Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

[Sengoku Strider]

I went back to Octopath's end game last night. My characters are levels 63-75, have the final classes and top skills unlocked, yet Mánagarmr the Great Direwolf still stomps them into paste with their HP buffed to 9999. This is the good stuff.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I personally would prefer if they put that kind of work into a new game in the spirit of the old one. How many people think of Mario All-Stars as the ultimate version of its games?

What's a real mess is the wonderful world of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy remakes. At this point there's five to ten variations of each, none of them "definitive" especially when it comes to Final Fantasy..... Mainline DQ/FF games at this point have enough games to be called their own genre, there's hundreds of the things. You could play a new one every week and you could spend an entire lifetime playing them. Don't worry about running out; they'll make more of them for you while you're grinding through.

Dragon Quest 3 remakes get a bit of a pass, though. Someone up high was responsible with that one. Or it just gets special treatment from me.

Speaking of really old rpgs I'm going to fire up the original DQ games on NES soon.

I went back to Octopath's end game last night. My characters are levels 63-75, have the final classes and top skills unlocked, yet Mánagarmr the Great Direwolf still stomps them into paste with their HP buffed to 9999. This is the good stuff.

Yeah, the game is so freaking good.

[BryanM]

One of the major design failures endemic in the genre is how they treat turn-based games: The entire point of them is you can play them as fast or as slowly as you want to. The worst thing in the world is getting to push a few buttons, then waiting three to eight seconds for animations to play out. And then you're finally allowed to play the game again. That's one appeal of later Disgaea games with animation skipping - you can't even call the post-game one-hit grinding fests "fights", but there's a kind of euphoria in the flow of constantly pushing buttons and having stuff happen.

What's even baffling is most designers know this by now - Bravely Default always got a "make it go faster" feedback from their playtests with players. The Dragon Quest Monsters game I'm playing right now has a 2x animation speed that unlocks after beating the first chapter, and 3x after beating the game. They know, and some do nothing.

I just feel like any game that's improved with a fast-forward button has failed on some level. Kid Icarus needed a Mario-like sprint ability, for example.

It's kind of frightening how much Super Mario was able to get right back in 1985 - low speed if you need to go slow, high speed once you get good at the game. A level select function of sorts so replays aren't always the same... Those two things generalize so well that pretty much every game of every genre in every format can and maybe should use them.

[XoPachi]

O-Oh. 7th Dragon just gives you an overworld skill to...instantly get into fights. Unlimited free uses. If that doesn't speed up a lot of questing, farming, and grinding, I don't know what will. Holy shit that's useful.

[BryanM]

Some harsh words have been said about OG pokemon designs that knock off some rose-tinted glasses. "There's a seal named seel, that evolves into a dewgong called dewgong" sure shut me up. Icecream and garbage pile monsters are cool now.

Dragon Quest Monsters 3 was announced recently. Which is of course the 9th game in the mainline series. Naming conventions for the franchise have always been a little cursed, but I'm glad Saro and his doomed girlfriend Rose from DQ4 get to be MC's. I always liked how they reused old characters from the main games. (The green palette-swap knight Rose Guardian always got to be more memorable than most monsters in the series. At least the man had a job and reason to exist beyond you stabbing a sword into him.)

I do like it better when they reuse old supporting characters. So you're not just controlling Some Guy, but someone you've got a little history with. Cobi and Tara really deserve to be elevated only as much as the Trunks and Rocksteady MC's were.

Dragon Quest Monsters 2 had three super secret monsters... one of them, Ramia, the bird from Dragon Quest 3, was one I always wanted to use as a kid. And I recently discovered all the rumors back then about these monsters were lies: There was only one way to get them officially: as a give away at events. And these give-away monsters had a level cap of... wait for it... 9. So they were completely unusable. Hacking them in was the only way to use them. Thanks for nothing I guess.

Instead of replaying the original game, I decided to take a chance and play its fraudulent "remake" instead. It's not remotely Dragon Quest Monsters 2, it's Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 4.... but I chose to appreciate it for what it is, and not what it isn't. The Joker games do a good job of making you feel like you're onsite on a National Geographic field, ready to harvest some animals.

There's just something about the Nintendo 64 aesthetic... they didn't really make many jRPGs like this in those days, a full zero for the N64 itself. Most of them are on the Playstation 2, which is a little too powerful. It's a gaping hole in the library of games that pretty much only the DS and 3DS filled.


Upsides

When you fuse a monster and throw away a skillset, you can reclaim skill points spent on it. Which is a massive improvement for all kinds of reasons. Lets you use bad skills early on without being punished - you're always building up skill points.

Outfits were added and they've very cute. It really helps by not making you stare at the same person for dozens of hours.

There are some commands to help avoid encounters: hide/sing/shout/whistle.

There is a behavior sink similar to FF8's draw system or Persona 1+2's card negotiation thing - spooking monsters can make them drop weapon upgrade materials. It's still tedious, but beats fighting them and trying to use the 2% steal skills instead. Anything that isn't just more battles is a relief.

All monsters have access to the Pysch up command, which can make catching things a bit easier.

Basic attack magic skills only go up to the second stage, which makes grafting them onto a monster much less of a chore now. (And also lets you get outrageously overpowered spells you can only cast 1 or 0 times at that stage in the game.)

MP costs of certain things have been dramatically increased, especially everything better than the basic Heal skill. Top tier AoE magic costs 60 MP. Omniheal costs 160 MP to cast. Having dedicated cost reduction traits now really matter, especially early on. They did a better job of making Warrior/Mage/Priest archetypes separate from one another this time around.

The game is maybe a little too generous with providing access to many high tier monsters by the endgame. There's nothing that comes close to this kind of abomination.


Downsides

Having to check in with a specific NPC to progress in the game is very annoying. The storyline.... it was always a simple fairy tale for three year olds. Which is fine when it was nothing more than frills and set dressing. Absolute torture when they expect sapient beings to spend minutes of their life on this shit.

It really gives a sense of "we put time out of our lives to add this shit to the game, and you're going to spend an equal amount of time out of yours watching every second of it". Just very vicious and mean.

Worst of all? They didn't animate my favorite part of the terrible story: You go to all this trouble to collect this precious legendary treasure, only for it to immediately eat shit from being blown into the ceiling, split in half, and die. Just a wonderful shaggy dog moment. If there was one thing to not cheap out on, was the destruction animation of the artifacts.

That kind of cheapness does kind of pervade the entire affair - modifying actual level geometry was a no-go. No sinking island with a rising water line.


Jumping

Jumping is more of a mean tease than anything else. You're unable to jump on any geometry; it's mostly cosmetic.

I was actually happy about it for all of eight seconds, until I found I was unable to jump over a 1" inclined plane and had to walk around to go up it the "proper" way. Sigh.

The entire thing constantly made me imagine a much-much-much better game. Where walking from one spot to another was actually fun, Nintendo style. Just imaging all this platforming I could have been doing between battles.... ah. If only, eh?


Sidewayssides

The upgrade to 3DS gave them the ability to increase the party size limit from 3 to 4. Makes AoE even more powerful, but in exchange you can use more dudes which is always a plus.

They added a bunch of giant monsters into the game, which was very Joker-iffic of them. The final battles after you finish the final dungeon really do give a sense of their passion for kaiju. The super-forms of the old bosses was a big feature of the original DQM2, and putting them center stage was cool. Lord Dragon, Geno-Sidoh, Asura Zoma, etc.

It's a pity it was ruined by needing to go back and forth with the equivalent of going back and forth into a room. It would have been an epic moment if it had been one single gauntlet instead.

They added an official little buddy you can carry along with you through the entire game, another staple from the first Joker game. Unfortunately translated as a "monter" short for "Monster Partner". They're kind of half-assed looking imo. Anyway, the entire thing is anathema to me and I always put these guys into storage immediately. This isn't Pokemon; constantly fusing into new monsters is a big part of the fun for me.


Roster

The Dragon Quest 9/Joker 2 started a new and innovative design idea for the cast. Just like with the radical experimental avant-garde game Megaman 9, they decided to add exactly one (1) lady monster to a game. Women that aren't pink slimes.

Of course, they're hidden away somewhere under postgame lock and key RNG, least someone ever accidentally sees one. They're also apparently their own monster family according to the fusion charts, as they begin and end their lines. All three of'em that there are.

They're all 2-slot monsters, which means they're unusable to me since I find the point of having an army of monsters is to use as many of them as I can. This.. was a big problem of the game, since almost all of the S and SS rank monsters are big.

A problem the sequel thankfully fixed.

But if there's one thing these games are good at, is preparing a big roster of guys. That's the one thing the budget goes into.


Key System

Looking back, this is probably the biggest disappointment. In the original game, you could ignore the main plot and play it like a roguelike. One random world leads to another. A simple flow of looking for new resource monsters, optimal EXP, new keys. I'll always remember the ludicrous EXP farm the boss-monster key world was.

In this one, you don't get access to the real key system until you beat the basic game. And the way it's implemented...

Instead of earning keys by entering keys and beating a boss, you roll for them at a vendor. In town.

That gives Gold a big use, but also gives you no reason to go into keys that won't give you a reward. The play loop becomes: burn some gold rolling keys, reset if you don't get what you want. What even is the point??

Adding to the cheapness is they don't even have random terrain, just re-using zones from the main game. If only they put some effort into making a new game, with some tile-based plots of land, eh?

My expectations were low, but I feel like they managed to fall a little short. They could have done a little better.

It wasn't like I expected them to remake the graphics of all 500+ monsters with shiny toy-like graphics ala Link's Island Adventure: Switch Edition. But c'mon.


Replayability

Monster collecting games tend to innately have replay value, since you can mix up the guys and skills you use every playthrough. DQM is even better at this because of the fusion system - when the numbers don't always go up, but sometimes go down, you really do have to consider where your break-even points and such are. (Fusion gives a huge immediate boost, but quickly requires increasingly high inputs to get the same kind of returns on growth.) There's a variety of strategies you can choose to use for a playthrough - by learning useful fusion recipes you can climb the ranks to the A/S ranks fairly quickly and break the games in half.

But this is something these kinds of games rarely accommodate. Actively discourage even - by only allowing one save file at a time. The bare minimum, a built-in way to store your dudes, start a new game, then pick them up once you've cleared it again is never provided.

It all seems to exist to give the impression of "You've finished the game. Now hurry up and buy our next game."


Balance

Since it's a Dragon Quest game, they know there's some people who'll actually want to fight battles with their dudes. So there is some attempt at balance. Wisdom and Defense skillsets giving ~2x more points now was great.

Like usual, magic is ridiculously overpowered in the early PvE. And physical attacks are rather dominant later on, especially when it comes to killing Metal Slimes for EXP or catching monsters. One turn of an attack boost skill pays for itself as soon as someone attacks while buffed by it. Defensive buffs against magic and breath attacks is necessary for the endgame battles.

The Double Trouble trait still exists, which I absolutely loathe from a balance perspective. "Oh gee, do I want my guy to deal 500 damage a turn or 1000 damage a turn? What a hard decision filled with depth. So many upsides and downsides to consider."

Do take a gander at the resistance types. It always gets to me how many freakin' resistances Dragon Quest games have for every single little thing. Single target fire magic is different to multi-target magic which is different to fire breath.

What comes to mind is when the Pokemon Trading Card game added the dragon type for a brief spell. It diluted the type pool too much that it made it less likely for types to be relevant, and was retired soon after.

There's just no way a human mind can remember all these things... and they're not expected to. PvP uses the AI to fight, and it'll know the gist of what's effective and what's not. Which is great for casual players, but not for hardcore control freaks who want to learn every little thing about a game to min/max it.

(And for Dragon Quest in general, I realized that Metal Slime EXP farms are a necessary design decision due to the diminishing returns on the linear math. To keep the player getting stronger at the same kind of pace they do at the start of the game, they need to get levels a heck of a lot faster later on.)


Music

I just wanted to mention how fantastic Final Fantasy 6's music is. It alone is enough of a reward to warrant playing the game. Every character has their own theme, and they ain't short little loops like Tokimeki Memorial has. The final battle is this massive orchestra that is a culmination of your entire adventure; the ending is a remix of all your guy's theme songs put together. (He gave everyone a song, then the madman doubled it.)

It's fulfilling.

Most games are doing great if they can manage a fraction of this.

Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 4 is very dogshit, on this metric. Pay someone to write some freaking songs. Maybe be bold enough to mix things up a little. God.


Conclusions

All these Joker games are the same game beneath the skin. Later ones are refined mostly for the better - Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 5: Joker 3 has some major improvements. You can resize finalized monsters, and control all of their traits. It's much more in spirit with the original game's idea of "use your favorite monsters". And it does away with the extremely annoying gender feature, which only exists to make you waste time without adding anything to the game. (Additionally, I hear the professional version has harder fights throughout it that require some preparation.)

The Dark Prince should also be more of the same.

.... they just certainly have too many cutscenes. Joker 2: Joker 2 was almost entirely a liminal space after slogging through the opening chorescene. I really appreciated that; nothing to get between you and playing the game, you know? These cutscenes are like.... you're at a park to calmly take in the trees, maybe pet some ducks. Then some assholes stomp into your mellow vibing space to tell you you need to do a massive list of chores for them. It's not cool.

In retrospect, maybe that's a reason I don't like Dragon Quest 6 as much as I think I should. They feel obligated to constantly insert little skits everywhere that don't matter outside of themselves.

I do wish they'd mix up the skill system eventually; they could just simplify it so you learn a set's skills normally by meeting level and stat thresholds, like in the old original games. Not everything has to be Dragon Quest 8 forever.




(Since there's like all of 50 pages in english about this game, I feel obligated to add the following words for SEO reasons: Dragon Quest Monsters 2: Cobi and Tara's Marvelous Mysterious Key Keys. But once again it isn't really remotely DQM2, besides a little bit of its skin.

While it's a bit fun to play something it feels like nobody else has... The lack of english attention can be a bit of a downside. Here's one example: The FAQ that includes advice on which keywords to use while randomly generating keys, to have a chance of getting useful ones? It's for the Japanese version, not the translated one. I still have no idea how to generate a level with Gold Golems, which are apparently the most efficient way to gather very necessary gold.)

[Steamflogger Boss]

Playing the first DQ game again and man there is just something about it. So simple and so...pure? No frills, where it all started.

[Sima Tuna]

I came to Dragon Quest very late. I think my favorite is DQ4. I played it on DS and just loved every moment. It didn't overstay its welcome, I enjoyed all the gimmick chapters and the final chapter with everyone was cool.

I never played DQ 1-3, although I've seen them played. Same for 5 and 6. I enjoyed 7, but it does a lot of weird stuff. I've tried multiple times to get into DQ8 and I just can't. I even played all the way to the very last boss in DQ8 on 3DS. And... I still kind of hate the game. It just feels way too fucking slow and plodding. DQ9 was great fun though.

I guess I prefer the more gameplay-centric stuff over the storyline/visuals/music emphasis of DQ8. I haven't played DQ11, but it looks like a successor to 8 and I don't think I'd like it. I'm looking forward to the HD remake of DQ3. As long as it's better than the mobile version, anyway.

[BryanM]

I do recommend 1, 3 and 5 sometime.

9 is a bit like 3 with how you recruit characters at the start. Like with the monsters games but not quite to the same extent, 3 has a bit of replay value.

5 is a bit... a bit unique for the series. It actually tries to tell a story. Your character's story, not NPC Signpost Dipshit #53,879's. Introduced monster party members, and the unthinkable insanity of having more than one waifu in their game at a time. Also the utter madness of having your MC be a staff chick instead of a sword hobo. Innovation left right and center.

(If you loathed the more realistic scale and over the shoulder presentation of 8, you'll probably hate the Joker series too.)

(Seriously Toriyama seemed to hate drawing women and just removed almost every single one of them from his manga for the longest stretch. But if you want plump old men with mustaches or grandpa Piccolo in your DQM game, you've got a plethora to choose from though.)

Playing the first DQ game again and man there is just something about it. So simple and so...pure? No frills, where it all started.

I praise it quite a lot. A lot of designers forget their roots - the base isn't really their last game, but the first game that their clone game is ultimately based on.

I think a bit of Pokemon's success is thanks to the 1v1 battles that make things go much faster. Adding a second character basically doubles battle time and button inputs. (Card games also have that problem of 1 thing, where you can use two 1-mana spells for the cost of one 2-mana spell. Some of them have advanced to using 2 mana spells as the base, so the next increment up to 3 is +50% instead of +100%.)

Making do with less and requiring more time spent grinding in a zone to get strong enough to venture into the next one... I think a lot of later jRPGs basically became walking simulators where you just zoom past dungeons and towns, never letting anything soak in and form a memory. Where they abandoned the original dungeon crawler mentality of these places were deathtraps to be overcome.

[Sumez]

I guess I prefer the more gameplay-centric stuff over the storyline/visuals/music emphasis of DQ8. I haven't played DQ11, but it looks like a successor to 8 and I don't think I'd like it. I'm looking forward to the HD remake of DQ3. As long as it's better than the mobile version, anyway.

11 is very much a successor to DQ8. So if you didn't like the story driven focus in 8 it's definitely not for you.

On the other hand, if you dig the gameplay focus, 1, 2 and 3 should be the absolute best choice for you. Hell, they didn't even have scripted in-game cutscenes until 3, and even then it's used incredibly sparingly.
DQ2 and DQ3 especially (NES versions) are two of my favourites in the series, and a blueprint for what I think a classic JRPG should be like which has been replicated close to zero times since then.
In both games there's a short linear lead-in sequence (a bit too long in 3, but it's ok) until you get the boat early on - and from that point on the entire world is open for you to explore. But unlike modern openworld games like Skyrim etc. it's not just a big map with interest points. Getting anywhere still takes effort and progress, and some areas of course will demand higher level characters than others, but it's still completely nonlinear. The only end-goal that matters is gathering a specific number of mcguffins in order to open up the endgame areas.
This creates a structure that I think is more similar to classic point n click adventures where attaining items and making progress in some areas will open up new possibilities in other areas. And carried over from the first game in the series, there's a massive emphasis on paying attention to what townspeople have to say in order to solve minor puzzles or uncover things you need elsewhere.

DQ2 gets a lot of flak from being the more rough one of the games. DQ3 is basically the exact same formula except a lot smoother, but there's a lot to like about 2's more uncompromising approach. A couple of the dungeons I had to map out manually in order to conquer, and of course that takes more patience, but it's also much more satisfying. DQ3 also introduces the option to bank your gold, which removes a massive risk from exploration. In DQ2 you have to constantly balance your resources and factor in the possibility of death when still mapping out unexplored territory. It's good stuff!

Addendum: There's also a slight relation between 1, 2 and 3 that makes me recommend playing them in order. It's nothing that drives their story or anything, but there are a few nods to their shared continuity that is definitely best appreciated that way.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I loved 8. So my first entry point into the series was 7. I was young and not terminally online at the time. My game buying choices were actually just looking at the back of the case and whatnot. It looked decent so I tried it. I absolutely hated 7. We've generally talked about this before I think. Almost didn't play 8 because of it but the US release seemed to have a lot of hype/advertisement backing which is probably what led to me playing it. Ultimately glad I did because it got me to reconsider the series which I had basically written off. Proceeded to play 4/5/6 and loved them. I think I originally played 1/2/3 on Gameboy.

@BryanM: Yeah the whole one on one combat thing is kinda neat and definitely makes for a faster experience.

@Sumez: Well stated.

Been thinking about giving FF1 another shot.

[BryanM]

Haha, poor unlucky 7.

Its overworld art was a massive downgrade from 6, and for no really good reason. There's no reason it couldn't have looked more like other sprite+3d games of today or even back then. Look at Persona 2. There's no excuse, the characters could have continued to have a 2x1 Chrono Trigger style ratio on their art. You can make it look like almost anything - they looked at this in preproduction, and said "yes this is the way to go."

The playable characters weren't the most attractive bunch - you had a green gnome MC, a grandpa, and a grubby brat. The cast of 4 is more like the kind of imaginary friends most would want to go on an adventure with, I think. Or most of the other games.

When its competition was Final Freaking Fantasy 7, it was rough. I laughed out loud at the one (1) CGI FMV in the game, it was just so embarrassing. It would have been a million times better if they just commissioned an animation studio to do a couple minutes of traditional animation. (Jade Cocoon for example had a partnership with Studio Ghibli.)

Its one undeniable upside was the improved monster animation in battle. But more frames of animation have diminishing returns, you know?

Its one lasting legacy is getting a laugh whenever you can get a Christian God in one of the monster games.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I think my biggest grievance with Dragon Quest 7 is that it takes actual hours before you are getting into combat. Completely agree on the visuals though, they are painful. In general it's too much game, which kind of became a trend with JRPGs and one I do not like. It's okay if these games are 30 hours and not 120+ would be something I'd love to tell Japanese developers.

Even forgetting about FF7 I'd say DQ7 compares poorly to other contemporaries such as Wild Arms and Suikoden. Wild Arms man, that game is great and was definitely overshadowed by FF7.

[ryu]

I played Wild Arms and Final Fantasy VII almost back to back as a kid and definitely had more fun with the former. But I wouldn't agree that FF VII is one of those games that overstay their welcome. It's like 30-40 hours if you play through it casually, nothing compared to the timewasters that are today's RPGs.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

But I wouldn't agree that FF VII is one of those games that overstay their welcome.

I might've missed where it was mentioned in regards to FF7, but the only mention of a game overstaying its welcome I can see is in reference to DQ7. I think the confusion stems from the discussion of the DQ games by number only, and then mention that FF7 was among DQ7's competition at the time.

FF7 was all right, certainly cutting edge in terms of presentation at the time, but the Materia system meant that the characters felt much more samey and interchangeable than in FF6 where you had freedom of who to use, and their special abilities helped differentiate them a lot more than in FF7 where special abilities were largely limited to the Limit command. Want to use a new character? Just move all your Materia over! Late in the game, everyone can pile on whatever Magic spells they like in FF6, but individual special abilities still remain useful and relevant, albeit less so depending on how aggressively you've been learning spells. The Materia system was interesting to play with in terms of customization, but I would've liked party member selection to feel more strategically meaningful outside of Limits.

I also didn't like how FF7 helped popularize the trend of having a large cast of playable characters, but forcing the "main" character to be present at all times, limiting party customization arbitrarily. Plenty of later RPGs did this too unnecessarily, such as FF8, Legend of Dragoon, and so on. Fortunately this was a trend that was fairly quickly bucked by the "Tales of" series.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I played Wild Arms and Final Fantasy VII almost back to back as a kid and definitely had more fun with the former. But I wouldn't agree that FF VII is one of those games that overstay their welcome. It's like 30-40 hours if you play through it casually, nothing compared to the timewasters that are today's RPGs.

I could have been more clear and I'll edit it in, the first part was about Dragon Quest 7.

[ryu]

Yikes. Think I just didn't pay attention, sorry. Guess I just read Wild Arms and something 7 mentioned and my mind immediately made the jump to comparing Wild Arms and FF7.

[Sima Tuna]

Haha, poor unlucky 7.

Its overworld art was a massive downgrade from 6, and for no really good reason. There's no reason it couldn't have looked more like other sprite+3d games of today or even back then. Look at Persona 2. There's no excuse, the characters could have continued to have a 2x1 Chrono Trigger style ratio on their art. You can make it look like almost anything - they looked at this in preproduction, and said "yes this is the way to go."

The playable characters weren't the most attractive bunch - you had a green gnome MC, a grandpa, and a grubby brat. The cast of 4 is more like the kind of imaginary friends most would want to go on an adventure with, I think. Or most of the other games.

When its competition was Final Freaking Fantasy 7, it was rough. I laughed out loud at the one (1) CGI FMV in the game, it was just so embarrassing. It would have been a million times better if they just commissioned an animation studio to do a couple minutes of traditional animation. (Jade Cocoon for example had a partnership with Studio Ghibli.)

Its one undeniable upside was the improved monster animation in battle. But more frames of animation have diminishing returns, you know?

Its one lasting legacy is getting a laugh whenever you can get a Christian God in one of the monster games.

There's still something I like about DQ7. I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe, like you said, it has to do with the characters. DQ7 is a very strange game. The lack of direction and the amount of time it takes for the adventure to get rolling are definitely flaws. But I like the class system and I enjoy the episodic nature of the adventures. DQ9 does something similar. DQ7 and DQ9 aren't really games about a single, overarching story. They're more like episodes in a tv show, where every new area is a new adventure, with a beginning, middle and end. The ultimate ending usually has some kind of clue or puzzle piece that connects to the larger story, but it's not the focus.

I haven't seen many other rpgs that approach adventuring like this. Y'know, like separate, smaller travels that aren't strongly connected to the main story. Definitely a flawed game, but I'm happy I played and completed it. I don't know if I would ever complete it again. DQ7 almost requires a game guide so you know where to go next.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Yikes. Think I just didn't pay attention, sorry. Guess I just read Wild Arms and something 7 mentioned and my mind immediately made the jump to comparing Wild Arms and FF7.

No problem really, but definitely wanted to clarify my position on it. I like FF7 well enough.

@Sima Tuna: I'd almost say lack of direction is a feature of the series. Like the game wants you to talk to every NPC and explore it fully. So I'm not sure if that's fully unique to 7. Buuut I also haven't played it properly in many years so it might be worse than I am remembering in that regard. Last time I tried I didn't get to the combat. People seem to say the 3DS version fixes some of the general issues of the game but I haven't tried it. Plus people say that about 8 too and I can't help but think what's to even fix. Both 3DS versions are a lot shorter on howlongtobeat. I assume a fair bit of that is simply cartridge vs disc but I doubt that explains all of it.

Also this may sound lame but every game is flawed and people are going to enjoy different things. I've got several clears under my belt of games I really liked that many people would consider absolute shit. Life is too short to play a game you aren't enjoying is something I wish I realized sooner.

[BryanM]

Job systems really are difficult things - from day 1 in Final Fantasy 3 they've had design issues with making most of them relevant. I think the fundamental issue is that they're often implemented like a player of a card game or gacha game having every gaming piece. Some are going to be way better than others, and you can't want things that you have.

The go-to example I use for power differentiation (called "color pie" by the Magic Teh Gathering's development team) is the Tornado skill from Diablo 2. It's effectively a slow wiggling lightning bolt that has a chance of missing your target. It'd be doodoo for a Sorceress, but it's the best option a Druid has, which is the class that actually has it, so it has a reason to exist.

Dragon Quest 6 went to some extreme lengths to make some weaker skills stand out: Breath attacks and the Hustle Dance famously costing 0 MP. The guy who decided that deserves a taco and a frosty milkshake.

Every time I play a DQM game always makes me think "good lord Dragon Quest has a lot of useless skills."

[Sumez]

That's one of the things I liked the best about DQ8 - You only got the 4 characters in your party, and each of them is shoehorned into a very specific set of skills depending on where you put their skill points. This means everyone needs to fill a specific role, and most of their abilities play an important role.

DQ7 meanwhile every class gets like 40 variations of "deal damage" with no indication of what properties separate them, if any.

DQ11 of course is the king in this regard. You have a lot more abilities in that game, and twice as many characters, but holy hell you'll need to use each and every one of them properly and tactically across all the fights you're thrown into. [provided you're playing on the harder mode, of course, this is a disclaimer every time I talk about DQ11]

[BryanM]

Oh man, I know I was getting on the Final Fantasy reskins for having an obnoxious amount of white space, but I feel like this Live a Hero thing could use a good heaping serving of white space.

I tried out the Octopath Mobile game a while back, since it had some positive buzz. I didn't really get into it, it's not the worst thing I guess. I found the character design extremely irksome. Characters are as common as pokemon, with much less to differentiate them. "Merchant" guy "Dancer" lady "Warrior" guy etc is about all there is to them. It's another one of those braindead Squeenix design hallmarks. Nobody successful does this - 1/4th as many characters with 10+ times the investment into each one is what the standard is. The typical Genshin product ad has more effort put into it than they've put into their entire cast.

I talk a lot about the diminishing returns on novelty; this is worse character design than a kaiju game where all the kaiju are big lizards.

DQ7 meanwhile every class gets like 40 variations of "deal damage" with no indication of what properties separate them, if any.

That DQM resistance table I linked up there really is something else.

Magic always gets a bum deal in these games. My favorite is the basic Blaze spell you get in every game. It's almost immediately outscaled, and then you have a skill that costs MP that does less damage than the 0 MP attack command. It's obsolete as soon as you get it.

That was something DQ8 could have used - serious magic damage buffs. And a second lady. And a malnurished Mr.Satan in a clown suit. That would tie the game together nicely.

It is a little frightful how much the whole "adventure with some cosplaying Dragon Ball" characters thing carries the franchise.

Anyway, control skills like the dance/pun abilities do have little place to shine when most fights are sweeping trash in a turn or two. And most bosses, except for God, tend to resist them. And again - if you want to burn a turn to erase an enemy's turn, you can just heal. And use the also overpowered buffs if that's not enough.

Healing is OP in these games. I kind of have come to prefer the ones where it isn't, where entropy is the norm. Control skills tend to be very powerful there, since Heal isn't rendering them obsolete.

[Sumez]

Sounds like you need a good dose of DQ11 with super strong monsters enabled.
Every skill is perfectly balanced for a satisfying challenge, including debuffs against bosses, magic damage, and even healing.

In DQ8 you break the game the moment you you get the heal-all skill. In DQ11 every time you get an ability that seems OP, the next boss will turn it into a minimum requirement.

[BryanM]

Argh, I tried playing the demo since you vouched for it so much, but it just doesn't... it doesn't like my PC, and I'm not 100% sure that's a me thing, or the general incompetence of Japanese game developers to make games that actually run on PC's. Spending hundreds of dollars to play a couple of games (wait, three. I'd have to get the newest Mario Kart too. But not DQM3, I'm too burned out on that now.) when I have too many other ways of killing time is a no-go currently.

Maybe around the time of the Switch 5 or 6. If we still have oxygen during the apocalypse : /

[Sumez]

Or just play it on PS4

[BryanM]

Bro, I ain't even got a Phantasy Star 3 how am I supposed to Phantasy Star 4 it up???

In retrospect, it's kind of amazing I'm still allowed to play *any* games made in the last three years...

[Sengoku Strider]

Phantasy Star 3 is a good time, I don't care what anybody says.

I got Octopath II. Before I start, is there any type of save carryover from the first game to the second? Should I finish the endgame of the first before starting up the second?

[TransatlanticFoe]

Octopath II - no carryover from the previous game's save file.

It also ditches the thief-only treasure chests, so you don't have to worry about getting the thief early on or face dungeon backtracking for loot.

[Sengoku Strider]

Octopath II - no carryover from the previous game's save file.

It also ditches the thief-only treasure chests, so you don't have to worry about getting the thief early on or face dungeon backtracking for loot.

Thanks! Looking forward to jumping in. I actually didn't mind the backtracking for a bit of extra XP, the dungeons aren't so big once you've finished them.

[TransatlanticFoe]

You get tonnes more interactions from party members during story events, so I'd recommend picking up everyone first. Your starting character is still locked in until you clear their storyline, so consider that when picking if you weren't fond of a particular class in the first game. They have similar abilities, probably the biggest change is hunter's captures are unlimited uses this time.

[Sengoku Strider]

I went with the scholar last time, I might go that way again though he seems a bit grimdark. They all look pretty fun though. I'm glad they kept things consistent with the classes, it gives the series an identity.