Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

[scrilla4rella]

it has probably the best beginning in the genre, out of the stuff I've played. It throws you right in the action immediately without a slow start (even Chrono Trigger and the SNES Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games don't manage this) with its consequential and dangerous fights, both regular enemies and bosses, right out of the gate once you enter town.

I totally agree.

Spoiler

I love how in when you get to starting first city, one of your first order of business is to beat up a bunch of cops.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention the inventory and money systems, which have not aged well. It is nice that they have the delivery guy solution (that must have been hard to program on SNES) but it is a little clunky.

I guess my experience with 8 and 16 bit RPGs has allowed me roll with it but I wouldn't blame someone for bouncing off of it. It quite long.

I'll have to check out M1 and M3 at some point.

[Sima Tuna]

I've been playing warpigs rather than jarpigs lately. I should really make a warpigs thread.

FF2 is unironically one of my favorite final fantasy games. But with the proviso that you play one of the later remakes and not the droppa-mah-spaghetti-code original. I love the SaGa series, so it's not surprising. FF5 is the best FF for gameplay and FF6 is the best for story, imo. Unless we want to count FFT, which could be better than both.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

I'd argue that's where the game is at its best; you have enough characters that inventory limitations are a thing of the past, and the remaining bits of the game are pretty fun.

The monkey dungeon where you have to carry specific items to trade, only to discover you have to go back to town if you're not carrying a key item you've used once ages ago, is a bit of a drag. Fortunately there's no noteworthy fights to deal with, it's just a silly puzzle/maze thing.

Interesting. I like all parts of Earthbound but I actually feel differently about this segment. Spoiler tagging just in case scrilla wants to go in without forming expectations:

Spoiler

I think the big strength of Earthbound is that despite having a very simple battle system, it's tuned surprisingly well and has pretty meaningful grunt battles up until around the time Poo shows up - different enemies often have significantly distinct roles and require different strategies or resources from the player, and enemy damage is high enough that resource management is important. But around the time Poo joins, the game's balance starts to break down: you finally hit an inflection point where stockpiling endless full heals with no cost becomes trivial (more because of PP reserves than because of having a fourth set of inventory slots, though having a fourth body around to direct attacks towards helps) and enemies from this point forward can't really handle a full barrage from all four of your characters, especially once Poo gets going and starts getting his worthwhile PSI. The game gets a little mushy from this point since enemy design stops mattering outside of a small handful of heavies and resource management mostly falls through.

Aesthetically, though, the rapid-fire globetrotting stuff in the end of the game is still very cool (even if I like the Americana tour vibes you get in the first 60% of the game more) and obviously the final few areas of the game are dramatically perfect, something that all three Mother games totally nail. I just think the game loses a lot of the relatively tight design that makes its first half so strong.

I've been playing warpigs rather than jarpigs lately. I should really make a warpigs thread.

FF2 is unironically one of my favorite final fantasy games. But with the proviso that you play one of the later remakes and not the droppa-mah-spaghetti-code original. I love the SaGa series, so it's not surprising. FF5 is the best FF for gameplay and FF6 is the best for story, imo. Unless we want to count FFT, which could be better than both.

I actually liked Final Fantasy 2 quite a bit, having played the NES version. Outside of character progression being a little obtuse - which I'm willing to cut the game some slack for since a lot of that was probably alluded to in the manual - and, more importantly, spell progression being too slow (this is the main problem with the game - it's not grindy really, but you do have to spend a lot of time laboriously building up your offensive, healing, and anti-status spells while on your way from location to location), I thought it was a cool game. Its combat is fun, it has some interestingly threatening boss battles, its fairly grim vibe is a really interesting contrast to the other NES FFs. It's probably a weaker game than either of them but it's still fully solid.

Saga 1 completely rules though. I played it last year, too, and might have come away from it liking it even more than FF4 and 5. That GB density really does a lot.

[XoPachi]

Finally killed MagiMaster. Jesus fucking Christ.


EDIT: oh...Shadow's dead.

[Lander]

I always found the Clumsy Robot fight in the Montoli building emblamatic of Earthbound's wacky balance. Have a goofy enemy put the player in a corner, make everything look hopeless, and then...

Spoiler

You may say that now, but you may soon come to realize it's a rather long sliding scale indeed. The latent space in act 3, the lazy algorithms used to assemble it... Lufia 3 dungeons will start lookin' pretty good indeed, and they're barely a step up from Dragon Quest Monsters'.

Yeah, it wasn't great. Not quite as bad as expected, but noticeably loose and incohesive compared to the first two acts. I'm okay with forking off little clearings to hold points of interest, but bisecting the already-massive wide corridor space with rivers for 2x the navigation cost is too much.

Two midgets in a trenchcoat = one shaman was a fun gag the first few times, but didn't make up for the rest of the mob standing just far enough apart to hobble my fireball spam. This gag holds up like fine wine, however.

At any rate, glad I picked sorceress and learned that greater mana potions fill past the end of the bar if you spend it quick enough.

Oh, and maggot lair was awful. Groundbreaking one-dimensional gameplay!

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Interesting. I like all parts of Earthbound but I actually feel differently about this segment.

Spoiler

I don't blame you for feeling that way. I also have my gripes about Ness becoming WILDLY more powerful than the rest of the party which feels like it unbalances things. You're less of a team and more Ness and Ness's backup. Mother 1 and Mother 3 have better endgame balancing. Mother 1 I quite enjoyed but I suspect they retooled M2 to be easier due to complaints about M1's difficulty.

I always found the Clumsy Robot fight in the Montoli building emblamatic of Earthbound's wacky balance.

Spoiler

Sneakily enough, all the actions where it looks like it's healing all its HP to full do absolutely nothing. It's a totally normal fight. Drop its HP to 0 and the cutscene starts. It's nice to see the Runaway 5 bust in again though! The missiles it fires still hurt like HELL though! One thing I never understood: why is it Runaway 5 when they have 6 onstage? Where's the black lady playin keyboard?

Saga 1 completely rules though. I played it last year, too, and might have come away from it liking it even more than FF4 and 5. That GB density really does a lot.

Among my fave RPGs ever. SaGa 1 and 2 mechanically are really great and I've written extensively about 'em on GameFAQs. SaGa 3's party system makes your team selection less meaningful as you can just switch whenever, and does away with several of the elements that made the first two games feel very different. If you've never tried it before, do a "no spending Gold" challenge on them. You only need to spend money at a couple of plot related points, but otherwise all three games are doable without ever spending money. It's hardest in the second game with 4 Humans, but you basically need 4 Mutants or Monsters in the first one as Humans can't get stronger without shops.

[Sumez]

EDIT: oh...Shadow's dead.

Did you not wait for him on the floating continent?

[XoPachi]

Ooooooooh. Kekfa's tower is hard hard. Oooooh...

Did you not wait for him on the floating continent? :(

..............no.

QmQ

[Sima Tuna]

Part of the experience of playing any game for the first time is making "sub-optimal" choices that nevertheless increase your appreciation of the game's story. I don't think you are supposed to save Shadow the first time you play FF6. Just as you're not supposed to save that one dying dude with Celes. Accept that they've passed and move on to finish the game.

[XoPachi]

Part of the experience of playing any game for the first time is making "sub-optimal" choices that nevertheless increase your appreciation of the game's story. I don't think you are supposed to save Shadow the first time you play FF6. Just as you're not supposed to save that one dying dude with Celes. Accept that they've passed and move on to finish the game. :D

You can save Cid?

And yeah, that's how I viewed Shadow dying. He starts off as a cold and ruthless hired gun that even other NPC's snub. But then after seeing Interceptor soften up around Relm and how the stakes open his eyes to things greater than money, he begins to show a bit more compassion. But he dies before he gets his redemption arc. And the characters don't get close to him by the time he's on the floating island with them so it's not something they think about making his death tragically unceremonious. You can only hope he at least had Interceptor with him at their demise.

[BryanM]

You can save Cid?

Yeah, speedy healthy fish restore his HP while languid sluggish fish shred it. Game's weird about these hidden forks in the road. It's stuff like this that convinced many there had to be some way to save Arris in 7. (And there is... cheating! Ah, the good 'ole "we'll do it ourselves" solution. Truly the most reliable way to get things done.)

There isn't really much more content in keeping them around. Cid dying is actually way more dramatic. And you can watch a youtube video of the ending with Shadow if you don't want to do it yourself some day.

Oh, and maggot lair was awful. Groundbreaking one-dimensional lameplay!

Ah, it kind of makes me a little sad when latecomers miss out on the early days of a game.

1.0 didn't have mana potions at a vendor. So you had to wait two minutes for your mana to refill during early levels. Conversely, there were no skill timers so you could fill an entire screen up with hydras. (This kind of thing, along with Necromancer skeletons and Frozen Orb/Blizzard used to destroy people's computers who were on anything less than a Pentium 3 ~500 mhz. That's literally 100% the reason any skills have a cooldown to begin with - it's completely unnecessary and vestigial to keep it in the game these days. It reminds me of that story of a family that always cut off the ends of a ham before putting it in the oven, and they find out the reason they did it was because their ancestor had a smaller oven where the ham wouldn't fit...) (I bet the Diablo 2 Reskin kept the ~0.75 second universal aftercast delay... god I hated that. Having to wait an eternity to throw a fireball after casting a meteor. They can age all the characters up 50 years, but not change any of the bad stuff...)

The Blizzard North guys really never put these things together, and realized that the mana system should be the throttling mechanism. Like the Wizard from Diablo 3 I guess. +Mana suddenly becomes a lot more visceral a stat if it means you can toss out three or four meteors at a time instead of two. And anything is more fun that cast -> wait -> cast.

In the original game, minions had collision. You could not walk through them. Imagine what the Maggot Lair was like, playing as a summoner Necromancer. Imagine what it was like playing multiplier with one or seven of them in there. Just imagine. (This was made extra painful by the fact that skeletons were worthless until the massive rebalance patch years later, with the synergy system and all that.)

They were so fond of the Maggot Lair idea, they put it into Hellgate London. Which... ah. Is a kusoge worth playing I guess if you're tired of playing good games full of fun and colors. (#1 activity for the multiplayer seems to have been complaining about how much the game sucks in chat. At least according to a depressed intern's post when the studio was coming apart.) I always give them a hard time for not using palette swaps and sticking with the grey zombie monster the entire game, despite there being palette swaps they could have used... (Jesus, even Dragon Quest 1 palette swaps the blue and red slimes immediately.)

... but honestly looking back the most "what the hell were they thinking" moment was the power system on the damage field-type weapons. Look, people need to know about this:

You've got a gun, right? It shoots a stream of fire. This fire lands on the ground. It creates a burning field of deadly damage. Now, as you're shooting there's a little power gauge that decreases as you shoot. This is like an ammo gauge. When it runs out, you have to wait to reload. The optimal way to play is to drench monsters in a raining burny death stream, just pour fire on them, right?

... wrong. The power gauge is a power gauge. Your damage output decreases as you hold down the button. The optimal way to use it is to sprinkle a damage field, wait for the gauge to regenerate, and sprinkle a little more to refresh it.

... this is so horrible, that I'm not sure I didn't make a mistake in figuring out how it works. But I swear to god: Holding down the button did not make enemies die any faster.

Blizzard North! They're trying to make a Diablo roblox game or something where their customers make the game for them or something. I respect David deeply, but these guys as a group...

Yeah, it wasn't great. Not quite as bad as expected

Heh, now imagine it's the year 2000 and there's nothing else better to do with your time than play a lot of Diablo 2. And you've had to clear this act 3 times per character. And you've made dozens of characters....

They were merciful enough to at least allow you to cheat your way past it in multiplayer. But in offline singleplayer....

[Sumez]

Part of the experience of playing any game for the first time is making "sub-optimal" choices that nevertheless increase your appreciation of the game's story. I don't think you are supposed to save Shadow the first time you play FF6.

I would love to agree, and I think that would be a massive quality of a game such as this (like a tiny grain of romancing saga). So XoPachi missing out on Shadow is actually pretty cool from my perspective.

I dont think I have ever played a game where I didn't save him. The game asks you if you want to wait for him, so I always wondered what would cause people to not do so. Yeah, it's kinda reassuring that this choice does seem to have the intended effect

[BulletMagnet]

The game asks you if you want to wait for him, so I always wondered what would cause people to not do so.

The first time I played the game as a kid I ended up leaving Shadow behind because the game scared me into doing it: I arrived at the jump-off point with time to spare and selected "Wait" when prompted, but instead of switching to a cutscene as I was expecting, the menu simply vanished and the timer kept ticking. I activated the message again, selected "Wait" again. Same result. After a few more attempts I panicked and jumped; I didn't know you had to wait until there were only a few seconds left on the timer for Shadow to show up and would automatically jump when he did; I figured maybe I hadn't gotten to the end fast enough to save him.

[BryanM]

The game doesn't mention Shadow's name on the first prompt, only the 2nd+. With the game pressuring you to rush, and there being no difficulty at all in sitting there, there's no reason to assume there would be a reward here. (Really just avoiding being punished.) "Wait" by itself has the same kind of weight as saying "NO" to a Pokemon game asking you if you're really really really REALLY sure you want to surf on the water. (Games being overly polite is such a Japanese thing. "Do you want to jump on the airship?" "No, I want to sit here and die." "Oh, I see. I made assumptions on your intent when you pressed the 'A' button. I apologize for my impertinence. Please understand, it was not intentional.")

There's another invisible decision when you choose between Mog or the hairpin.

I dunno, one of the basic hallmarks of jRPG's is being able to reach "perfection" - collect all the guys, collect all the things, kill all the bosses. One of the things many western RPG grognards sneered at, since they preferred their games to be imperfect and messy, yet with a bit more freedom, like real life. It's not wrong to want or not want it in a game, but it is a broken contract when presenting one thing and having elements of another tossed in randomly 0.01% of the time.

[Lander]

(Clumsy Robot)

Sneakily enough, all the actions where it looks like it's healing all its HP to full do absolutely nothing. It's a totally normal fight. Drop its HP to 0 and the cutscene starts. It's nice to see the Runaway 5 bust in again though! The missiles it fires still hurt like HELL though! One thing I never understood: why is it Runaway 5 when they have 6 onstage? Where's the black lady playin keyboard?

Fiendish! Impressive that it's still so effective in its simplicity, seeing as manipulating player perception has become the genre-staple secret sauce for creating excitement.

Spoiler

Plays nicely to the theme of the game as well, having the grown-ups show up to pull the helpless kids out of a jam that ends up looking a little silly in hindsight. Sure, they might go on to defeat a cosmic doom entity and save the world, but they don't know that yet!

I think I was showing off the game to a bewildered flatmate who had wandered in, the first time I beat it.

Yeah man, this boss is super hard. Not sure if I have enough bottle rockets to-
Oh shit.
It's the Jazz Band

(...???)

Ah, it kind of makes me a little sad when latecomers miss out on the early days of a game.

Ye gods. I had an intuition that Sorceress is like playing a mule-friendly arrange mode, with all the teleporting around and remote-looting, but no mana recharge and no busted runeword regen items is another stratum.

It almost sounds like one of those obtuse MMOs where the playerbase draws a sense of cameraderie from shared mechanical suffering. Or perhaps just frustration, depending.

Dying in the back of Chaos Sanctuary was perhaps a tiny glimpse of where the run would be without all that QoL; running balance sheets against the stash and drawing up elaborate Virtuous Mission style plans to dig out from a series of selfmade holes. Kind of exciting, but frustrating after about an hour.

And I expect easy mule-ing via shared stash was a distant dream in the original, if the I_am_literally_transferring_items has joined the game episode of Diablol is anything to go by.

I think resurrected has some new balance patches; enough to hit v3.x.x.x, though how much of that actually applies to solo offline is anyone's guess.
I've only seen FCR-based cooldown in my run, though have also only ever cast Fire Bolt / Ball, Static Field, and Tele Port / Kinesis.

Might pop a point into something more impressive out of curiosity... And then sneakily edit it back using a Web2.0 utility site to preserve the sanctity of my low-level normal mode scumbag playthrough.

[BryanM]

One of my favorite moments is from Mother 3, when you have to choose a chimera to move water from one lake to an adjacent hole. One of them is a blowdryer, and it just blows on the water. "That's not doing anything." Another is a couple of kids. They try their hardest, but doing it one bucket at a time isn't fast enough. And the last one is a pump, and gets the job done.

They spent hours making these animations that only get seen for a few seconds in a playthrough, that you might not even get to see. Completely unnecessary. And yet, completely necessary for it to be an Earthbound game.

And I expect easy mule-ing via shared stash was a distant dream in the original, if the I_am_literally_transferring_items has joined the game episode of Diablol is anything to go by.

Oh... oh god. The PTSD.

In multiplayer you had to sit in a game for around five minutes so it'd linger around for ~three minutes when you left. (Referred to as "perming" by the community.) You threw the items you wanted to move around on the ground in a pile. And logged out-and-in with your various characters as needed. A couple ways this could go south: the game instance could poof. You could have messed up the game name/password somewhere. It wasn't ideal.

Alternatives were to trust some rando stranger (haha) or to try to drop your stuff in some out of the way hidey-hole no one would ever go to in an open multiplayer game. Both of which were much less ideal.

Singleplayer was actually a lot better on this front. If you had a second computer you could just hand it over in a peer-to-peer multiplayer game, but everyone just used an inventory moving utility program. Singleplayer is also better since your characters don't get deleted for inactivity, and you can make an infinite number of them.

With one patch they were looking into expanding the size of the stash (please remember that the LoD expansion buffed it from being able to hold two things to almost being able to hold four), but they gave up because they were afraid the potato servers they bought back in 1995 would melt. (One thing that always makes me shake my head is how Blizzard shuts off all of their games every Tuesday morning for "maintenance". At least Starcraft and Diablo II never had that stupid nonsense. Unnovation can go straight to hell imho.)

Of course in the mod scene there are versions of the game with gigantic inventory and storage, tabs even. What Blizzard won't do, we have to do ourselves. (Unfortunately making new content like skills and levels is rather complex. Too bad they didn't make it more of a Roblox game like Warcraft 3 was.)


Ah. The highlight of my career was during one Bloody Foothills train in multiplayer, a fine level grinding spot. I was playing a Lightning Fury javazon, one of my favorites. A unique javelin dropped, and I instantly recognized it as Titan's Revenge. The best in slot weapon for my character. I remember my heart stopping as I went to click it. I missed. Some little barbarian weasel bastard was just barely offscreen, and he saw my drop too and began moving toward it. I clicked again. I missed again. At least I was moving closer to it, but I needed to seal the deal. I narrowed my eyes and managed to land on it with the third click.

The wonders of just letting anyone pick up everything. I've killed bosses hundreds of times, and don't remember any single one of them in particular. I remember that damn javelin.

Afterwards when I was able to take a look at the thing, it turned out it wasn't a normal Titan's Revenge: It was an ethereal Titan's Revenge. The best of the best.

It's gone now of course, along with the character. Inactive multiplayer characters get deleted, after all.

For a game about greed and desire, Diablo was always a bit like a zen teacher. It was a cruel, abusive teacher, but a teacher all the same. That one should not get attached to worldly things. That all things are transient.

It's a lesson I often fail to learn. Playing a perfect run of Persona 3 wasn't nearly as fun as just playing it would have been, and what do I have to show for it after leaving the game behind?

Maybe it's ok Shadow's dead.

Even if that cheaty bastard Kefka survived somehow.

It almost sounds like one of those obtuse MMOs where the playerbase draws a sense of cameraderie from shared mechanical suffering. Or perhaps just frustration, depending.

Hardship really makes things memorable, you don't tend to remember when things go smooth unless it's rare.

Like I always say here, the early games like Dragon Quest 1 had stronger dungeon crawler roots. Where you had to grind in the same zone for an hour plus sometimes, and your reward was to get to grind in a new zone. Around the SNES era jRPGs became basically walking simulators on the whole. You walked from the start to the end almost completely unchallenged. No hardship.

I've been fascinated by kusoge - design choices that are the exact opposite of what you'd see in a "good" game.

There's been video essays on the topic, about how same-y everything feels with the corners rounded off. Umihara Kawase wouldn't be a shadow of the game it is, if mastering fishing in it wasn't so hard and weird.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

One of my favorite moments is from Mother 3, when you have to choose a chimera

The area where the Mother 1 theme plays hits me real hard as a fan. They went to the effort of composing a version on the GBA and put it into such a short area you can run through quickly, but if you stick around and listen to the whole thing... man it hits hard.

[XoPachi]

Well, I'm thoroughly unprepared for Kefka's Tower. I dont feel like grinding 8 other characters and I think I'm out of meaningful stuff to do to make that go by more pleasantly. Shelving this until I find the patience.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I feel like you're giving up rather abruptly at the climax of the game. O_o

You really don't need to level up that many characters to get through it, and if you have a core team of 4 who are much higher levelled than the rest, split them up in to pairs with 2 weaker characters to each team.

Spoiler

Or, have your main team of 4 tackle part of the tower, clear out the bosses you can, then sub in Mog with the Moogle Charm to walk around and hit switches while the team handles another section of the tower. You really don't need a fully kitted-out team of 12 to handle the dungeon if you do a bit of back 'n forth to have one team clear out multiple paths.

If it's your first playthrough I can think of 3-4 optional dungeons you likely missed, too.

[Sumez]

Well, I'm thoroughly unprepared for Kefka's Tower. I dont feel like grinding 8 other characters and I think I'm out of meaningful stuff to do to make that go by more pleasantly. Shelving this until I find the patience.

There's a small island somewhere with a single forest full of dinosaurs that give a ridiculous amount of exp, but are really easy to kill as long as you have at least one powerful character.
Just bring three weaker characters with a strong one to grind them up, you'll get them up to speed extremely fast.
As Roo says, you don't need three strong teams for Kefka's, just one to do the boss fights, and two others to survive.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

As long as you've played through all of the areas you've had the ability to - not even all of the optional dragon bosses, just the areas - then your core cast is strong enough to carry the rest of the crew even if you have to split them across three parties. You do have the option of backtracking or doing it in a slower way like Roo suggests, but I hardly touched Mog, Gau, Relm, Strago, or Gogo and was still able to very comfortably handle the final dungeon; it's not as daunting as the game wants you to feel it is.

[Necronopticous]

Well, we have been working on RPGirl for about 3 years now and we're finally almost ready to privately release our first ever playable demo. If you would like to try it out, add yourself to our mailing list:

Signup for RPGirl Closed Demo

Aiming for Jan/Feb timeframe!

RPGirl: First Slice goes live tomorrow night!

https://yellowbuttons.games/rpgirl/
https://yellowbuttons.itch.io/rpgirl

Feel free to sign up on the sheet if you're interested and haven't already!

[Steamflogger Boss]

After just kind of feeling meh on Arc the Lad 3 (decent enough game, just not moving me in any way to finish) I decided to play Final Fantasy V. Truly a gaming masterpiece.

[Sima Tuna]

Arc the Lad 2 is the Real Shit.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Arc the Lad 2 is the Real Shit.

Yeah super awesome game. I've played through 1-2 a couple times. 3 is just kinda...idk it's fine just not needed lol.

[dummy]

Has anyone here played any of these games? If so, thoughts?

The Last Battle (snes/super-famicom) (this is a JRPG game released on 1994, not to be confused with a side-scroller action game that was also released for the snes and its actually a hokuto/fist of the north star game)

Rudra no Hihou/Treasures of Rudra (snes)

The Raidou Kuzunoha games (ps2)

Little Master: Niji Iro no Maseki (or just Little Master, snes)

[BryanM]

I hear Rudras gets good buzz in general. Just probably not very unique, if it were released earlier and branded as a Final Fantasy game it might have been a contender. A real problem for all late games on a platform; stuff like Disgaea 5 on the Switch got to be so much more successful than it would have been if ported over later - less competition, more time to sit on shelves, etc.

Tried playing Mystic Ark for a bit one year, but it just felt like I was playing a game I'd played a million times before. After a while everything blends together and you're not really there for the combat or leveling up anymore. Hence why things like the Tokimeki imaginary friend thing gets pushed more in titles like Persona.

Am curious if there are any translations in the Tokyo Majin Gakuen super franchise. I guess I was vaguely aware it had an animated series, but no clue whatsoever that it was game franchise. The games do not look mayonaise-shaped. Reminds me of Baroque, something that would never be popular and is a miracle they ever got made.

[BrianC]

The Last Battle (snes/super-famicom) (this is a JRPG game released on 1994, not to be confused with a side-scroller action game that was also released for the snes and its actually a hokuto/fist of the north star game)

The renamed HnK game was on MD/Genesis, not SNES.

[Blinge]

Does anyone know if the Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song remaster on Steam is any good?

...longshot, I know.

[Sima Tuna]

Does anyone know if the Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song remaster on Steam is any good?

...longshot, I know.

It's my favorite SaGa game. Excellent remaster too. I only played it on switch though, so I don't know if you're asking about pc compatibility or the game itself. Game itself is great and includes a lot of quality-of-life features that make dealing with the unique systems (like the event rank clock) a lot easier. The art is very unique. Personally, I love it, because it's like they tried to make sprites using 3d models. I think the look is cool. But some people hate the stunted appearance of the characters. Music, combat, environmental visuals and customization are some of the best in the series. All characters are a blank slate (with different growth preferences) and you can truly build your own party using whoever you want in whatever role you prefer.

Unrelated, but does anyone know if FF3 pixel remaster is the definitive way to play FF3? I ain't playing that DS version because I remember how it runs at 15 FPS on original hardware.