Category: JRPG

Anything loosely falling into JRPG category. May be Final Fantasy, may be Disgaea.

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Game Ramblings #40 – I am Setsuna

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Vita, PS4, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Despite the story being thematically similar to FFX, holds its own well enough to make the game worth playing.
  • Battle system was well done.  Easily possible to break the game with certain skill and gear combos, but the positioning additions to the ATB system were well placed.
  • Doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but there’s some obvious flaws in most parts of the game
  • Game in general showed signs of being either incomplete or rushed to completion, but the core that is there is really strong.

I am Setsuna is definitely a JRPG that points back to the kinds of games Square was releasing back in the 90s and early 00s.  It directly uses a very Final Fantasy styled ATB battle system, uses a very Final Fantasy styled story, and has the same sort of mage/healer/melee/assassin character archetypes that the Final Fantasy games used.  While there are some definite places where the game has some pretty major flaws, the base that is there shows a lot of promise for the next title by Tokyo RPG Factory, Lost Sphear.

Since it’s realistically the thing that any JRPG spends the most time in, let’s talk about the battle system.  If you’ve played anything between about FF4 through 9, you’ll recognize the ATB system in place.   The battle runs in real-time, filling a meter.  When it’s full, that person can attack.  Faster characters attack more often, rinse and repeat.  In general the system has worked fine for 25 years, and in this game it’s no different.

The big things that I am Setsuna really does well that are kind of atypical usually have to do with positioning.  Rather than being fixed on one side of the screen, both friendly and enemy characters can move around the play field.  This allows for some interesting setups in hitting multiple enemies at once, whether it’s with AoE magic, melee swipes, or pass through projectiles.  This also means that party buffs, healing, and more can also take advantage of the AoE nature in order to optimize spell use.  There’s also a number of combo skills with multiple party members that take advantage of this, allowing you to line up multiple enemies in one go for much larger damage.

However, the battle system also shows one of the biggest signs of lack of polish in the game.  In general, the boss fights were a lot of single mechanics.  Put on the right gear, find the right party members, and you’re guaranteed an easy victory.  Because skills are equippable, the amount of flexibility is astounding, but can lead to some extreme breaking of the game’s difficulty curve.  For example, the Counter skill blocks ALL physical damage, so phsyical-only bosses revolved around one party member doing nothing but staying in Counter, one party member casting a Taunt skill on the Counter person, and a third party member being there to grind out damage.  It got so bad that by the end of the game, I was using three very specific party members for everything.  The title character Setsuna had a skill that did massive AoE damage + AoE Heal.  I equipped her with MP drain on damage taken and MP drain on damage dealt passive abilities, effectively meaning she did everything at next to no cost.  The second character cast a party Protect spell, and the third just did damage.  It made the game trivial, but it also seemed like what the game was balanced for given the incoming damage numbers.

The game’s presentation was the next point where there were some big highs, and also big lows.

A normal view within the I am Setsuna overworld.

For one thing, the game is astoundingly gorgeous.  The overworld takes on a very painteresque feel, with billboarded mountains and trees over a simple 3D landscape.  The main problem here is that there are no battles in the overworld at all, so you’re just running through from point A to B as fast as possible.  The little details as you walk around in the environment, from the snow falling out of trees to the trails you leave in the snow are also always well done.  However, that’s the big problem; EVERYTHING IS SNOW.  There’s effectively no environmental variety, so the towns all look similar, the forests all look similar, the caves all look similar, and they are all frozen over.

In a nice touch, the snow trails fade over time as you wander through the environment.

The soundtrack was also a bit of a mixed bag.  While the piano-only focus of the soundtrack works fantastically well in emotional moments, high tension moments lack any sort of depth to the soundtrack, with a high pace and high volume piano not really ever being enough to carry through.  The fact that the battle music adds in a bass line and some light percussion makes this even more frustrating, because they clearly put at least some thought into expanding out the landscape of the music they were writing.  It definitely didn’t need to be fully orchestrated, but adding a bit more depth in places to the music would have greatly benefited the game’s exciting moments.

Having a pixel art styled developer thanks island was a nice touch in the end game.

The little details were the last place where things were a bit of a mixed bag.  Once you get the air ship, you can run into a developer island that shows a clear nod to the team’s past games.  It’s entirely pixel art, with classic 16-bit music and visuals.  However, there’s a lot of places where things seem like they were left unfinished, with numerous empty houses in the overworld, bath houses with no meaning, and worst of all, gaining a new party member quite literally at the door to the final boss room.  There’s also a number of high level dungeons and scattered encounters that would be great to fight post-game, but can be a big pain to get to due to some of the traversal back through long linear dungeons. I hate to say the game feels unfinished, but there’s some things that definitely give me the impression that the team’s budget couldn’t quite match their ambition.

In general, I am Setsuna is a game that JRPG fans should at the very least check out.  There’s better out there for people new to the genre, but for folks looking for an ATB-system throw back, this is a pretty solid one.  For a game that’s regularly under $30, you can do much worse.  However, don’t expect a perfect game.  It definitely has its flaws, but for me it was worth overlooking them to experience what had been done here.

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Game Ramblings #38 – Ray Gigant

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS TV / Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam)

TL;DR

  • Decent battle system, a few changes not typical of the genre w/ move cost and HP regen made battles feel a lot more impactful
  • Battle animation was a clear focus for the visual needs of the game
  • Outside of the battle system, the game is significantly more average
  • Story works, but not much to write home about

Ray Gigant is for the most part a pretty standard first-person dungeon crawler JRPG.  It’s got a normal mapping system that generates as you wander around the dungeons.  The battles are for the most part a standard turn-based affair.  The visual-novel styled story hits a lot of points that are by and large not unusual for a sort of post-apocalyptic games out of Japan.  However, there are a few things that it does that are at least of note, even if they don’t really elevate this to anything more than average for the genre.

The biggest problem that I really had with this game is that it didn’t really do much with the dungeon crawling aspect.   The environments that I was walking through had occasional puzzles (forced teleports, one way entrances, etc), but they were never that challenging.  The art and enemies used for each story arc was the same the entire time, so once you did the first run for an arc, you knew what you were seeing.  The lack of being able to draw on the map was also a deterrent compared to 3DS games like the Etrian Odyssey series, where I could directly put traps and notes on the map as I progressed.  In general it was pretty clear that for as simple as the first-person dungeon crawling was, it was also the area that received the least amount of love, so by the end of a story arc, I was typically doing what I could just to rush through dungeons to get to the good parts.

Since this is a JRPG, the core of the gameplay is in its battle system.  This is where they really do some of the things that are less standard for the genre.  There’s a pretty basic elemental system, as well as differentiation between ground, air, and undead enemies, giving a nice amount of flexibility in how you take advantage of each character’s move set to get through the battles as quick as possible.  This is backed up by everything being based on an Attack Point value, rather than a more typical mana cost.  The AP regenerates by either waiting a turn with a character, or by taking damage, so the harder battles had an interesting play between preserving AP, using heals to keep the party going, then going all out in an attack pattern to get your bulk damage in at once.  The system also resets all HP in between fights, so each fight feels more impactful, rather than becoming more of a resource-management slog that a lot of dungeon crawlers fall into.

The visual treatment of the battles is also worth noting.  All the characters have pretty decent idle animations, both the player and non-player characters.  While it doesn’t extend to the basic attack animations, it adds a nice flourish to the battle while you’re setting up your turn.

This also extends into the Slash Beat system used for a generally boss-only massive special attack.  For reasons known only to the development team, the game turns into a rhythm game at this point, but it works out shockingly well as a distraction in the middle of larger fights.

The core leveling system also takes a bit of an unexpected turn.  There’s no XP to be had at all in the game, and tied to that there are also no distinct item drops.  All fights drop one of three types of core resources, ones used for upgrading gear, ones used for purchasing skills, and ones used for purchasing character levels.  Since these drop from any fight, there’s a really quick feedback loop between the fights you’re engaging in, and the upgrades the characters receive.  It also ends up allowing for highly flexible team builds.  Taking too much damage and need defense? Spend resources into the character’s shield upgrades and get better gear, or use the skill purchase resources to get damage mitigation.  Need more attack damage? Spend resources into the character’s weapons or purchase character levels in physical damage.  Rather than being on the fairly preset path typical of most JRPGs, this feels a lot closer in style to more western RPGs, where gear builds are typically more fine grained.

However, the little details start to show where the game lacks the polish of larger budget titles.  Aside from the environment art repetition mentioned above, the story itself leaves a lot to be desired.  It pretty much follows most character tropes (broody male that doesn’t want to interact with people, airhead girl that doesn’t pay attention to things around her, obviously evil older mustached guy, etc) without going into any interesting territory.  Although there are three distinct story arcs, each one is over within a few hours, so the characters don’t have the time to grow, even if they had been written to do so.  There’s also a subsystem in battles called Parasitism that activates periodically, changing attack cost from AP to character HP.  In general it activates at inopportune times during boss battles, but can be immediately cleared with a Slash Beat attack.  It seems to serve no purpose other than linking into the story and being annoying.

Overall this was fairly average, but a nice distraction from what I’ve been playing recently.  It definitely doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and there are far better dungeon crawlers out there for people being introduced to the genre.  However, it scratched the itch for me without getting heavily in the way, and at least had a few nice surprises for me along the way.

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Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

More Info from Atlas

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta.  I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights.  I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it.  However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use.  The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks.  By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses.  In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party.  Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies.  This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage.  First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up.  Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight.  I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack.  If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died.  This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won.  My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights.  It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered.  Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories.  The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups.  Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic.  Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception.  The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in.  The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG.  This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation.  On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point.  Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in.  I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.