apologetic excuses for the developer, but these guys have made multiple neo-oldschool jrpgs now and are so referential of the 16-bit era that it seems deliberate.

I don't think that's what is really going on at all, it doesn't feel deliberate, and nothing about that design is inherently old-school.
Each character's individual story is written entirely around the premise that they are in it by themselves. There is absolutely no recognition of the other characters even existing while any actual story scene plays out. And it goes far beyond simple gameplay/story segregation, as the game continues to create scenes of almost hilarious ludonarrative dissonance, when for example a character declines the help of a trusted friend saying they are going to go and do something alone, only to immediately be whisked into a battle with your full overpowered party of ragtag RPG misfits. I can't remember the situations precisely, but the game has a TON of scenes like that, where actually having other people present for the story would have affected the outcome so drastically that it becomes completely impossible to ignore the dissonance.

So when the game tries to half-heartedly remedy that by creating those weird interactions where both characters suddenly get whisked into a pocket dimension just for the duration of the scene, which is the only place they are both allowed to exist at the same time, that just comes across even more comical.

Like you said, I find it highly implausible that anyone would play the game in a way where they just straight up refuse to recruit some of the characters, but the way the game was designed really feels like the developers had a completely different idea for how that would play out until it was way too far into development to change it. Even if you do take only 6, 4 or even 2 characters into your party for the duration of the game, that still conflicts completely with nearly every character's story assuming they are just alone. You can't really patch that contrast with "role playing" when the game spells out every single story beat with heavy dialogue and characterization of everyone.

Or Final Fantasy X. Two semi-pro water polo players & a collection of randos travel the world to help a dancer kill herself to prevent an evil giant flying whale who is also an abusive overbearing water polo dad from doing stuff instead of just levelling up and pelting it to death with water polo balls, which they end up doing anyway. Or she's trying to avoid marrying a shady purple guy. Or both. I forget. And one of them is a secret ghost.

Yet, FFX actually manages to create a genuine connection between all of those characters. Kinda funny how that works.

[TransatlanticFoe]

Yeah it's not that there weren't interactions - it was just they were either obtuse to trigger or easy to miss the prompt for (because it's a slowly flashing plus sign in the top right of the screen). What's wrong with having it trigger by speaking to an out-of-party member while in the pub? And yeah, some of the story beats were a bit weird in tone considering you could have a full party but the character is tossed in jail or something. Again, not hard to add a small scene or dialogue just to make it less jarring. It's not the big issue that reviewers made a huge thing out of, because the individual stories do have some ties ins (which all leads to the secret superboss, who I've complained enough about before!). It's just something which I really hope they improve upon for the sequel because it was a weakness for an otherwise excellent game

[Steamflogger Boss]

The superboss was the best part of the game.

[BulletMagnet]

Suikoden I and II Remaster incoming.

[ryu]

Started up Octopath Traveler last night. Game's been collecting dust for a few years as I've been busy wasting time on WoW Classic. But also because it also always seemed to be just The 4 Heroes of Light 2.0 to me, and what I've played so far only served to embolden that impression. Not like 4 Heroes of Light was a bad game, but it was a bit bland all around and I never felt the need to experience more of it.

The HD-2D look is a bit contradictory. All the HD effects disperse any nostalgic feeling the low res sprites and textures may otherwise invoke and Breath of Fire IV already perfected the "2D sprites in 3D environments" look and feel years ago.

Still a comfy game so far.

[Necronopticous]

The HD-2D look is a bit contradictory. All the HD effects disperse any nostalgic feeling the low res sprites and textures may otherwise invoke and Breath of Fire IV already perfected the "2D sprites in 3D environments" look and feel years ago.

Yeah, this is a good way to put it. My wife & I hate this visual style and sadly it really seems to have caught on as A Thing. Doesn’t help that Octopath was a huge dud for me, and just seeing this style makes me think back on that experience.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Suikoden I and II Remaster incoming.

I really like what we've seen of this so far.

[ryu]

The HD-2D look is a bit contradictory. All the HD effects disperse any nostalgic feeling the low res sprites and textures may otherwise invoke and Breath of Fire IV already perfected the "2D sprites in 3D environments" look and feel years ago.

Yeah, this is a good way to put it. My wife & I hate this visual style and sadly it really seems to have caught on as A Thing. Doesn’t help that Octopath was a huge dud for me, and just seeing this style makes me think back on that experience.

Played for another couple hours and feel like the game is growing on me in some aspects. I'm appreciating the battle system a little more (although I'd still not call myself a fan of the break mechanic) and found myself liking the visuals more in certain locations. It certainly looks better than the Suikoden "Remasters" we're getting.

[Sumez]

I think the "HD-2D" look is a good compromise where artists can make classic cool looking sprites without having to conform to all the rules of strict tile based worlds, or deal with things like proper scaling and whatever most old school 16 bit generation style graphics get into problems with on modern platforms. Hell, if the alternative is the Final Fantasy "pixel remasters", give me "HD-2D" any day.

In Octopath specifically the look is at times a bit drab thanks to the lack of color, and there's a very claustrophobic feel that can fortunately be remedied a lot by disabling the darkened shadow around the borders. But it also has some damn beautiful environments that come through well exactly thanks to the style the game is going for.

I don't want every game looking that way, but I'm kinda glad to see people experimenting with where they can take it, and I'm really enjoying what I've seen of the Dragon Quest 3 remake so far. A massive step over that ugly mobile version that got ported to everything including PS4 and Switch.

[Sima Tuna]

The hd-2d style looks gorgeous in Live A Live, particularly in the Kung Fu, Mecha, Sci-Fi and Ninja chapters.

[Sengoku Strider]

I don't think that's what is really going on at all, it doesn't feel deliberate, and nothing about that design is inherently old-school.

I dunno, if you think back, things are probably left a lot more vague than you might recall in those old school jrpgs. Often a character just joins your party because you say hi. Most of the characters in Phantasy Star II literally never interact at all - or even say a single word after joining (until the ending). Several join your party because they were sitting in your house for no particular reason when you came home.

I'd have to go back & do a formal survey, but I'd bet that a solid majority of party members in pre-PlayStation 2 Square games go largely unacknowledged after their initial join up scene (Chrono Cross probably swings that average by itself). Certainly in the 16-bit era half of them are just sorta there and not made explicitly relevant to the proceedings. And Square were the story-heavy guys. Tons of other companies' jrpgs leaned entirely on NPCs for plot progression & world building. If you dial it back a step further to the 8-bit days, it's incredibly rare to get anything else.

I do have the SFC Romancing SaGa trilogy sitting on my shelf waiting for its turn, but my experience with the SaGa series is pretty limited (like, before Scarlet Grace I think I've only played through Final Fantasy Legend I). But I get the impression that's what they're leaning on heavily here. That doesn't have a really party-interaction heavy story does it?

Yet, FFX actually manages to create a genuine connection between all of those characters. Kinda funny how that works.

Psh. My Octopath head canon DESTROYS it.

DESTROYS

Suikoden I and II Remaster incoming.

That's awesome. Going purely off how much I enjoyed them in their time, those are probably my two favourite jrpgs ever, especially II. I finished them both around 4 times, so I don't know how motivated I'd be to go through them all again now, but I sold my copies 20 years ago so it'd be cool just to own them again. I do hope they manage to add some more animation though. If there was one thing that bugged me about them at the time, it was how SNES the animation felt. I was hoping that aspect of things would improve in the PS1 era.

[Sumez]

I dunno, if you think back, things are probably left a lot more vague than you might recall in those old school jrpgs. Often a character just joins your party because you say hi. Most of the characters in Phantasy Star II literally never interact at all - or even say a single word after joining (until the ending). Several join your party because they were sitting in your house for no particular reason when you came home.

I'd have to go back & do a formal survey, but I'd bet that a solid majority of party members in pre-PlayStation 2 Square games go largely unacknowledged after their initial join up scene (Chrono Cross probably swings that average by itself). Certainly in the 16-bit era half of them are just sorta there and not made explicitly relevant to the proceedings. And Square were the story-heavy guys. Tons of other companies' jrpgs leaned entirely on NPCs for plot progression & world building. If you dial it back a step further to the 8-bit days, it's incredibly rare to get anything else.

This is all good, but I don't think any of that has anything to do with the issues with how it's implemented in Octopath Traveler. I guess it's really good that you apparently don't see it at all, but I'm also a little surprised

[Sengoku Strider]

Edia, the folks behind the recent Valis collections, are resurrecting another Telenet property - Cosmic Fantasy. They've got a collection of the first two PC Engine CD games hitting Japan in December for ¥6800+ tax, which is kind of a tall ask considering you can buy the originals at any media recycle shop for ~¥1200 each.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/FgKpNzoqwG8

They have said an English version is forthcoming at some point. The second game did get a North American release on the TurboGrafx-16 back in the day via Working Designs, but I'll assume there'll be a new translation here.

This is all good, but I don't think any of that has anything to do with the issues with how it's implemented in Octopath Traveler. I guess it's really good that you apparently don't see it at all, but I'm also a little surprised

I spend a lot more time playing retro stuff than recent, so it just didn't register as something I couldn't look past or find a charitable interpretation of, I guess. But I can understand how someone could have been left wanting more in this day & age.

[guigui]

Just started a run of Ara Fell Enhanced Edition on the Switch. Game is currenlty on sale at around $5.

This is your typical JRPG with cute and funny teen characters, retro pixel arts, nice music. I read some good things about it, and for now I am no disappoint because it seems to have most things I like :
* not too intensive talk, but characters you'll get used to know and somehow care for.
* kind of open world, in the sense that most locations seem to be unlocked rather early in game. You can explore a lot of the world at your own will, and understand quite fast if you step in an area currently too hard for you.
* lots of weapon and spells upgrades, have to take care of how you build characters.
* kind of tough and strategic battles if you play on harder difficulties. Can hange difficulty at any time. I tried hardest on the go, hopefully it wont become tedious.
* some strategic grinding to build character. Stats resets possible.

For now I only have a couple hours in but, maybe, I'll get to the end of this one ; which did not happen in a JRPG since the release of ... shining force II ?

[BryanM]

Dunkey just posted a pretty hilarious takedown of this, contrasted alongside the Sony direct (or whatever they're called):

https://youtu.be/nlLT2SHL_lg

Yeah, I saw this clip. My eyes glazed over during the boring ass Sony crap. Yeah, really bad movies full of explosions. Like I haven't seen a million of those. Yawn.

But then Rune Factory comes up and my neurons get activated.

It's the difference between disposable locations and disposable NPC's versus having an actual home with characters who matter longer than 5 seconds.

House hermit versus murder hobo.

One thing I hate about Animal Crossing games is they don't really let you do things like play soccer with your neighbors. Some sports games tacked on would really expand the activity list. (Rune Factory merging Harvest Moon farm'em ups with Secret of Mana murder hoboin' and weapon craftin' really helps provide a range of activities. Do as much of either as you want, these aren't some horrible video games full of a list of chores.)

One type of game that really doesn't exist, is a Game Center CX-esque game compilation wrapped in an RPG framing device. There's all this nostalgia bait going on, but little of it involves trying to take you back to the past in a simulated world that never quite was.

[TransatlanticFoe]

Cleared Xenoblade 3 after about 140 hours. Weird ending, more is detailed in some short postgame quests which just leads to more huh really. The main story is fairly light in all, the true meat of it is your party and their interactions with all the optional characters, and their side stories. Which is a shame that the difficulty curve is squarely aimed at just doing the main story - even picking up a few optional hero characters quickly overlevels you and this causes a huge problem. It makes it harder to level up classes, because they all top out at level 10 of 20 until right at the end of the main story - so you swap classes a lot and gradually need to fight higher level mobs to gain class affinity/rank... then you're even more overpowered for the main story. The option to level down is only unlocked after clearing the story.

There are also serious useability issues. You can't filter accessories by a sensible category to sell them, and only halfway filter them when equipping them. And the game has an odd auto-allocation of accessory system whenever you change class. The result? The inventory is a mess and you can't even easily get rid of crap you don't want. The collectopedia systwm is now cards for requisitions, so as well as losing the descriptions you can't tell where any of the stuff you might need is vaguely located. Add to that streamlining the combat further (no spike, no different aggro types for field enemies) and losing out on proper settlements, you have a game that's not as good as the second title... which wasn't as good as the first one.

Solid 8/10 though, I had a lot of fun just going around helping people out and stuff (probably the same reasons why I enjoyed the oft-loathed Mass Effect Andromeda so much). The hero quest mechanic is soooo much better than the second game's randomised system and frankly I liked a lot of those guys more than the main characters.

Back to Live A Live now, given it arrived, then I went on holiday and then Xenoblade 3 happened. 4 chapters cleared and it's insane how different this game is.

[BulletMagnet]

Zeboyd, the Cthulhu Saves the World guys, just announced This Way Madness Lies, a short RPG that combines Shakespeare plays and magical girls.

[guigui]

So I just finished Ara Fell, and this typical JRPG game keeps its promises up to the end. Characters and story are developped well enough for you to not feel the urge to skip dialogs each time it gets in your way, and I actually ended up caring about some people in there. Grinding can make things easier, and I like it. Exploring is rewarding. Story is quite linear though, with some non-stupid sidequests, but not that much.

Took me about 25 hours on hardest difficulty and exploring everything. Definitely on the short side, but I guess longer would have been too long.

So it is a definitive recommend if you're searching for a very lovely and well crafted "little" RPG, play on hardest to get a challenge.

[BryanM]

After ~15 years, I had some desire to play a Pokemon game again and tried Black 2 again. And petered out around the same place, again.

Everyone calls the latest games hand-holdy and chatty like it's some new thing, but this one is really annoying. I just want to walk from one side of a corridor to another, and they feel like it's necessary to inject a skit into each one. Dialogue is not this franchise's strong suit, these imaginary people have no thoughts or worries in their imaginary lives. Pokemon is 10,000% better as a liminal game focused on walking around and leveling up.

So the old games in the series aren't better just because they were the first or retro like my grandpa brain suspected; they are, functionally, better because they leave you in peace to see and explore things at your own pace.

[Steamflogger Boss]

After ~15 years, I had some desire to play a Pokemon game again and tried Black 2 again. And petered out around the same place, again.

Everyone calls the latest games hand-holdy and chatty like it's some new thing, but this one is really annoying. I just want to walk from one side of a corridor to another, and they feel like it's necessary to inject a skit into each one. Dialogue is not this franchise's strong suit, these imaginary people have no thoughts or worries in their imaginary lives. Pokemon is 10,000% better as a liminal game focused on walking around and leveling up.

So the old games in the series aren't better just because they were the first or retro like my grandpa brain suspected; they are, functionally, better because they leave you in peace to see and explore things at your own pace.

It's all shit and the same thing over and over. I think I've finished 2 maybe 3 of them ever.