JRPG Thread

Really anything that's more in depth than having nothing but nameless NPCs that just repeat one line of dialog over and over again for the entire game.

The story and combat are both pretty good, if simple, there's something like 177 recruitable characters in the game(though you won't be able to recruit them all in a single playthrough) and there's a huge city with a ton NPCs, each of whom have a unique personality and their own daily schedules. The main downside is that the game world outside of the city is kind of small and restrictive, as you're only able to walk on paths and roads most of the time.

I can safely say that it's incredibly both underrated and overlooked. Damn near nobody has heard of it or played it, but it's fucking superb.

everything this nigga says is true, but I'll also add that the game is comfy as fuck. All the locations and scenery are very tranquil, and the music is scrumpoly. You'll find yourself not minding whatsoever about wandering around, enjoying the sights, and stalking people for recruitment purposes.

It's pretty good, one neat thing is that you can customize your combos, I always loved learning the weapons and trying to find the most fluid combos. There's a huge number of recruitable NPCs, not that all of them are worth a damn. The writers put a lot of work into it, many of the characters are actually memorable and different from each other, the quests are well written, and the MC actually has a personality. It's not a 10/10 masterpiece, but it's a comfy JRPG with plenty of shit to do and people to stalk.
On the flip side the combat is wonky at first due to lack of options and the game doesn't really let go of your hand for a few hours. But hey, at least once it does there's an assload of things you can run around and do. The further you get the more fun it gets.

Comfy is just a word you mongoloids use instead of casual

Haven't played it myself yet (it's in my backlog, but my backlog is huge to begin with), but from what I've seen in past threads, while most Tri-Ace developed games aside from Valkyrie Profile 1 and Star Ocean 2 seem to be considered rather hit or miss by anons (or outright bad in the case of Star Ocean TLH), there seems to be a noticeable soft spot for Radiata Stories, provided it gets brought up anyhow.

I put well over 300 hours into it. The game has its flaws (biggest being exploration is lacking) but what it does right it does very right. Some shit off the top of my head:
You can recruit everyone in the game, from hobos to knights, to the guildmasters which are suitable OP to make up for the massive amount of effort it takes to get them.
You can fight everyone in the game. One of the default actions is a kick and kicking people repeatedly starts a fight.
Combat is actually a lot of fun and has a ton of options. You get 4 weapon types but you completely build your own combos from sets of moves you earn. So for instance while using a spear you could go for quick pokes from a distance or spin2win or a combo of both. Also commanding your allies has a lot of options, one of my favorite strategies when playing with non humans was to set goblins in kamikaze formation with the goblin song skill (instantly heals goblins for cheap). End result was my team of goblins repeatedly suicide bombing enemies and stunning them to death.
Game has a choice halfway through it that changes everything you do for the rest of the game and adds a lot of replay value.
You can purge all elves in the name of the glorious human empire, this is the only game i've played that let me do that.
Has a post game with tons of content that pokes fun at its self and previous tri ace games. Also adds Lenneth as a playable character.
Also Jack was just a fun main character, it was refreshing to have a protagonist taking the piss out of everyone instead of being another boring faggot.

It's an overlooked gem for sure.

Looking at some videos, I can see why. It opens with over fifteen minutes of slow-paced cutscenes and dialogue, broken up only by an unwinnable battle and some walking around. The protagonist is immediately shown to be a stupid fool who coasts by on his father's name, and he's ugly too (though he's far from the ugliest there). The party members have annoying, repetitive voice lines during battle (that don't match the subtitles), along with loud vocalizations on every attack. The first mission has you following a slow-moving cart that stops dead in its tracks if you get three feet away from it. It's supposedly an escort mission, but the bandits on the road ignore the cart and only attack you (but they have no pathfinding, so if the cart is blocking their way they'll just run in place).

It might become superb later in the game, but it starts out looking a lot like the dregs of the genre.

This might not be the genre for you. I have prepared a game in the genre of which you may enjoy.

Enjoying Dragon Quest 8 for 3DS so far, up to where you have to find the sea chart. Rank S in the Monster Arena was a bitch to get through with Morrie having a liquid metal slime.

I guess it's hard to develop taste when all you have to compare it with is Tales shit.

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That may be so, but I reckon it's a mite bit harder for you, forever cursed to be tainted with the taste of niggercock and stale semen in your mouth.

Dragon's Dogma

reminder that choosing the nonhuman path even for your second playthrough is heresy
the part i liked about this game the best is that there's no way to save ridley on the human path so there's basically no "good" ending where you saved the girl as well. choosing between her and your bros in town basically had consequences

lol mad weebcuck

Trails of Cold Steel 2, World of Final Fantasy, Bravely Second w/ uncensoring patch.

GS 1 and 2 excel in everything. Has any other RPG come close to offering such a complete package?

Well… it's not a JRPG, but Witcher 3 should be your wet dream.

Playing through Ys Memories in Celceta. Stuck on the tower mini boss after getting hammer loli. Nightmare on first playthrough. I should beat that fucker with a little more effort and time. Not exactly a JRPG but Dungeon Travelers 2 was my go to game for ages. Didn't expect a lewd dungeon crawler to have such a good combat system and mazes that you can actually get lost in. I hope that DT2-2 comes out this winter in english.

Rune Factory 3 and 4 fit that bill perfectly. Comfy, lots of NPC dialogue, and a great deal of character customization. In 4, every NPC in town can join you into battle. You can even get married and have a kid too. In 3, every girl is fucking psychotic and 4 they're much more normal. Each game has lovable characters though. Use fist weapons and you can suplex bosses. We still don't have a fifth game because the license for making games on the 3DS is terribly expensive and caused the company to bankrupt.

Oh fuck, that game was the shit, fucking everyone in that game was a recruitable character and the combat was actually pretty decent. Human path best path.

Shame it never got popular or got a sequel

radiata stories is japanese Dark Messiah of might and magic.

KICK EVERYTHING

Try Breath of Fire 3/4. Each town has a bunch of NPCs, and they change what they say pretty often.

You can't even talk with most of the NPCs in that.

Sword of Mana, the remake of the first Seiken Densetsu, is pretty good for that but the combat can get boring. There's other remake, Adventures of Mana, but i can't talk for that one

Did you miss the entire paragraph leading up to that which talks about western RPGs in an unflattering manner too (ie. maze simulators)?

Here's a comfy JRPG. it's comfy once you slit your wrist and wait for that sweet release from this earthly plane and game

Lufia 2

While not comfy in the way you initially specified, BoFV has a nice atmosphere to it and the party interactions are well done. Fair warning though, this game will kick you in the nuts and you are encouraged to restart from the beginning while carrying over your weapons/skills if you create a "no win" situation.

Solid game, humor falls a bit flat after a while, but having a party of wolf riding goblin shamans and giant ogres is fucking awesome. You can really tell how it was a testing ground for VP2, though.

DID YOU KNOW: I've played every Suikoden, and this is the only one I completed.

Kill yourself.

Fuck off, you don't know shit about environments.

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looks like simon and nia

You play as a human forced to live underground because of a cataclysm that happened on the surface; and your mission is to escort Nina to the surface. So kind-of.

I'm replaying Nier to get myself ready for Automata. This time around I'm playing the version with Brother Nier.

It's a weird experiance but the game is every bit as good as I remembered it to be. Just made it past the time skip, going to get the first ending before getting all the weapons.

It's the same game, it's just that in one version, the MC looks stupid.

I honestly really liked Berseria. Then again I never played Zesteria so I didn't have that coloring me and I also just came off playing FFXV which was pretty awful, so Berseria felt fucking refreshing in comparison.

To this day, my fave game.

Yes, I'm very autismal for fetishizing a decade-old JRPG that seems downright generic on the surface. But I've never played a more charming game. The sheer personality is something I've never quite seen condensed in a single game.

Recruiting all the characters is tons of fun. I hardly remember any of them being a pain.

and Ridley ;_;

It has some differences here and there in dialouge and the feel of the game is a bit different. I personally prefer the idea of a father protecting his child rather than a sibling protecting a sibling but it gives the story a different spin I guess. One way or another the game is gold.

And yeah, pre-timeskip brother look retarded. Looks cool after the timeskip though.

Grandia, Lunar SSSC…
They may not be like the ones you mentioned, but there are lots of fun moments.
And they are comfy as fuck. Play them if you still haven't.

That reminds me that I never finished Grandia. I think I was close to the part in that screenshot too, where you get trapped with that qt enemy commander.

Have you never played a Tales game before Berseria? That's the only imaginable way I can possibly conceive someone liking this shitty game.

So what was the problem with Zestiria again? Because if it's anything to do with Alicia than that's not a problem with the game but the marketing which you should ignore outright anyway, and if it's anything to do with the item skills/drop rates the answer is to git gud. You can average about 4 items drops per battle if you play it right and from there making the perfect items is just a matter of understanding the system.

Those are really the two major complaints I hear. Once in a while some complaining about the companion AI or ability spam (ancient nova), which is much more valid but not enough to say the game is nearly that shitty.

Sorry that's Alisha, not Alicia. It's been a little while.

wew, i forgot games have voices

should i get the 'undub'? i don't mind it so far

Then why the fuck are you playing it you dumb faggot?

Everything. Music, Rose, combat, characters, story, pacing, gimmick system, Rose, DLC, etc etc. Literally every aspect of Zestiria was an outright downgrade from every other Tales game. It was grade-S shit, and if there is a man on this planet who enjoyed it, or god forbid thinks it was great, then he must be proof of gods unending contempt of mankind. Zestiria is absolute trash, SIDF, and no amount of revisionism or justification will change that.

Also, Magilou GET. Took approximately 15 hours of gameplay, but I'm sure you could shave a ton off that time if you railroaded yourself as much as possible. I quit immediately after getting her, but I'm looking forward to seeing how she works.

Really sounds like Xilla spoiled you, because I can tell you the earlier games in the series weren't all that, and Zestria is an upgrade in a lot of ways, not least of which being the combat and gimmick systems which are actually fun to play with if you can ignore your non-controlled characters dying every 10 seconds (a problem that's been endemic to the Tales series since PS2 era at least). And lets not forget Symphonia 2 exists. THAT should give you the example of bad characters and pacing, Zestiria is merely average in that regard with a bit of filler in the middle of an otherwise good story.

>Zestiria (…) combat and gimmick systems that are actually fun to play with

How much do they pay your per post? It must be quite lucrative, if you're saying things this damn blatantly stupid and incorrect.

Then what is it, because Xilla 1/2 and Symphonia are the only Tales of games this decade. Meanwhile the combat is very clearly better than PS2 tales games, literally no contest with the likes of Abyss

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Not sure what quality of English voicing RF3 has (admittedly not a series I've gotten around to playing), but I remember seeing anons in a thread some time back saying that RF2's English dub was trash. But I suppose if you're not minding it thus far, you might as well keep going.

Got to say, as far as DS JRPGs go, I was moderately surprised by the dub quality in Sands of Destruction. R'hia, Agan, and Taupie in particular sounded pretty good, though Taupie's voice was more a case of enjoyable dissonance (being that his kind look like two foot tall teddy bears, but the voice fits his gruff mercenary personality). It's a shame that game suffered from executive meddling in terms of writing (Kato wanted it to be dark, but Sega didn't want that, so it's got a lot of mood dissonance).

You know moon and are playing the Japanese version, or did someone make a script rip patch (albeit I would assume it would need the relationship in the English text changed from father/daughter to siblings).

Somehow I get the feeling both of you are the same people that were arguing the case in the Tales thread some weeks back. Just saying.

My bad, Symphonia 2 was first in 08, the rerelease was this decade.

So yeah, just Xilla 1/2, Zestiria and Berseria, and I figured we'd already discounted Berseria.

Both of the dotHack game's Mac Anu is pretty comfy. You can talk to all the NPCs and trade with them, which is nice.

I thought it since long ago, but lord, you really are stupid. Please stop flailing onto your keyboard and forcing everyone to read the vomit you call thought.

Why don't you just admit that the other games aren't actually better than Zestiria and you just love to complain rather than actually playing video games?

Still got both series, as well as .hack//Roots (which I assume I ought to go through prior to G.U.) backlogged. Sign was pretty damn comfy though (when it wasn't being depressing anyhow), particularly what was seen of that Mac Anu there, so I would hope that aspect carried over to the games as well.

I am not in the habit of telling tall tales, especially ones so transparent a small child could see through them.

I will bet my right fucking hand that is NOT what the original text translates to. Fucking Working Designs bullshit.

Nigga finish that game. It gets better.

.hack//roots sure was something.
TheWorld:R2's story in general sure was something.

Breath of fire 3, everything else is shit.

Guess I've got something to look forward to then, though it might take me quite a while to get there (given I've got not only the prequel anime but also IMOQ to get through first). I do recall hearing some complaints in the past though about G.U.'s atmosphere not being as good as the first series though. Something along the lines of the games forgetting that the characters in game have people behind them, I think.

Do not listen to Ondore's lies.

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I've been playing Berseria myself, it has such a shitty start but it does eventually get better, Velvet eventually stops moping about "muh brother" every scene and becomes cute in her own new edgy way. The characters also started to grow on me and become much more likable, either that or just like the kid I developed some form of Stockholm syndrome.

After about 25 hours in you get the ability to map arts to a combination of blocking + face buttons, this becomes really essential in the game to chain together combos, which is fucking beyond me why they put it so far into the game, and optional, so once you get your first Grade 4 Area, go do that.

Rokurou saved the start of the game for me, he's probably one of my favorite characters, if his position in the cast was changed to Eizen I would've probably dropped the game after the prison stage.

Speaking of Grandia, anyone here play both 1 and 2 and notice how 2 is basically a remake/adaptation of 1? The names have all changed but the story is basically the same. So many elements mirror each other between the two games and the overall themes and intents are pretty much identical. Even the winged sisters are the same.

is there a chart?

There's an old one half/vg/ made years back. I can post it if you'd like, but a lot of people have since stated it's got some issues, and is rather limiting as for whatever reason they only opted to slot forty-nine games for it (though it did also list a google doc which, last I recall, was missing descriptions for most of the games anyhow).

I've thought of revamping it before (namely due to how limited the existing one is), but trying to get consensus on JRPGs isn't the easiest thing, especially as there's not a more-or-less constant thread like half/vg/ had in JRPG General (/vg/ here was pretty dead last I saw anyhow, as was /jrpg/), who I believe was the group that made the one I'm speaking of. Also doesn't helps that a fair amount of solid JRPGs are still really love it or hate it, and as far as fan-translated ones go.

How the fuck do you beat this asshole? Every guide seems to say that you need a bunch of shit I don't have like Anima or Holy, since I think I'm a bit under-leveled. It's hard to tell with the sphere grid. Trial-and-error just isn't an option when the boss has 180000 health in total and a five-minute unskippable cutscene beforehand. Is there any way to do it without too much grinding, if at all?

You must get over your daddy and abandonment issues and accept that he did the best he could to raise you into the fine young man you are.

He's pretty easy, actually. I just used quick attack, or whatever it was called, until he dropped dead. Haste Tidus and spam that shit all day erry day. If you haven't made a habit of running from encounters throughout the game, as of course you haven't since you're not a complete faggot, then you should be able to manage pretty well.

Assuming you still die after then go get the ultimate weapons for your characters if you haven't already Luna's is too long, unless you want to spend 30 minutes alone dodging lightening, and that is a perfect run at that. If that doesn't work, then you have to grind, though this is the last boss you have a problem with, the next one is so easy it is pathetic

it is not that hard fam, you can do it even without using the Sphere Grid for the entire game.

You gotta get that thing that lets you break 9999 damage.

I mean. I knew that Jecht was the bad guy because of Final Fantasy Dissida.But fuck I wish I hadn't recognized him. I feel dead inside
Fuck I just got to the part in FFIV Cecil is an alien Golbez is his brother and the world was created by aliens and my head started spinning, I know absolutely NOTHING about 5,6,8 or 9 Well Except that Kefka wins? Apparently? It's uncler I wish I could unlearn everything I know about final fantasy

He isn't. It's a complex situation. That battle with him is the culmination of the entire PLOT, and a fine resolution to Tidus' issues. It was actually pretty well done, and made the game all the better for it.

Ignore the memer faggots who think FFX is pure shit because HA HA HA. Discounting MMO's, it was the last truly good numbered title. You should play it.

Of course not, user. Why would I ever do that? Ahahahahahahahahafuck Gagazet.

But seriously though, thanks Anons. I'll kepp all this shit in mind.

Jecht IS the bad guy, if you even still consider him Jecht at that point. And I suppose you could debate that point, but there is no debate that if you DO consider him Jecht then he is, if not the big bad, then at the very least the proverbial dragon.

Back to tv tropes

Echoing the guy who told you to get back to tvtropes, but ignoring that, you're wrong.

Jecht's dead, bro. Ever since he turned into Sin. What you fight at the end is more like a monster wearing a twisted facsimile of the man.

I've played Lunar 1 and 2 and Grandia 1 and 2, all of them were fantastic. Are Grandia 3 and Xtreme any good?

Trying out this one now that there's a reasonable translation that makes it playable. Not too bad so far and the combat system is somewhat unique but I wonder if it will allow for more depth in the future.

That may be the case, but honestly, when I first played it, I found it funny.

Oh shit, Lufia 2. It's a shame that almost no one remembers it.

Havent' played Grandia II and III yet. So I can't say. My backlog is too fucking huge.

In a general sense, both games revolve around a godlike power created by man long ago in order to copy another godlike power for themselves. In both cases the original power gave Man everything he ever wanted to begin with. In both games some person of high status is attempting to recover this copy which already destroyed the world once in order to use it for themselves.

Outside of the general plot there are a lot of specific details that parallel one another as well. Plenty don't of course, but the ones that do are pretty striking.

All I can remember of 3 though is that it was shit. Wouldn't really bother with that one until you have nothing better to do. 2 is alright, darker and edgier than 1 but with better pacing