Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

[Sima Tuna]

Granblue Fantasy is a successor to FF6? Why am I just finding this out? And why is it full of waifus if that is the case?

Are any of the Granblue games worth playing?

[BryanM]

I've talked about it a bit over the years. Often complained about how it's half Squaresoft's fault for never doing a follow up to FF6's aesthetics that I was addicted to the stupid thing for a while. (Early 2016 began an extremely depressing phase for me; got my hopes up like an idiot that maybe humanity's doom could be avoided or reduced in intensity but lolnope.)

The original game has a similar artstyle and Nobuo Uematsu contributed heavily to the soundtrack. The game itself has a high fantasy/steampunk thing going on (yes, the characters ride around on airships). The main character has a job class system that kind of seems like FF's thing at first glance. The boss fights are chuuni and over the top, always against one kind of god or giant monster or another. There's a reason it blew up into a franchise.

(I am deeply saddened the youtube video with the image of an angry splashing tuna while the Defend Order music plays was taken down. What's the point of anything anymore. Why live.)

The game itself I can't recommend - it's a browser game from ten years ago. That stupidly needs a freaking GPU to run at full speed for some ungodly reason. (The reason is Google Chrome sucks.) But if you need a mindless incremental game that doesn't require installing anything and doesn't have huge load times....

--

Granblue Vs seems to have an active scene that likes it. It was popular enough to get a sequel, after all. Arc System Works did the core gameplay design, so it's probably not any worse or better than their other fighting games.

Relink seems to be have been received well by the people who played it. By god it should have been, being in development for half a decade and involving PlatinumGames. If there's anywhere for jumping into the franchise for a normie, it's that.

... seems more like generic action RPG fare to me. It lacks tuna and probably doesn't have the same edgy chuuni music, so I wouldn't know personally.

And why is it full of waifus if that is the case?

Compensation for all those classic FF games that were 79 to 100% male?

There must be balance in all things.

(Or you can say it's homage to the harem game FF5. It's always important to have at least one old man in your harem, tbf.)

[Sima Tuna]

It lacks tuna

Into the garbage it goes!

[NYN]

After all the FFT exchange here before, does the release of the remake in September, uh, or October get anyone excited? It also features an "original mode".

[it290]

I'm going to get it, because FFT is one of my favorite games, but I'm just wrapping up a playthrough of Lion War of the Lions that I started before the announcement, so I probably won't grab it for a while. Looking forward to the voice acting and the UI updates look nice. Hoping the upscaling isn't shitty and kind of bummed that not of the WOTL content is included.

[Steven]

There's going to be a remake of this game? Huh. When did they announce that? Then again, there is an extremely good chance that I did see this news before and forgot. Wouldn't be surprising or the first or last time.

I have the US PSP version that my ex-roommate basically forced me to borrow about 12 years ago and I never played it or gave it back. I should probably give it back to him eventually. Or maybe I should finally play it...? Or maybe I should play the remake instead. Hm, choices...

[BryanM]

I'd sooner try playing Triangle Tactics, I'm all FFT'd out. Already put in my hundreds of hours.

I would be interested in more FFT, but only if they make it a different game. Use a colorful fantasy setting like FF4, steampunk of FF6, or the cyberpunk of FF7. Or an insane mashup of all three, that would be very avant garde.

I'm 10,000% more interested in Sword of Convallaria than I am of War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius.

(On that note, it's both kind of sad and expected that Aster Tatariqus, a Fire Emblem Three Houses knockoff, crashed and burned. Can't really put in that kind of budget for these kinds of games... It does amaze me Langrisser M is still viable and still playable in english...)

[Steven]

I looked at Sword of Convallaria a while ago because it's on PC and insta-noped because it's free-to-play. No way am I going to get involved in any of that. I'll play literally almost anything, even play games in genres that I typically dislike (turn-based non-strategy RPGs) on occasion, but free-to-play...



I do plan to eventually get to Triangle Strategy. I just... haven't, but I also didn't care for the demo for some reason that I no longer remember. Planning on giving it another attempt eventually, but that "eventually"'s time frame is very unknown. It's on sale on Steam every once in a while, and it's been at 60% off a few times there recently. Maybe I'll go check out the demo again, assuming that it didn't get delisted.

[Sima Tuna]

I'd sooner try playing Triangle Tactics, I'm all FFT'd out. Already put in my hundreds of hours.

Yeah, I feel you. I put in hundreds of hours on ps1 and then more hundreds of hours when the game came to psp.

I was willing to have a 2nd go with Tactics Ogre Reborn, because the game was substantially reworked from the mediocre PSP version of the game, and it contains a lot more actual tactics in it now. But this version of FFT seems to be just a cross between ps1 and psp with the crappy nu-PSP translation and none of the extra classes from the PSP. Or guest characters from PSP, like Balthier.

FFT, for me, is a solved game. I can go back and have fun with it, but only in the same way an alcoholic can go back and "have fun" with a bottle of scotch. There's nothing for me to learn about FFT. And the tactics at high level devolve into a series of exploits (CT5Holy, Jumping Ninjas, Cid spamming sword arts, farming monster drops with Poaching etc.)

[CStarFlare]

Been trying to break into Ogre Battle (SNES version) recently and feel like I'm hitting a wall. I love the aesthetic, love the music, enjoy the first few maps well enough then find I get steamrolled and overwhelmed. Maybe I need to start over; the first few maps I used one group for everything so all my other parties are completely underdeveloped, but I guess I feel a little overwhelmed when I see I have ~12 parties from the get-go available to me and I don't understand much about what makes any of them tick.

I'm loving the idea of it but I'm bouncing off the game fairly hard. Without going full walkthrough, what 1/2 things should a new player know?

[Sima Tuna]

Been trying to break into Ogre Battle (SNES version) recently and feel like I'm hitting a wall. I love the aesthetic, love the music, enjoy the first few maps well enough then find I get steamrolled and overwhelmed. Maybe I need to start over; the first few maps I used one group for everything so all my other parties are completely underdeveloped, but I guess I feel a little overwhelmed when I see I have ~12 parties from the get-go available to me and I don't understand much about what makes any of them tick.

I'm loving the idea of it but I'm bouncing off the game fairly hard. Without going full walkthrough, what 1/2 things should a new player know?

It's good to build parties to do different things, like a flying party that can traverse quickly everywhere around the map to reach towns and accomplish objectives. And another party that swims so they can fight/move on water well.

A common tactics that works well in many strategy/rts games is a couple squads of fast scouts/flankers moving ahead of the regular army footsloggers (the most powerful, but slow units.) These scouts achieve early objectives and then fall back when the fighting gets too tough, sweeping around to the sides of the regular army and then becoming flankers who cut down weakened units or reinforce as needed.

I would do this all the time in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, specifically 14. But it also works in Tactics Ogre with Griffons and Cockatrices acting as the flankers.

Edit: I forgot to mention the super obvious strategy of putting a single flier in every unit so you can just ignore terrain entirely.

[BryanM]

Been trying to break into Ogre Battle (SNES version) recently and feel like I'm hitting a wall. I love the aesthetic, love the music, enjoy the first few maps well enough then find I get steamrolled and overwhelmed. Maybe I need to start over; the first few maps I used one group for everything so all my other parties are completely underdeveloped, but I guess I feel a little overwhelmed when I see I have ~12 parties from the get-go available to me and I don't understand much about what makes any of them tick.

You only need around five parties.

Ogre Battle is a bit poorly designed in some important spots. (I'm not a fan of the Charisma and Alignment systems, and they really don't make any sense narratively.) One way to make sure your parties endure is to have a healer on every one, and then they're basically immortal against all the trash. However, this comes at the cost of dealing less damage so you're constantly pushed back after a combat, despite barely taking a scratch. And sometimes will lose control of a city.

The later maps also stop rewarding hidden characters eventually, and it can be easy to miss some cool stuff without a guide. I always felt I was in Space Balls combing the desert, having my guys walk over every pixel on the map because there are invisible towns and treasure everywhere. Equipment can be crazy strong in the early game.

One sneaky sneaky thing about it.... is all the attacks are the same, they only differ in reach, element type, and how many guys they hit. And if they use STR or INT. The Priest attack uses STR for example.

It's been a long time, but I don't think changing classes changes stats? You can get weird situations where Tiger Men can do more damage than Werewolves because their STR stat grows an extra point per level.

(Some weird verisimilitude dissonance imagining throwing your new, naive recruits' lives away against the werewolf to have them turn into werewolves. And not letting them level up during the day since it'll stunt their growth? Ogre Battle is wonderfully weird in so many ways.)

There's technically infinite EXP on every map; if you kill a unit's leader but don't wipe them out completely they'll go back to the base and revive. Shades of killing the same guys over and over again and they keep coming back at you. Like I said, weird verisimilitude.

If you take the game mechanics literally they're ridiculous.

the crappy nu-PSP translation

I do love how we get attached to stuff (blame yourself or blame god for that), but it does seem like there's a bit of a little bit of a war against readability. dragon quest translation has like everyone talk like a surly scottsman or somethin', the more faithful and much less memorable spell names, etc. I think it's in-line with the sickos who put unreadable fonts into everything.

[CStarFlare]

Thanks, all of that is helpful. I've started over; I went through several maps not really realizing I could deploy more than one group, so everyone was underleveled, and then I didn't realize you could change class, or that I had a whole roster of other characters I could swap in and out. Just easier to start over with a little more knowledge. Just having a flying unit in a group makes me understand how the game expects you to put up with exploration and finding hidden items.

I've also noticed that if I just let the game run on the first stage, I can collect thousands of gold more than it costs me to be deployed so.... a stage one infinite money exploit sure is a mechanic.

[Sima Tuna]

I do love how we get attached to stuff (blame yourself or blame god for that), but it does seem like there's a bit of a little bit of a war against readability. dragon quest translation has like everyone talk like a surly scottsman or somethin', the more faithful and much less memorable spell names, etc. I think it's in-line with the sickos who put unreadable fonts into everything.

I dislike fake medieval purple prose in game translations. If you're going to do that, go all the way with middle english or bust. 'Sides, all this shit is translated from Japanese anyway, so we can't pretend it was supposed to read that way in Old French.

I'm playing Unicorn Overlord right now. The "game" part of the game is amazing. I love building up my little squaddies and sending them out to wreck shit. But the story is just Fire Emblem Awakening tier nonsense all over again. It has the gameplay of Ogre Battle but not the "war is hell" story. Overlord has support conversations in it and of course every waifu (female character) in the game can be wifed up by the main character. Like Awakening, the main character is bland and inoffensive so you can project yourself onto his anime penis. All the women have big anime titties and shake them when they walk, or else they have the Atelier Thyza look going on.

I know Vanillaware has always had coomer art but cmon bruh, the story is supposed to be about war 'n' shit. I can't think of anything LESS conducive to a boner than leading a group of plucky rebels against an overwhelmingly powerful level 40+ Evil Empire.

Oh yeah and Overlord also does the same thing as nu-Fire Emblem, "brainwashing" characters to make them evil. Just an excuse so you can recruit stage bosses after beating them up. "He was never actually evil, he just ordered atrocities because he was under mind control!" Imagine if that worked at Nuremburg. Call me crazy, but I kinda liked how FE7 (and Tactics Ogre) would introduce these kinda sympathetic stage bosses/major NPCs and then let your party fucking murder them. Because that's war.

If the original FFT were made today, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, Weigraf would have been an optional recruit, nearly impossible to miss, who could be redeemed in the story. Rather than just some piece of shit punk you murder the fuck out of. And Delita would for sure be recruitable somehow.

[Steven]

Unicorn Overlord's a cool game. The story and stuff is just kind of there to give the gameplay an excuse to exist, but I'm cool with that. The game's largely very easy, unfortunately, which is disappointing, but I like it despite that.

[BryanM]

Oh yeah and Overlord also does the same thing as nu-Fire Emblem, "brainwashing" characters to make them evil. Just an excuse so you can recruit stage bosses after beating them up. "He was never actually evil, he just ordered atrocities because he was under mind control!" Imagine if that worked at Nuremburg.

This is a supreme curse/blessing of friend collectors. Granblue Fantasy's dev team tried to make an utterly irredeemable villain in Sandal Phone, literally your classic Final Fantasy kill everyone everywhere for ever kinda guy you'd see in Jacob Geller's Art In The Pre-Apocalypse type thing.

But.... he was hot. And because players formed an emotional attachment to him, he chilled out and makes coffee for the crew now....

I understand why Fire Emblem makes so many of its early bad guys ugly bandits, but I don't like it.

I dunno. The inverse of this, like when Aeris dies, reminds me that negative punishment exists. I dunno how many people play Fire Emblem and allow their characters to just die if they die and carry on. That's how the games are supposed to be played, originally, but I myself can't stand losing stuff like that if a game is longer than an hour. This is worse than giving a meerkat a name, this is like they had me bottle-feed the thing from a little baby for weeks.

It's just a big problem with developing emotional attachment, when 98% of the time you spend in a game is stabbing dudes in the face. A brain only knows its inputs, and if the only characters you're really interacting with are murderous jerks, then well.

I've also noticed that if I just let the game run on the first stage, I can collect thousands of gold more than it costs me to be deployed so.... a stage one infinite money exploit sure is a mechanic.

The reputation gauge takes a hit if you loiter around a lot. You can re-visit defeated stages, and some of them have neutral enemies you can fight, which also ticks points off the gauge as time goes by.

Ogre Battle 64 has a pisstake about this: Every year you have a birthday party. At first, it's a nice time and everyone has high spirits. Then as the years and decades go by.... they become increasingly frustrated and demoralized. "Here we are... fuckin' again.... this war ever gonna end....?"

One of the lines of text wasn't even translated from Japanese.

[Steven]

Fire Emblem should just auto-save after every single move and get rid of the rewind thing. That may break people's habit of resetting should a unit die. Nobody would like that and Fire Emblem sales would probably plummet as a result, but that wouldn't really bother me too much. Actually, do Fire Emblem characters even die anymore or do they just become permanently wounded so they can participate in non-fighting stuff but not fight? That's the difficulty in creating Fire Emblem with a story, I think; you can't kill any of your characters that have important lines, but if none of them are at risk of death, there's little to no drama, so in that case it's best to have a generic excuse plot, perhaps. Well... whatever.

Damn, I just remembered that Engage exists and that I still haven't played it. I keep forgetting that this game exists. I don't even remember if it's supposed to be good or not. All I remember is that the protagonist has the Pepsi logo for hair or something like that.

[Sima Tuna]

Fire Emblem should just auto-save after every single move and get rid of the rewind thing. That may break people's habit of resetting should a unit die. Nobody would like that and Fire Emblem sales would probably plummet as a result, but that wouldn't really bother me too much. Actually, do Fire Emblem characters even die anymore or do they just become permanently wounded so they can participate in non-fighting stuff but not fight? That's the difficulty in creating Fire Emblem with a story, I think; you can't kill any of your characters that have important lines, but if none of them are at risk of death, there's little to no drama, so in that case it's best to have a generic excuse plot, perhaps. Well... whatever.

Damn, I just remembered that Engage exists and that I still haven't played it. I keep forgetting that this game exists. I don't even remember if it's supposed to be good or not. All I remember is that the protagonist has the Pepsi logo for hair or something like that.

Xcom Enemy Unknown has autosave after every turn and especially after every death. You can retry the mission IIRC but not much else.

Fire Emblem fell victim to the Waifu effect. Now it's more Waifu than Emblem. I especially dislike how they removed a lot of the inventory resource management that was part of the older games. I realize a sword snapping after 15 swings is a pretty dumb and annoying system, but all I'm saying is they should have improved it rather than removed it. With all weapons infinite use, then they tried to rebalance the weapons and items in other ways, but those other ways don't really work or make sense. Like making weapons super, duper, ultra rare. It doesn't make much sense that a big town with a fancy smithy can't sell you a bunch of weapons all at once. The bottleneck for military supplies is usually on the money end, not the supplies end... At least, assuming you don't live in a country like Japan with a serious lack of good steel. But even then, bamboo spears are free. So if I have the money, they should have the weapons!

I don't remember which game it was that was stingy AF about the weapons. Might have been Fates. And a sword breaking in 15 swings is unrealistic, but a sword not breaking in 100 full-scale battles is unrealistic in a different way. At that point, you're probably rebuilding the sword between every battle and practically forging it anew. Eventually though, metal fatigue will set in. It's different for commanders and officers of course, since they don't, y'know.... Fight.

Shadow Dragon is my favorite of the newer Emblem games. That and 7. I can just about tolerate Awakening if I only play it for the gameplay and ignore all the cutscenes and supports. But Awakening (and all the nu-Emblems) have really WEIRD game balance for characters. Every character in Awakening is a Growth monster, which means they're all gonna be broken at endgame. A character being broken at endgame was supposed to be a reward mechanic to balance characters who started out weaker. But everyone in Awakening is monstrously powerful anyway. The paralogue characters are like growth +++, Super Saiyan God Growth. It becomes highly ridiculous.

If every character is a growth character (and it makes sense why they design them this way for Waifu Emblem, because nobody wants to invest in a waifu character to find out they'll be mid at the end) then that also ruins the balance of the different archetypes of units in FE. It means you never really have a Jeigen, because even the Jeigen is just a growth unit who starts as a pre-promote. Marcus was good in FE7, sure, but he was still a Jeigen. His stats at endgame were dogshit next to Kent and Sain.

Overall, I just have a lot of little complaints to do with the fact I think the older fire emblems did SOME things correctly, and the new fire emblems kinda threw those things away. Units should all be useful in the squad but the form that "useful" takes varies greatly. Marcus is an absolute MVP in Fire Emblem 7 despite his crappy endgame stats. Simply for being unkillable and ferrying units around, he takes up a role that nobody else in your squad can handle in early and midgame.

I know some people have tried to revive old FE style, and I haven't played those games yet. Honestly though, I would rather the FE guys just re-release their old games in old form to the US audience. I played Shadow Dragon and Echoes, and enjoyed them for what they were (especially Shadow Dragon) but we need FE4 and 5 English official releases.

[Steven]

Oh, nice timing~

I got an email from Steam yesterday telling me that The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily is suddenly released. I played the demo a while ago for a little bit and it seemed cool enough, given its resemblance to Dragon Force on Saturn (which I have sadly never played, and also sadly never seen in a store locally), so I bought it. Literally SIX MINUTES into the game it fucking crashed. Eh... well, I guess that happens sometimes, but damn, six minutes? That's gotta be a new record of some kind. At least it happened so early that it wasn't even long enough for me to lose any progress.

I seem to have slept in a bad manner the night before last, so yesterday my neck hurt pretty badly all day at work so I decided to go to sleep instead of playing the game too much, but it seems solid so far, aside from running really badly on the world map for no apparent reason. Hopefully that can be fixed. I really like all of the cute voxel art, but I can't really say much else at this point due to having only played it for about 30 or 40 minutes, crash time included, but if someone needs what seems to be a good PC-only SRPG other than Reverse Collapse that I am sure nobody will ever play unless it gets put on consoles, here you go. One of the reviews of the demo said this game is just as difficult as Reverse Collapse, which I already know is horrifyingly difficult but fair and well-balanced, and that's an excellent thing and reason enough to check it out, but it remains to be seen if this is true or not.

Fire Emblem fell victim to the Waifu effect. Now it's more Waifu than Emblem. I especially dislike how they removed a lot of the inventory resource management that was part of the older games. I realize a sword snapping after 15 swings is a pretty dumb and annoying system, but all I'm saying is they should have improved it rather than removed it. With all weapons infinite use, then they tried to rebalance the weapons and items in other ways, but those other ways don't really work or make sense. Like making weapons super, duper, ultra rare. It doesn't make much sense that a big town with a fancy smithy can't sell you a bunch of weapons all at once. The bottleneck for military supplies is usually on the money end, not the supplies end... At least, assuming you don't live in a country like Japan with a serious lack of good steel. But even then, bamboo spears are free. So if I have the money, they should have the weapons!

If every character is a growth character (and it makes sense why they design them this way for Waifu Emblem, because nobody wants to invest in a waifu character to find out they'll be mid at the end) then that also ruins the balance of the different archetypes of units in FE. It means you never really have a Jeigen, because even the Jeigen is just a growth unit who starts as a pre-promote. Marcus was good in FE7, sure, but he was still a Jeigen. His stats at endgame were dogshit next to Kent and Sain.

Overall, I just have a lot of little complaints to do with the fact I think the older fire emblems did SOME things correctly, and the new fire emblems kinda threw those things away. Units should all be useful in the squad but the form that "useful" takes varies greatly. Marcus is an absolute MVP in Fire Emblem 7 despite his crappy endgame stats. Simply for being unkillable and ferrying units around, he takes up a role that nobody else in your squad can handle in early and midgame.

So I guess you kind of hate Three Houses, the game where you can get almost every unit no matter which story you choose and where every class can use every weapon and every character can basically do almost anything but there's no point in that because Wyvern Lord exists and there's no reason to not be Wyvern Lord unless you're magic or run out of flying battalions. That game's definitely a bit of a mess. God damn does it have an amazing soundtrack, though! Just thinking about the soundtrack makes me want to play the game again! Or I guess I can just go listen to the OST since I bought the massive and expensive OST set with the music box and all of that.

But yeah, in the case of Fire Emblem's devs, it's going to be hard to make all of those cute girls because they're probably the only reason that the series sells now, make aforementioned cute girls not terrible in battle, and also give them just enough personality for them to be attractive or whatever, which is unfortunately typically a single trait that becomes their entire character (a problem that applies equally to the dudes in Fire Emblem as well), but also not have them be important to the story in case the player gets them killed, which players may not like because then they're going to complain that their girl doesn't have anything at all to do with the story. Poor FE devs. Screwed no matter what they do. Edgelord... ah, wait, that's not right. Edelgard was a step in the right direction, I think, even though the writing was quite poor at times and I'm sure a lot of players started the game and chose her because she's both cute and player-sexual and then later hated her because she's very blatantly Chaos-aligned.

If you like inventory management and strategic item use, though... Reverse Collapse. Or you can play the original Code Name Bakery Girl, where you have extremely limited items and can't make more items when Atena isn't around and almost no ammo and 65% accuracy at best and have to be extremely careful about literally everything because you'll run out of ammo from missing too much and become guaranteed to fail.

Xcom Enemy Unknown has autosave after every turn and especially after every death. You can retry the mission IIRC but not much else.

Yeah, restart mission should go away too unless you game over lol.

Actually, I think that maybe it would be better to leave save scumming and the rewind features in as an option and just have a separate game mode where there is no rewind, no restarting the mission unless you game over, and it autosaves every time the player moves a unit/attacks/uses an item/etc. That way people who want to save scum can choose the save scum game mode and people who want to be forced to commit to their mistakes can choose that game mode, even if probably few people would play this mode.

I don't remember which game it was that was stingy AF about the weapons. Might have been Fates.

I think that's the one where everything is unlimited but everything higher than either iron or steel (I forgot, but it's one of these two) has increasingly low accuracy, so nobody really uses anything other than forged iron or something like that.

I know some people have tried to revive old FE style, and I haven't played those games yet. Honestly though, I would rather the FE guys just re-release their old games in old form to the US audience. I played Shadow Dragon and Echoes, and enjoyed them for what they were (especially Shadow Dragon) but we need FE4 and 5 English official releases.

Did you play Vestaria Saga? I have not, but it's made by Kaga, the dude who designed the old Fire Emblems from the first one up to and including Thracia, which was his last one, and also SFC Wars.

[Steamflogger Boss]

How had I not heard of Vestaria Saga. WTF. Obviously Tear Ring Saga is mega based, goated game. Berwick is wildly ambitious. You can't play it like Fire Emblem. I could see fans hating it but viewing it as it's own thing I enjoyed it. Not everything really works but it was refreshing to see some NEW IDEAS in this space.

I bounced reallllly hard off the newer Fire Emblems. Basically everything after Awakening. Fates was....just shit and Three Houses made me want to harm myself with all the modern tropes. I know it won a pile of awards, but I hated it and didn't finish it. Some friends have been telling me I'd probably like Engage but I'm so skeptical at this point.

As for Dragon Force, I can't recommend it enough. I'd say find a way to play if you can. There are lots of ways.

[Steven]

Vestaria Saga is free BTW. At least, the original Japanese non-remake version is. Same with Vestaria Saga Gaiden, or maybe it's Vestaria Saga II. It's confusing, but yeah, that's free too, at least in Japanese. If you want some other language, you may be forced to go to Steam. I have no idea what's going on with these free versions and remakes and whatever but I downloaded the Japanese freeware first one just now. It's late and I'm pretty tired, but I'll probably try it tomorrow or something when I get a chance.