Hazuki wrote: ↑Fri May 16, 2025 9:43 pmLike what? I've only played and beaten 2 doujin RPGs so far: Labyrinth of Touhou and Genius of Sappheiros. Both are extremely hard but I don't have that many fond memories of LoT because I remember being able to solve everything by grinding. A boss is being a roadblock? Just grind for several hours and come back later. This doesn't work on GoS at all though since grinding doesn't do much to your characters, so you really have to do critical thinking and come up with efficient strats to stand a chance. Each boss there felt like a puzzle and a genuine challenge, so I found it to be a much better game. I heard LoT2 is better than the first but have never played it. LoT3 was also announced recently, btw.
I do like Labyrinth of Touhou. You can grind past everything but you seldom have to. LoT has a hard mode that requires you to beat bosses with your party's average level at or below the boss's recommended level. It doesn't totally stop you from being able to grind, but it slows it down enough that playing better during the boss battle becomes the preferred route. I think the biggest flaw in these games is that the normal battles are not terribly interesting. LoT3 seems to be working to improve this but it also introduces an insane amount of dialogue. Just skip past it imo.
Anyway here are some of my favorite doujin JRPGs:
Hat World - An RPG combining SaGa-like combat and character building with sidescrolling platformer exploration. The battle system is solid, and it has some great and challenging boss fights. The common enemies are unfortunately mostly just speed bumps. There are six campaigns with different main characters to play through and its stories are rollercoaster rides full of plot twists and incredible showmanship.
- An excellent dungeon crawler RPG. You make a party of 3 from a variety of classes and explore dungeons bit by bit. The enemies are all hand placed and respawn when you leave the dungeon. The combat system is the game's best selling point. You can always see what the enemy is about to do on the next turn, and you're supposed to come up with ways to counter them. It's refreshingly reactive in a genre where most games are about spamming your team's optimal combos. I like the cute, doll-like characters, and the small scale of the adventure. You're not out to defeat an ancient evil, you're looking for poison resistant potato seeds after a disaster poisoned the land. You can buy it on a number of platforms, like steam or the switch store.
Demon King Chronicle - I'm told this belongs to the "nephehist" subgenre of JRPGs, which focus heavily on gameplay and exploration, less on story, and in particular are known for having on-map enemies like Chrono Trigger or Earthbound, but in these games it is important to carefully manage and avoid enemy encounters which can rapidly drain your resources or wipe you out. They tend to have relatively few friendly NPCs, and don't have a lot of dialogue in their stories. Kind of like the Souls or Kings Field experience but with JRPG combat. Demon King Chronicles's combat is pretty straightforward, but the stuff that happens outside of combat is not. After initiating combat, you have a few seconds before the battle starts, and during that time other enemies will try to mob you. The AI patterns enemies use to approach, avoid, and gang up on you are varied and interesting, the game gets a ton of mileage out of the concept. I think the story and setting are unique and interesting too.
I wrote a longer review of it on the shmups farm some years back:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=23939&start=11940
The English of DKC version is no longer officially available, but you can get it here:
https://archive.org/details/demon-king-chronicle
Backup download link:
https://files.catbox.moe/l02ghi.zip
Enchant Farm - Another nephehist, like Demon King Chronicle. This one leans hard into the Kings Field inspiration and the author even recommends Kings Field in the end credits. You play as one of 8 elemental spirits and must break a curse of immortality on an inescapable island. It has a very good and unique combat system that steals pokemon's elemental system and drops it into the context of party based JRPG combat. After completing the game once, you unlock tactical difficulty, where both your party and enemies hit harder, and your ability to out-level the enemy is restricted. It arguably should be the default option, it's really good.
Click for the download link:
That's a number 1 in the url, not a letter l
- Has a great and unique combat system where all fights are 1 on 1 duels. Every action takes time to perform, and you can always see what the enemy is doing and vice versa, and you want to manipulate the action order so that you hit them when they're vulnerable but you don't let them do it to you. The defend command is usually a waste of time in JRPGs, but here blocking with your shield is really useful and you do it all the time. Its character building system is based entirely around equipment and gives the game plenty of replay value. It's only about 5 hours long, but it's great the whole way through, and it's kind of nice to have a JRPG where once you know what you're doing you can get through the whole game in one sitting. It's also got a lot of charm. You can buy it on steam for $2. I uploaded a playthrough on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNDrte4GfwQ
