JRPG Catch-All

I'm intrigued. The thing I love about non-Persona SMT games is you can never tell what batsh*t crazy setting it will be set in.

I got in too late to comment on the sleeper RPGs other than to say, yeah, Brave Story is crap-ola. Crimson Gem Saga is a way better generic boring RPG.

I liked JdA OK, but I really like the down-the-rabbit-hole stuff in Disgaea, so the simplified nature of the game didn't appeal that much to me. Nor did the artstyle really resonate.

Loved Valkyria Chronicles, though. I played it together with a friend, trading off the controller between rounds and strategizing together. It's probably mostly due to the fact that we had some hilarious times playing it this way, but I just loved that game.

That Wizard of Oz games looks nuts. Never heard of it and you bet your ass I am tracking it down now.

necroyeti wrote:

I got in too late to comment on the sleeper RPGs

I posted it less than 24 hours ago. It's still very open for discussion. This thread just moves fast.

necroyeti wrote:

That Wizard of Oz games looks nuts. Never heard of it and you bet your ass I am tracking it down now.

I think it landed over here and didn't get more than a mediocre reception (RPGFan and RPGamer reviews). I vaguely recall navigation was wonkily done because you have to use a virtual trackball to move.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Speaking of the Rainfall games, I think Pandora's Tower was the most interesting of the three but also seems the least likely to get a release over here. That makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, I'm very interested in that one.

I wonder if the street-pass like pin transform system is in the IOS version of TWEWY - it might be really cool if you could gain pin exp for passing other iphones or wireless access points with the app backgrounded.

necroyeti wrote:

They did it with the original DS version too. Which was hilarious because wireless communications was so much less of a thing back then. I don't think I ever got a single DS tag with it, much less another TWEWY player. I got all that experience (can't remember what it was called, the green one I think) from the charity hits it would give you.

They gave you charity hits?

They did it with the original DS version too. Which was hilarious because wireless communications was so much less of a thing back then. I don't think I ever got a single DS tag with it, much less another TWEWY player. I got all that experience (can't remember what it was called, the green one I think) from the charity hits it would give you.

EDIT: I misread your post, Norman. though yeah, given all the iDevices out there nowadays, you'd be getting a crazy amount of tags.

EDIT MORE: That's such a great conceit though, and fits so well with the Night Watch/Neverwhere kind of vibe in the game. What a great game.

See, THIS is why people are disappointed.

Yeah, if you put it in tag mode and just left it you would occasionally get a tag from "an alien" or something like that. I used to leave it overnight and I'd have one or two in the morning usually. Any pin that needed to be leveled from that XP, that's how it got done for me. SO SLOW.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

First trailer for Shin Megami Tensei IV:

Sold.

Not like that was going to be difficult. That looks like it will be fun to get immersed in. It seems they might do a good job with the 3d parts too.

I used my other DS (phat) to tag myself. You didn't have to be playing TWEWY or anything, just broadcasting in the menu without a game in even.

necroyeti wrote:

Yeah, if you put it in tag mode and just left it you would occasionally get a tag from "an alien" or something like that. I used to leave it overnight and I'd have one or two in the morning usually. Any pin that needed to be leveled from that XP, that's how it got done for me. SO SLOW.

Agreed, I would walk around with it in my bag in the city (and even change my route to walk by the nintendo world store sometimes ) and never got anything other than those UFOs and whatever the generic wireless access points give you.

necroyeti wrote:

Yeah, if you put it in tag mode and just left it you would occasionally get a tag from "an alien" or something like that. I used to leave it overnight and I'd have one or two in the morning usually. Any pin that needed to be leveled from that XP, that's how it got done for me. SO SLOW.

Tag XP had a 20x modifier. So you needed only more than 1/20th of the total pin xp to get tag evolutions, assuming that the remaining 95% was battle xp.

Shutdown xp was counted at a 9x rate.

necroyeti wrote:

Yeah, if you put it in tag mode and just left it you would occasionally get a tag from "an alien" or something like that. I used to leave it overnight and I'd have one or two in the morning usually. Any pin that needed to be leveled from that XP, that's how it got done for me. SO SLOW.

Oh yeah that's right, I forgot about the aliens.

Stele wrote:

I used my other DS (phat) to tag myself. You didn't have to be playing TWEWY or anything, just broadcasting in the menu without a game in even.

I think I did this with my Wii by using the Wii to server up DS demos. Also tried it at PAX East which was humorous since you hit 20 tags in about 30 seconds.

MrAndrewJ wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

First trailer for Shin Megami Tensei IV:

Sold.

Not like that was going to be difficult. That looks like it will be fun to get immersed in. It seems they might do a good job with the 3d parts too.

Yeah.... I need a date to put that in the budget. And I need to get my Time-Turner back from Granger again. Sigh.

So I'm past the point of no return in The Last Story, and will mostly echo Blind_Evil's comments. You should really, really play this game. I'll write further when I finish; I'm pretty sure the game still has more to say about some of its topics.

I will say this: Whereas Xenoblade started off really fun and then got more and more tedious and boring as time went on, this game has been just the opposite: It started off a bit strange but has gotten really, really enjoyable. I already recommend it heartily. Buy it now; XSeed games are notoriously hard to find!

I'll Nth it, as far as the first boss, anyways. I broke down and played it at 3am because I was not taking it to PAX unopened (have I mentioned yet that I'm an idiot!?) and got that far before I realized I was headed into that Civ-V-one-turn-too-many-ville.

I'm going to restart afterwards, when I have two brain cells on speaking terms with one another.

Just a head's up on the iOS version of The World Ends with With You, if you have a 1st gen iPad, when you try to buy it you get an error message saying it's not compatible because it requires a gyroscope to run.

It's also not compatible with a 4th gen Touch, according to the reviews on iTunes.

momgamer wrote:

it requires a gyroscope to run.

That's curious... Some new pin mechanic?

shoptroll wrote:
momgamer wrote:

it requires a gyroscope to run.

That's curious... Some new pin mechanic?

I don't know. Somewhat disappointed, but I'm betting it will be easier to get a copy of the original that buy a new iPad right now.

I'm seriously considering firing up FF7 and 8 and playing through them... For old time's sake... but the pile, the pile!

And in the pile lies Nier...

I played a bit of each multiplayer mode in The Last Story. It's pretty cool, I think if you like the game's combat mechanics you'd derive a bit of mindless fun here as well. It uses its own friend-code system, you're assigned an ID the first time you connect to the NFC.

The co-op is, as far as I can tell, just a few of the late-game story bosses in an arena. I don't know if the selection is limited by how far you are in the story - you are prompted to load your save, but I think you can fight anything regardless. I'd maybe avoid co-op until you're nearly done with the campaign for this reason.

Up to 6 people per game, and when selecting your character you can also pick which boss you want to fight. The game randomizes which among the nominations you fight. You pick a character, and that character has the gear that you have on them in the campaign. For mages, you hold the button down to start casting. The spell countdown is much faster than when it's handled by the AI, and you can shoot at any time. Releasing early leads to a weaker spell, though. I couldn't see co-op being terribly engaging for more than a few nights, but I only fought two of the weaker bosses, and they went down very quickly with six human controlled characters.

I found the deathmatch quite a bit more interesting. Rather than using your own gear, you're given stock characters, which allows for a lot more variety than in the co-op. You can play as the usual party members, unplayable but prominent story figures, generic allies or enemies, and major enemies. Generally speaking, if it's in the campaign's combat and it's humanoid, you can use 'em. After selecting your characters, you vote for map, and whether you want to play TDM or plain DM.

Much like an old-school FPS DM, there are pickups scattered about the maps, ranging from temporary buffs to special crossbow ammo to status-inflicting weapons. There's a good balance between the two character types, as fighters can pester mages and keep them from casting, but if mages land a direct shot it's almost always a one-shot kill. At times I saw dominant mages played almost like snipers in shooters, holding their spell until the unsuspecting target came 'round the corner. Other times I saw fighters overwhelm the pack through the smart use of evasion and environmental strategy.

This wiki page has the DM portion pretty well covered. The characters are more varied than I thought originally.

I really like Trails in the Sky but sometimes the Guild missions just cut off without warning.

Just recently, while exploring the PSN games for PSP, I came across Lunar: Silver Star Harmony. Now, I remember that back in the GBA games I really wanted this one - sadly, I got ripped off on an auction site and got a bootleg with non-working saves (gah!).

So, is the PSN/PSP Lunar any good? I like 'traditional' jRPGs, I loved DQ IX, or Chrono Trigger on my DS. Having said that, I usually get discouraged by grinding (SMT: Strange Journey, I'm looking atcha!).

Lunar games make me sad, for only 1 reason. I bought an imported collector's edition of Silver Star Story Complete. So much stuff in the box. I played a few hours of the first disc, and then went away for a fortnight. When I got back, disc 1 was missing. The only suspect was my younger sister, and to this day, 15 years later, she won't tell me what happened to it. I suspect that she took the PS 1 somewhere and left the disc there.

Lunar is a really traditional JRPG. It's certainly pretty and a great remake of a classic but the gameplay is super simplistic by modern standards. Many SNES JRPGs have more complex mechanics I would say. Personally, I found it quite charming but actually playing it was pretty boring. I pushed through about 15 hours before finally stopping. The story is not bad per se, just not especially interesting or surprising.

So I would pass unless you have nostalgia for the original, in which case you will probably enjoy this remake.

Edit: to compare to Chrono Trigger or DQIX, both of those have much more interesting mechanics I would say.

15 hours is fairly long by today's standards Though I've spent 100 hours on DQ IX before I got bored (post-game content).

I suppose I'll pass on that (as it's full price on PSN) and only buy it if I find a cheap UMD version.

The problem is that 15 hours seemed like barely a quarter of the game (at least from what I could tell). If I had been close to the end I might have been able to push through.

Edit: I did get it for $15 on sale. I'm not sure what the regular price is these days.

Lunar made its name back in the mid-90s (along with Ys) as one of the first console RPGs to embrace the multimedia capabilities of the CD format. It looks and sounds quaint now but, when the game was released, the anime-esque cutscenes drew a fair amount of attention:

The other thing that stood out for Lunar was the localization effort by Working Designs which, again, was fairly remarkable for the time. (Notice how often I keep using that caveat?)

I haven't played the PSP remake, but I played and still own the PS1 Complete version...and, even when I played it back in 1999, it was hard to shake the feeling that it was a bit outdated. It's not a bad game, but it's kind of stunning that it's been remade three different times: PS1, GBA (Lunar Legend), and the PSP Harmony version.

If you haven't played it already, I'd put forward Trails in the Sky as a counter-recommendation over jumping into Lunar on PSP.