Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

[BareKnuckleRoo]

It honestly looks worse than the PS2 era Chikyu Boueigun games, for which there's no excuse no matter how technically brilliant Sandlot were back in the PS2 era (which they were), as the Pokémon games have, you know, a budget.

[Sima Tuna]

There's a reason I've been getting my poggermans fix from Cassette Beasts, Coromon and my old DS repro of HeartGold that I'm endlessly doing Monotype runs in.

The new pokemon games are just awful and lazy. They can afford to be, because they know the franchise has such weight that it will always sell. It takes a while to truly ruin a brand with poor products, and you can skate a veerrrry long time on past goodwill, all the while selling your trash. I think Nintendo's philosophy with pokemon is that they won't change anything until they're forced to. They're going to keep using the same shitty 3d engine because that's what they have, so the games will run like ass and look awful. Who cares, if the games sell anyway, right?

If you want a modern "pokemon" game, then give Cassette Beasts a look. Its creatures are much more modular than Pokemon, and your flexibility in building them is greater as well. The game isn't perfect and does have some issues (including performance issues, some of which are apparently baked into ALL versions,) but it's as promising an imitator as I think we've seen. Coromon is great if you're a Gen 3-4 fanboy like me, but I think CB is the easier recommend for most people.

[XoPachi]

Disc Creatures is another good one. By the same guys who did Infinos Gaiden and Andros Dunos 2 no less.

[BryanM]

They're going to keep using the same shitty 3d engine because that's what they have

The engine isn't the problem, the guys responsible for putting the game (including the engine) together are.

Gamefreak's five guys are not the most technically gifted people on the planet. It is pretty crazy they're in the position that they're in.

Holy shit do we need to talk about Pokémon Scarlet/Violet

I got it as an xmas gift for the missus and Jesus Miltank Fuckin' christ. what a travesty of a game this is!
I genuinely can't get over it.

My brain is still trapped on the Nintendo 64 trees of its predecessor.

I'd actually be 100% ok with Nintendo 64 graphics, because I'm a deviant freak, as long as:

* The textures are clean and crisp

* The resolution is high, so the polygons aren't all jaggy and whatnot

But Sword and Shield doesn't have enhanced Nintendo 64 graphics for its Nintendo 64 tree, it's a literal Nintendo 64 greasetree >_<

If you want a modern "pokemon" game

I'm 100% for the "play a different game/read a different book" plan. Always like to link this video when it comes up.

One thing I think a lot of devs make a mistake on is sticking too closely to Pokemon's monster design style. The closer you get to that, the closer you get to stale bread everyone should be tired of eating by now. Megami Tensei, Digimon, those hero/waifu collector gacha games... bit more refreshing in their themes and color palettes.

Humanoid units are especially underused in the genre. (Noooo, not like that)

... a moment of silence for cabbage cat.

The Jade Cocoon games are a large, large departure from the Pokemon battle engine. And of course Dragon Quest Monsters is always a dragon questy monster fusion adventure. The fusion system is compelling, you can use it gently or you can min/max the hell out of it and completely break the game apart.

Subsystems that can feel like a cheat are a jPig mainstay.

[Sumez]

I'm quite unconvinced there was ever a single Pokemon game that isn't really bad. Always felt to me like superficial kiddie jarpigs with absolutely nothing engaging to them outside of a gross overdose of compulsion. I haven't met a fan who doesn't coincidentally happen to also be the age where it just ties into their nostalgia.

[ryu]

I had my Pokemon nostalgia phase in my twenties that abruptly stopped with Pokemon X because the games were getting too easy and railroaded for my taste. A friend convinced me last year to try out Legends Arceus, but I just hated that you had to do that stupid open world grind in order to progress in the game (catch the same Pokemon 20 times! Use the same Pokemon 40 times in battle! etc.) because the developers didn't know what to do with their skinner box (as is often the case with these games).

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I'm quite unconvinced there was ever a single Pokemon game that isn't really bad.

Pokémon Pinball springs to mind (same guys I think who did Kirby Pinball and Revenge of the Gator), but it's still themed as Pokémon sadly.

As a kid I bought into the craze for Pokémon Blue and the collectathon that went with trying to trade. But honestly, once I was old enough to appreciate Final Fantasy Legend and Legend II (I think I mighta got those after Pokémon), my brief love affair ended. The combat in Pokémon isn't particularly engaging; PvE can be broken by simply getting large stocks of healing items, and for PvP to be remotely interesting you have to have two teams around the same level, which is a slog to get to. I recommend a peek through this guide with goes over just how few Pokémon are viable for PvP use, how you basically have to use a Gameshark and stat edit so everyone's on even footing for competitive play to be remotely balanced (or spend hours of grinding so everyone on a team is at the max level), and so on: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gameboy/3 ... faqs/20844

You also have limited numbers of key TMs in the game. Want to teach Earthquake to multiple team members? If they don't learn it naturally, you'll need a separate cartridge to grind with, trade, have that save file use their once-ever TMs, trade back, and have that other cartridge restart to get more of those TMs. It really does mean that team optimization and moveset customization at a high level is either a really long and tedious process, a short process aided by a cheat device (or the Missigno glitch to duplicate items), or you settle for PvP fights with unoptimized teams. The same applies to certain once-ever Pokémon that can only be obtained once per playthrough, making obtaining multiples legitimately (if you want a team with two or more of the same 'mon) tedious.

It's the same problem that trading card games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering have in real life; people who have more money to invest are able to compete on a completely different level than people who don't. If you don't have a Gameshark, or a second Gameboy and game to do TM use and tradebacks with, your teams will be limited.

There's online battle simulators nowadays that even the playfield and let you freely create teams with anything theoretically available. That obviously works better for play balance, but it's not an official game and you're tossing the RPG itself out the window. It's turning Pokémon into a deck building game.

Battle system aside, Pokémon just isn't compelling thematically. Everyone's bought into the marketing craze of "cute/cool monster friends!" while ignoring the ethical problems of commercializing what is essentially cockfighting for children. There were significantly better RPGs with more meaningful and memorable worlds made at the time Pokémon existed. Perhaps they didn't have the longevity of Pokémon in terms of the lengths you can go to to build a team, flesh out that Pokédex, etc, but I'd much rather replay SaGa 1 and 2 multiple times with different teams than replay Pokémon.

Cool monsters are nice and all, but cockfighting is cockfighting and I'd rather take a chainsaw to god.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I'm quite unconvinced there was ever a single Pokemon game that isn't really bad.

Honestly, I never really thought of them as games period. They're the equivalent of randomly poking your phone because you're waiting for you dinner date to show up. That's why I always get taken a bit aback when I see complaints pertaining to technical shortcomings. It's like saying "this version of 'Snake' isn't even in color?? C'mon, you can do better than that..."

(in interest of full disclosure: I was also in my 20s when Pokemon became a 'thing' so I have no warm, cuddly nostalgia attached to the series, the same way I have no warm, cuddly nostalgia attached to Barney the dinosaur. So to me, the games exist as just a way to distract 6-year-olds, and keep them from destroying the house. Like VHS copies of The Little Mermaid)

((in interest of full disclosure part 2: I did kinda of like the one where you just drive around and take pictures of the creatures. It was like a rail shooter where you're an ultra-elite assassin. But that doesn't pertain to this thread)

[BryanM]

I just find it funny this forum loves Metroid but hates Pokemon. We were impressionable little children when the poopy NES Metroid game came out, but aggressive horny teenage males when Pokemoners came out.

Pokemon is a fine game. It has more substance to it than Altered Beast does, as a game for newbies. The biggest mark against it (besides the technical incompetence and insistence on making them much worse with locking the player in annoying dialogue dump prisons or other forced tangents, instead of just letting them be free) is they haven't aged with its playerbase. 40-somethings have already figured out the monotype gyms, not giving them a "I've played pokermons before" mode is really rather mean.

For some normies it's the only jRPG they ever play and the non-existent difficulty is a feature. (Just like it is in the Metroid franchise.)

The combat in Pokémon isn't particularly engaging; PvE can be broken by simply getting large stocks of healing items, and for PvP to be remotely interesting you have to have two teams around the same level, which is a slog to get to. I recommend a peek through this guide with goes over just how few Pokémon are viable for PvP use, how you basically have to use a Gameshark and stat edit so everyone's on even footing for competitive play to be remotely balanced (or spend hours of grinding so everyone on a team is at the max level), and so on: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gameboy/3 ... faqs/20844

You also have limited numbers of key TMs in the game.

I always think about the old observation that there's always ways to improve at Starcraft. Unit control, scouting, understanding contextual advantages of different units (example of that: 1 zergling beats 1 marine, 40 marines slaughter 40 zerglings), macro, etc.

With Pokemon I suppose the opposite of that is true, where people try different ways to keep the games interesting that largely involve not min/maxing like a utility zombie. Obvious things include *not* using heal items in battle and implementing community tier lists so far more than 2% of the units are viable.

In some ways it's kind of beautiful Gamefreak refuses to support the most basic of things; "we'll do it ourselves" makes it feel like the community matters. Where they have actual ownership, as opposed to God making proclamations that everyone has to live with. (At least they loosened the grip a bit and got rid of finite TM's.)

There are also people out that actually like that there's an infinite grind they can choose to engage in.

But one thing that's really dogshit I've complained about before is their online unit storage. It should be directly integrated with the games, and it should last forever. For a forever game about collections, they don't much support that.

(But I do think they let people trade on the internet these days, so the pay to win/have friends to win aspect you mentioned isn't as big an issue as it once was.)

I still absolutely loathe the single save file thing, though. They really, really don't support their enthusiasts.

I guess that's why ~80% of the community content is all about emulation and romhacks.

I mean, imagine. Playing a turn based game that doesn't move as fast as you can make inputs. Where you have to sit there for like 1.5+ seconds to be told how much damage you dealt and took. SMH, I have trouble tolerating Super Mario games at regular speed these days, let alone a jRPG.

The guy doing solos with every unit, especially the really really bad ones, would lose his mind if it wasn't something he couldn't finish in an afternoon or two.

[Sima Tuna]

I just find it funny this forum loves Metroid but hates Pokemon. We were impressionable little children when the poopy NES Metroid game came out, but aggressive horny teenage males when Pokemoners came out.

Pokemon is a fine game. It has more substance to it than Altered Beast does, as a game for newbies. The biggest mark against it (besides the technical incompetence and insistence on making them much worse with locking the player in annoying dialogue dump prisons or other forced tangents, instead of just letting them be free) is they haven't aged with its playerbase. 40-somethings have already figured out the monotype gyms, not giving them a "I've played pokermons before" mode is really rather mean.

I agree. For me, Pokemans occupies the same space in my brain as Dragon Quest, Saga and the other "number cruncher" old jarpigs. I really love that kind of game and the OLD pokemon games cater to that mentality. Think of the old pokemon games like an RPG where you form a party of six characters out of a possible 150. It's up to you to build your team to support each other and cover for the inherent weaknesses of every type (except Normal, which is OP.)

If the game is too easy (although Yellow through Black 2 still offered some challenge) then there are numerous challenges you can impose to crank up the difficulty dial. No in-battle item usage. No item usage period. No TMs. No reviving 'mons. Play with a monotype-themed team (what I do) so you can't get safe switch-ins like a mixed team can.

The problem with pokemon is they actually made the new games easier than the old ones. Game Freak doesn't understand how to do pokermans difficulty. As much as people complained about Cynthia's cheating Garchomp in Platinum, that wasn't a horrible move by the devs. It was a way to say, "hey scrub, here's a gym leader whose team is SO optimized that you players literally can't do the same as her. Now figure out how to beat that." Jarpig bosses do that shit all the time. There was something similar in Black/White, with a dragon who had evolved something like 10 levels before he was supposed to, just so he could be a major roadblock for the player.

The 3d games never figured out difficulty again. The point of these games isn't to have "all optimized characters." Your pokemon are supposed to have imperfect movesets. You're supposed to make hard decisions about TM use. Ironically, despite what Nintendo tries to do (forcing everyone to have only 1 save file they keep forever,) the games are MUCH more fun when approached on a per-run basis. Because you can actually fucking use all those TMs. So what if I only get one TM for Thunderbolt? That still means one of the six poggermins on my team has an amazing electric move. Great for coverage or providing STAB to a 'mon with a shitty move pool. Or allowing me to skip the level-up process entirely and just hand the best STAB moves to my 'mons outright.

I think these games get way better when you use the resources you're given, don't strive for perfection and are willing to restart your file. The way I handle that (without losing all my favorite mons) is to trade between a 2nd copy of the game (my completionist file) so I can get all my runs set up ahead of time. I breed level 1s of whatever type I plan to use in the next MonoType run and I trade out the best-performers of the old run before I wipe the save. You could do the same thing much easier with some sort of cheat engine, and just hack in the level 1s of whatever team you wanted to use. But the way I do it, it is all legit and I do it that way so I can play with pokemon that I normally wouldn't be able to. I can take a Dratini that only spawns near the end of a run and I can breed a level 1, then send that back to myself at the equivalent of Viridian City. It's still level 1 and still sucks, but that approach lets me use all the pogermans for whatever challenge run I want.

I'm planning to do an All Fossils run next. Basically the same as Rock Monotype, when you think about it. Rock is a really bad defensive typing, so I can expect some challenge on this one. Those who think pokemon games are too easy, you can always join me running Heartgold with only Bug types? That's the only monotype run I tried but never completed. I made it to the Elite Four but Will was a brick wall. I love bugs though, so I'll be trying again.

[Sumez]

I just find it funny this forum loves Metroid but hates Pokemon. We were impressionable little children when the poopy NES Metroid game came out, but aggressive horny teenage males when Pokemoners came out.

Or maybe Metroid is a good game, and Pokemon is a bad one

[Lander]

Pokemon's an odd one. I had the stage set for full on nostalgia - played the games, watched the cartoons, had the trading cards - but it's one of the few series that I've completely grown out of with time.
To the point where I - perhaps unfairly - regard grown-up pokemaniacs with a mild degree of side-eye, like smash players and ur-weebs.

Perhaps it was seeing the series not really move forward so much as sideways from where I started with it. Memories of seeing E3 teasers for Next Poke Game and wondering if it would be the 'Monster Hunter World' analogue that really went big, only for it to be a noncommittal arena battler, significantly cut-down version of the RPG formula, or just more or the same.

I agree. For me, Pokemans occupies the same space in my brain as Dragon Quest, Saga and the other "number cruncher" old jarpigs. I really love that kind of game and the OLD pokemon games cater to that mentality. Think of the old pokemon games like an RPG where you form a party of six characters out of a possible 150. It's up to you to build your team to support each other and cover for the inherent weaknesses of every type (except Normal, which is OP.)

Hmm, doesn't that work out as Suikoden: Kids in some sense or other? Just with 150 cute animals instead of 108 stars of destiny.

[BryanM]

Ironically, despite what Nintendo tries to do (forcing everyone to have only 1 save file they keep forever,) the games are MUCH more fun when approached on a per-run basis.

This is a big problem with Dragon Quest Monsters games, too. They're designed to almost be kind of like roguelikes in the amount of variety you can get out of a replay. (Hell, the first two non-Joker DQM games had randomized levels. They weren't implemented well, but if they were, it would have been very cool.)

Or any decent jRPG in general, where you don't get to funnel your progress into a post game file. And there isn't any grindy endless postgame content for a player to engage with, for those who want that kind of feature. Powering up in the early stages of a game is one of the funnest aspects of this Cookie-clicker genre; like I said about Vampire Survivor type games, they take ~60 hours of content and compress it into 20 minutes.

The box revenue model doesn't incentivize this at all though. Quite the opposite - they don't want to create a forever game, they want you to buy the new box. Do your replays in a new copy of the game. It's pretty much the same exact game anyway, right.

Or maybe Metroid is a good game, and Pokemon is a bad one

Nah NES Metroid is pretty terrible for anyone who has gotten even a little good at games. Like with Diablo 2 man, you've got rose-tinted glasses. Go climb that endless blue shaft another 15,000 times, walk through empty hallways that only ever have one or two defenseless goombas in them, just zero action, and tell me how it's peak gaming.

It has really good music though.

but it's one of the few series that I've completely grown out of with time

Which is completely normal. Would probably apply to a lot more things if they didn't die on their own. (Heck, I'm all Monster-Huntered out myself. Played it too much, and three games were more than enough.)

Hell, Jade Cocoon 2 does the imaginary friend aspect better than any Pokemon game simply by having characters show up in your life more than once. And they rarely engage you in a battle when you do meet them so you don't feel like moaning and going "ah, this fuck again. Guess I've gotta punch him in the face again.... Sigh." every single time you see them.

The cartoons were always like one or two minutes of adventure followed by 18 minutes of "Team Rocket Antics". I do have to admire them for basically making an entire soap opera that spans 10,000 years that consists of basically but Jar Jar antics.

[Sumez]

Nah NES Metroid is pretty terrible for anyone who has gotten even a little good at games. Like with Diablo 2 man, you've got rose-tinted glasses.

I beat NES Metroid for the first time exactly a month ago, I have zero nostalgia for it. It's a great game.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Subsystems that can feel like a cheat are a jPig mainstay.

So awhile back I finished up Octopath II and of course since it's job system, so you can break it completely. Some random thoughts incoming, going to put it all in spoiler tags since it's a relatively newer game.

Spoiler

So in this game you can change between day and night with the shift of a button. Something that was necessary for them to do since characters have different day/night actions, plus npcs change depending on time of day. So this is all well and good. The game tells you at the start there are tougher monsters at night but the reality you will find out is that you should *always* be fighting at night. But not really because of the better monsters, but because it actually makes the game easier. One character buffs your party at the start of the fight for three turns if it's night time, and another debuffs the enemy for 3 turns if it's night. No cost involved in this at all, just native abilities. This makes a massive difference not only in being to punch up for fights but also in ease of one turn killing the enemy for bonuses after the fight. Also, this works on boss fights. That's something I appreciate about this game, generally everything works on bosses too.

Skill load outs you want are very different for grinding/exploring vs min/maxing for a boss as well. When you are just casually exploring you definitely want the heal 30% hp/mp after battle on everyone. It's mandatory. Why would you ever want to have to stay at an inn? Then since fights are going to be pretty easy you can mostly just use w/e you want on a few slots, like you want someone with more exp for the party etc For the really interesting fights in the game (there are two imo) you want to be setting yourself up to be killing the enemy before they can even really do anything, which is generally possible. Mandatory skills are First Step (tied to the stupid Inventor job), Deal More Damage and Peak Performance (big damage boost for being at or above full health) You also want the speed of your characters manipulated hard so that your apothecary is basically always going to get the first move. Making sure everyone always has tons of BP definitely feels like part of breaking the game. The optional superboss actually requires min maxing your full party, so that's cool.

Cleric is a busted class because of the final spell. Charge up everyone's BP, then get Aelfric going on people. Everyone acts first, then everyone acts again at the end of turns (more of a precaution for if you don't finish this in one turn). Very silly stuff.

All in all a great video game and exactly what I'm looking for in this genre. They tried a bit more to tie the stories together this time but that's not why I'm here. This is peak murder hobo performance.

I beat NES Metroid for the first time exactly a month ago, I have zero nostalgia for it. It's a great game.

Staying out of the Metroid discourse but it always cracks me up when this happens. I'll get accused of nostalgia but I've been playing a lot of old games for the very first time in the last 5 years. Ironically my nostalgia should be for N64 (despite my age, this was my first console when I was a bit older) but that's a system I can barely go back to. Just a few select games really. It always annoys me when people overuse the whole games don't hold up line. That's bunk, plenty of games hold up. I'd argue that most games that "don't hold up" were never any good to begin with. I do think there are several games that are overrated and several that are underrated in vintage game discourse. Probably many reasons why this happens *cough* youtube and random list sites *cough*. Actually playing games dispels a lot of myths. Truly a novel idea.

[Sumez]

I'd argue that most games that "don't hold up" were never any good to begin with.

This is a big pet peeve of mine. I've never seen anyone use that term about a game that either wasn't already clearly pretty bad when it came out, or holds up much better than they think. Games don't just magically get better or worse, but it's totally ok to admit you were wrong.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I'd argue that most games that "don't hold up" were never any good to begin with.

This is a big pet peeve of mine. I've never seen anyone use that term about a game that either wasn't already clearly pretty bad when it came out, or holds up much better than they think. Games don't just magically get better or worse, but it's totally ok to admit you were wrong.

Glad to see I'm not alone in this. Shit triggers me.

[Blinge]

Sumez if you were wondering what good there is in pokemon the posts by our fine fellows here encapsulate it pretty well, even while they're complaining about it.

Altho man what do I know. I only playd Blue as a kid, and Heartgold once as an adult for the nostalgia kick.

I understand there's some in depth nerd stats hijinx you can get up to with EV training and shit like that.
growing a pokeymans from lvl 1 and really minmaxing the stats it'll grow into.

but as people have been saying, what's the point.

I tried the Elite 4 with my GFs team the other day after she lost and I ended up losing too. This is in Violet,
I felt like her team didn't have an answer for one of the leaders' set ups.
You may think they've finally cracked it with the difficulty.. but no, the rest of the game was apparently a total sleepwalk.

Also - older games in the series had your jarpig dungeons, it had trainers out in the wild who would challenge you, so in... neutral gaming terms i guess you'd call them mid-bosses? A lot of them were progress blockers too. Making your way to a new area with your team intact was actually a challenge.

In the new games no one challenges you. You walk up to them. Field-on pokeymans means now you'll never be in danger again.
The gauntlet of each gym being a mini-dungeon you need to whup everyone in to reach the Boss/Leader?
No longer a thing, now you just do a shitty minigame then you can take on the leader.

In terms of challenge and pretty much everything else, I know pokeymon is supposed to be about evolution.
Well the series is currently evolving backwards.

[XoPachi]

Playing FF6 for the first time. About 12 hours in. Suplexed the train so I finally lived out that meme.

[ryu]

I was playing Final Fantasy XVI up until about the second third. Ended up dropping the game because it's uninspired and boring. I thought I'd end up quitting it because it's a movie game with a terrible plot copy and pasted straight from Game of Thrones, but the game really isn't that awful. It's just painfully mediocre in every department.

[Lander]

Man, what even happened with FF16? Yoshi P, mega budget, ostensibly very talented folks designing the systems and... It's a PS5-exclusive disappointment with a year plus wait so players on other platforms can also be disappointed.

I'm still holding hope that there'll be fun to had when it finally does come - and isn't retailing for a comedy sum as will be the inevitability - but the more I hear the lower the hype meter gets

[ryu]

I'm still holding hope that there'll be fun to had

Better forget about the game and play DMC 1 or 3 instead, or a Final Fantasy title with actual RPG elements. Every equipment item in XVI is a flat stat stick with no passive attributes. The combat is a brainless buttonmasher where you just spam buttons for half an hour because everything has way too much HP.

[Sima Tuna]

Man, what even happened with FF16? Yoshi P, mega budget, ostensibly very talented folks designing the systems and... It's a PS5-exclusive disappointment with a year plus wait so players on other platforms can also be disappointed.

I'm still holding hope that there'll be fun to had when it finally does come - and isn't retailing for a comedy sum as will be the inevitability - but the more I hear the lower the hype meter gets

Jarpig dev copies boring baka gaijin western fantasy conventions, creates shitty version of game of thrones.

[Sumez]

Weird everyone seemed to love FF16 when it came out, and now everyone hates it.

[ryu]

Weird everyone seemed to love FF16 when it came out, and now everyone hates it.

Everyone as in the persons paid by publishers to post positive impressions on their latest products?

[Sima Tuna]

I have never had a positive opinion of FF16 at any point. I haven't enjoyed an FF since FF12 or FFTA2. I don't remember which is the most recent of the two.

The best FF games, in my opinion, are FF2 (yes, really,) FF4, 5, 6, FFT, FF9. FF3 I haven't played and FF1 didn't appeal to me as much as it does to some, although I do admit to its general high quality. FF7 and FF8 are... Fine, I guess. I think the story of FF8 is dumb and it has other features I don't like, but it's probably overhated at this point. Despite being Nomura as fuck. FF7 is both overhated and overloved, but I get it. It was FF6 for people slightly younger than me.

[Sumez]

Everyone as in the persons paid by publishers to post positive impressions on their latest products?

I'll be sure to ask them about that XD

[cave hermit]

A few months ago I sat down and played through Yakuza Like a Dragon/7. Just in time for Infinite Wealth!

Honestly it's the story and setting that carries 7 in my opinion; the combat initially feels great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that the devs were still trying to figure out how to adapt the Yakuza formula to a JRPG. I get the feeling part of the problem is that you can theoretically go anywhere in the city whenever you want, so the devs can't really gate better equipment behind areas only reachable later in the game. The crafting system for better equipment also doesn't feel that well thought out, and there's a shop you can basically fast travel to where you can buy virtually any crafting material you need (except for one particular low level crafting item, which is inexplicably only available at a particular pharmacy, which I was not aware of until quite late in my playthrough). Crafting progression is mainly gated by excessive prices (although I ended up with a massive stack of yen after playing the mahjong minigame for awhile, so it didn't affect me too badly). Difficulty is also pretty low for most of the game, but then massively spikes for the last few boss fights to the point of requiring level grinding. The last boss in particular sucks since he's ridiculously tanky, has an instant kill move, can randomly take two turns in a row, and this is one of those games where if the MC gets killed it's game over.

The battle system has a few timed hit mechanics, basically just two types of special attack inputs (time a button press or mash), and timed blocking. I like the timed blocking, but the special attack inputs get repetitive real quick since it's just the same two types for every special attack. Also there are a lot of special attacks that involve positioning and AOEs, along with props you can use in your attacks if they are near you when attacking, but you can't manually position characters which kinda limits them.

I'm hoping Infinite Wealth improves on the core systems, because it looks pretty damn great. It seems you can manually reposition now at least!

[BryanM]

Act 3 of Diablo 2 is loathed by 97% of players - just a miserable slog of wandering around blindly in the same scenary while racist midgets stab you in the shins for ~3+ hours. But what's always been a trip is that 3% of perverts who claim to like it.

I suppose Nestroid is a fraction like that. And Pokemon is the direct with opposite with the super-normal quantity of units and all the damn colors everywhere.

I always wonder if Kid Icarus would have been held in higher esteem if it didn't start on vertical levels, which are always subpar for a platformer. Metroid doesn't have a single pit in the entire game, but Kid Icarus is nothing but pits. Even named its main character Pit.

I was playing Final Fantasy XVI up until about the second third. Ended up dropping the game because it's uninspired and boring.

Obligatory.

It's a bit disappointing how bad us humans are at asking ourselves "if this game was branded as anything else, would I bother playing it?" I wouldn't even know FF12 existed if it was named anything else, and that seems unfair to countless better games that could be occupying that space of 3 jpgs and a 15 second long Kingdom Hearts demo in my brain.

Does anyone here that played it even remember 12? Go back to replay it every five years or so? Wishes that more games like it would get made?

It always annoys me when people overuse the whole games don't hold up line.

I always assume 100% of the people who ever use those words don't actually mean them. What they are is just some weak just-so excuse for why they'd never play an old game. Whether they're graphics whores or trend-following lemmings, it doesn't much matter. (I do find it amusing how much they enjoy Baldur's Gate 3, now that they've been given permission by their social group to play a new game (new to them) instead of something they've played a thousand times with a different skin on top.)

I am actually a little bit more understanding when technical limitations were a factor. Things like how Super Mario only has the fireflower powerup. Or how Zelda has simplistic enemies (anything complex would have eaten a ton of their smol space.) And how for 2600 and earlier games, they barely had any idea of what a "video game" was supposed to be.

Diablo 2's bad level design

One thing I always found entertaining is how the devs never developed past that. They're romanticized as artists by some people, but they continued the empty hallway thing for the rest of their lives. Maggot Lair didn't work in D2? Put it in Hellgate.

The game they're currently working on seems like it'll be even worse on this front.

[Sumez]

Act 3 of Diablo 2 is loathed by 97% of players - just a miserable slog of wandering around blindly in the same scenary while racist midgets stab you in the shins for ~3+ hours. But what's always been a trip is that 3% of perverts who claim to like it.

I suppose Nestroid is a fraction like that. And Pokemon is the direct with opposite with the super-normal quantity of units and all the damn colors everywhere.

I have absolutely no idea what point is being made here. Why are you continually bringing up Diablo in a Jarpig thread about Metroid?