The GWJ JRPG Club Version 2.5 HD Remaster: Announcing our Q2 2024 Game!

And I've become our most recent -- and, barring some surprise, likely final -- finisher of Ys IX: Monstrum Nox! Here's another great track from a snowy area: it's the Cyslodia theme from Tales of Arise!

Congratulations to Malkroth and Wembley for finishing Tales of Arise! As a reminder, our theme for last quarter is going to space.

First, for Malkroth, from a game we played several cycles ago: The Alliance Alive! This is New Order Declaration, the track that plays during the final boss fight (which is in space).

And for Wembley, from Nier Automata, this is Fortress of Lies (the Bunker theme):

Okay, I am finally catching up with themes! I finished Tales of Arise, our theme there was To Space! and so in honor of that finish, here is Cid's Theme from Final Fantasy VII - Sending a Dream Into the Universe:

brokenclavicle and ComfortZone have both finished Final Fantasy IX. And this quarter, we're going to do Overworld Themes. Both get some absolute classic. Brokenclavicle, I present you with the Final Fantasy (I) Overworld Theme!

ComfortZone, for you, the Act III Adventure theme from Dragon Quest XI: which, like many things in this game, is an homage to Dragon Quest III:

Hey, quick shout-out to all y'all. Been reading along with the archived Q1 2020 thread for Bravely Second and y'all's chronicles are providing some delightful echoes of camaraderie. The notes are reminding me that I've thoroughly over-leveled and that I could stand to be clipping through Chapter 2 a bit quicker. Also, LastSurprise's robust Bravely Default 1 recaps are a tremendous boon in reminding me of character beats I'd long since forgotten.

So, yeah! Thanks to y'all from 3 years ago! Hopefully I'll be able to get this one out of my system in time to hop onto FF9 before Summer.

Sorry to bog up the Club thread, but I couldn't find another JRPG thread....

So I've kind of fallen out of love with JRPGs, but guys, Honkai Star Rail is a really quite great one (though technically not one at all - the devs are Chinese).

Particularly surprising cos it's F2P (but very enjoyable not spending a dang penny on). If you played Genshin Impact, you've got the idea of the aesthetic, progression and tone, but it's swapped out Genshin's real time combat with turn-based JRPG battles. And it works really well. Production values are through the roof, it's comedic tone is goofy but not overdone, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

FYI here is another thread.

Congratulations to Sundown, who becomes 3rd to finish Final Fantasy IX! As I said above, this quarter, we're doing overworld themes. And Sundown, you get one of my absolute favorites: Another World from Chrono Cross:

This music is so chill that I could listen to it on loop for hours, which I legitimately have done:

LastSurprise wrote:

Congratulations to Sundown, who becomes 3rd to finish Final Fantasy IX!

ahem

Also, I somehow seem to have been left off the leveling list altogether, despite a couple of completions...

Chrono Trigger
Dragon Quest XI (a month past the end date, I think?)

Well, don't I feel sheepish ... Sorry, merphle! I'll get it fixed for you.

EDIT: Time to make good on my failures to properly level merphle up!

Victory fanfare to honor your finish of Chrono Trigger, though this version's from Chrono Cross:

Victory fanfare to honor your finish of Dragon Quest XI (I'll count it, no need to be a stickler): it's the level up music from Earthbound!

And for this month's finish, the theme is overworld music: you get Ogre Battle: Atlas!

(Here you're really looking at a map rather than exploring the overworld, but Ogre Battle's just so good!)

Gosh, I want a remaster or new Ogre Battle entry so bad. I love those games and you can't even play them on a modern system.

Malkroth wrote:

Gosh, I want a remaster or new Ogre Battle entry so bad. I love those games and you can't even play them on a modern system.

New one would be great. Wouldn't mind a remaster of the ones still missing from modern-ish platform, but new one would be best.

So I know this is sooo 3 years ago, but I finally got over my personal hangups and got to Chapter 5 of Bravely Second, and I wanted to relay a touch of foolishness:

Spoiler:

So I reached the end of Ch. 4 where the Kaiser escapes and damns the timeline of your first save file. As prompted, I then started a New Game +. However, despite the ample hints, I still went through the motions of losing that first Kaiser fight, thinking things would eventually start changing like they did in Bravely Default.

It fortunately wasn't too far down the road (up to beating that 1st Ogre boss in 1 shot) before I had the idea to restart the NG+ and see if the Bravely Second action would work on the Kaiser.

Naturally, it did, and now I'm on track to zip through Chapter 5.

Hopefully I should have BS knocked out by the end of the month so I can use June to clip through FF9.

Congratulations to Malkroth for reaching level 17! That's a lot of JRPGs. (Also, I realized I never gave myself credit on the front page for Ys IX, so I added a level to myself too.)

The theme this month is Overworld Themes, and to follow up on Chrono Cross, here's the 600 AD overworld theme from Chrono Trigger. For some reason, when I think of the CT overworld music, this is what I think about -- not 1,000 AD, and definitely not 65M BC or 2,300 AD. I love the Zeal music, too, but for me that's music of a specific time & place, not generic overworld music.

Thank you! That is quite a few, isn't it? Where has all the time gone?

Awesome theme, this is also what comes to mind when I think about Chrono Trigger music. Maybe it's because 600 AD is where you spend the most time in the overworld, although 1000 AD is pretty close? The others you spend much more time inside areas than on the map. You also revisit 600 AD a lot, and most of the side quests take place there...

Okay, so I finished up Tales of Arise a couple of days ago and have to say, I haven't been this impressed with an RPG in a long time. However, it didn’t start that way. In fact, I may have never experienced such a turnaround in my perspective on a game through the playthrough. I literally hated this game to begin with, no joke. I would have quit on it if I didn’t want to complete it as part of this JRPG Club. I’m going to give some reasons, but as this is my first completed Tales game, let me know how many of my gripes are just typical of this series and I need to get over it.

First, the names are awful. Alphen? Sounds like it should be followed by Simon and Theodore. Balseph? That sounds much too much like… well, you know. And the worst? Zeugles.... ZEUGLES?!?! That sounds like creatures that would terrorize Fraggle Rock. Every time I heard these awful character, city, and creature names, it kicked my immersion right in the teeth.

Second, I really hated Shionne to begin with, and I’m sure that that’s the point, as part of her character progression. But… wow, what a b$%*# she was.

Third, I wish these characters would SHUT UUUUUPPPPP during combat. For crying out loud, sprinking in flavor text can be nice, but at the other end of the spectrum is hearing “Look Sharp! Lightning Tiger Blade!” for the 43 bajillionth time. I’m not even joking when I say that I played this game on mute for everything except the cutscenes, which is frankly a shame.

I have other quibbles, but let’s move on to what I loved. For one thing, the story began trite and simplistic and then morphed into this vast, otherworldly concept that I found fascinating. By the end, the combat offered lots of strategic options, as long as I didn’t have to listen to the battles. Creature designs were phenomenal, especially for the bosses, although I could have done with more variety and less repetition. Emotional progressions for the characters were nicely handled, with interesting conversations spawned from extremely different backgrounds and perspectives for different party members. The large numbers of R1-driven story panel segments were annoying at times, but I still found them to be engaging for the most part.
Anyway, I’m glad this club inspired me to push through and complete this game. I would love some guidance on the next Tales game I should check out, as a newbie.

I've largely stayed out of the conversations in this thread because I didn't want to risk spoilers, but look forward to reading back through it.

Congratulations! The theme for Tales of Arise was going into space, and so I present you with the opening theme from Rogue Galaxy!

Does FF IX go to end of June?

I never really got started after installing mods, but I'd like to still...

Stele wrote:

Does FF IX go to end of June?

I never really got started after installing mods, but I'd like to still...

FF9 goes until the end of September, I believe.

Aye, the quarter goes 'til the end of June, and threads are active through the following quarter, so FF9 should be open for discussion until the end of September when we're working through whatever awaits us in Q3.

We're coming up on the end of the quarter, and so ... a new RPG draws near!
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/dqn6X1h.jpg)

Nominations: Open NOW; close Monday, June 19, 9 p.m. U.S. EDT (GMT -4)
Ranked Choice: Open Monday, June 19, 9 p.m. U.S. EDT; close Saturday, June 23, 9 p.m. U.S. EDT (GMT -4)
Winner announced: on Sunday, June 24*

*I'm going on vacation next weekend, so I'm going to delay the counting of votes.

For anyone new to the club, or anyone needing a reminder, here's our process:

The game must be at least 1 year old. Remasters (but not remakes) that are less than a year old are fine. The test is basically "could I play the old game, alongside someone playing the new game, and share a common experience?" A reminder: Repeat club games are also fine, so long as the club played the game more than 3 years ago. (So, all games from Bravely Second: End Layer through the beginning of the club are eligible)

Anyone can nominate one game, and second any number of games. Any game that's nominated and seconded moves on to the next round.

From there, we'll go straight to ranked-choice voting. Rank all the games you'd like to play, in the order that you're most interested in playing them. We strike the game with the least interest (tiebreaker: 2nd place votes; second tiebreaker: total votes) until we arrive at one with a majority!

A couple of notes:

With Final Fantasy XVI dropping in a few days, and with (I imagine) a lot of our club eager to play it, we may want to choose a shorter game for this quarter.

And personally, I'd be in favor of something turn-based. I think there was also interest in returning to FF X or FF X-2, which is not necessarily on the shorter side, and only FF X is truly turn-based. People may not all want to play two FFs back to back, or to have the JRPG Club play a FF while FF XVI is so new and fresh, too.

Why are we worried about Final Fantasy XVI? This is the JRPG Club, not the Devil May Cry Club.

In seriousness, though, I'm going to go ahead and drop a nom for Live a Live. It's relatively short, and its first half or so is separated into chapters that can reasonably be completed in one or two sittings, so it would be an easy game to play "around" another big playthrough. The HD remake is readily available on Switch and Steam and is gorgeous. It is turn-based, but its battle system is pretty unique; it's not quite a full-on Final Fantasy Tactics style tactical RPG, but it occupies sort of an interesting middle ground between that and a more basic Final Fantasy / Dragon Quest style "your dudes line up on one side of the screen" combat system.

I will second Live a Live.

For my nomination, I am going to throw Monster Hunter Stories 2 into the ring. I have been very interested in it after the club played 1 awhile ago.

I'll second Monster hunter Stories 2.

I'll try to meet the suggested criteria and nominate something new:Cris Tales. It was given out for free on Epic awhile back, and it's supposed to be a love letter to JRPGs, and it's on just about everything.

Nice nominations so far, and I'll second Cris Tales. I'm going to go into left field and nominate Cosmic Star Heroine. I've played some of Zeboyd's other games, and I've been keen to try this one at some point.

Based on the precedent of action-oriented JRPGs showing up in the past (I at least spotted Kingdom Hearts), I'm going to put forth Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen with my nomination.

Part of this is riding the news peg of Dragon's Dogma 2 looming on the horizon, another part is trying to push myself into playing this game that I've started 4 different times and enjoyed each run at it, but never seeing it through. Let us break the chains of the ATB!

I'll second Cosmic Star Heroine. I played it a couple of years ago and thought that a second go on hard mode could be fun, but didn't go back to it. This would be as good an excuse as any.

I'll second Cosmic Star Heroine.

As for my nomination... I'm going to give it some thought.

Cosmic Star Heroine's a good one. I played the Penny Arcade games that Zeboyd made, and they were pretty good, but I thought CSH was even better. More straightforward storywise, less bogged down in needing to be a comedy because of the license, but every bit as mechanically compelling.

I tried Cthulhu Saves the World but bounced off of it; the "lol nerds love Cthulhu" of it was kind of a turnoff to me. I think Zeboyd is better when they're being earnest than ironic.

I’ll second DDog: Dark Arisen