Category: JRPG

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

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Game Ramblings #16 – Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: JRPG

So I’m a bit of a sucker for JRPGs, and the Star Ocean series has never been any different.  However, it’s been a while since The Last Hope, and that one was already a pretty big step down for the series.  The unfortunate thing is that, while SO5 showed some promise in my playthrough, it’s not reversing the slide.

If you’ve played a Star Ocean game before, this one pretty much follows the pattern.  You’ve got a cast of people on a usual nonsense JRPG story.  You’re on a backwater planet that happens to be thrown into the midst of fighting between the advanced civilizations in the galaxy.  The characters themselves are probably an overall step up from The Last Hope, including an often entertaining, but definitely hilariously dressed mage. The battle system is still a solid action battle system, pretty similar to past titles.  In what could have even been an improvement, you get up to 7 active party members at one time, which is one of the larger JRPG parties I’ve seen.  However, the game ended up feeling like it was rushed to shipping, and never really pulls into a very cohesive whole.

On the surface, this is a very short game.  I ended up clocking around 20 hours to completion, though that was admittedly not a 100% run.  What it ends up doing though is progressing the plot extremely quickly, so the story is over as soon as you really feel like you’re growing into the characters.  It also means that leveling is EXTREMELY fast.  I ended the game just short of level 80, so you can imagine the leveling pace as I was actually fighting through the world.  The unfortunate thing is that unlike other Star Ocean games, you’re effectively rooted to one planet.  There’s a few excursions to space stations, but nothing permanent.  To combat this problem, the enemies scale in the world after certain plot points, but traversing the same areas definitely grows dull.

There were also some very distinct points that drew me to annoyance.  In general, the main healer for the party was pretty incapable of staying out of trouble, so I always kept a lot of healing and resurrection items on hand.  There were also a handful of boss fights that were effectively the worst kind of escort mission.  One in particular had me facing waves of enemies while one of my party members was hacking a door.  However, if she alone died, it was a game over.  She also would not defend or heal herself, and the enemies would beeline towards her without being able to be tanked by the rest of my party.  To say it was frustrating would be a massive understatement.

The unfortunate thing in the end is that I did legitimately enjoy playing the game.  Individual fights were just fun, the little side story moments that the series often has were generally just funny, the game generally looked pretty visually solid (if not a bit busy at times).  This is just one of those games that very clearly could have benefited a lot from more cycles of iterating on what they had going, because it’s so close to really being a great RPG.  At this point I’m just hoping that tri-Ace is now setup with the technology they need for the next few years, so they can truly just spend time working on a next-gen game, rather than next-gen technology.

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Game Ramblings #12 – Phantasy Star 3: Generations of Doom

More info from Wikipedia

  • Platform: Sega Genesis
  • Genre: JRPG

Going back to old JRPGs is something that I do from time to time, and usually end up regretting.  I can’t go back to the PS1 Final Fantasy titles without getting annoyed at the amount of time waste because of loading that happens during battles.  Games like Dark Cloud, which were so revolutionary at release have lost a lot of their luster.  Even more recent titles like Lost Odyssey have simply been surpassed by the latest and greatest.  So, going back to play a game that I’d never played is usually an even bigger risk.  The question then becomes, was it worth playing?  In this case, it’s reserved, but a yes.

The story generally plays out over multiple generations of a single family, including the option of who you are marrying at the end of a generation.  While this does mean you lose party members you invest in, they are replaced by generally stronger characters.  There are also a pair of cyborgs written into the story that maintain their level and gear across generations, so the party’s power curve never suffers from the transfer between generations.

The game also greatly benefits from largely being quick and focused.  Battles are fast, leveling is fast, gear is generally easy to find and purchase, and the story is there and is well written, but does not get in the way.  I got to the end of the game within about 20 hours, so unlike a lot of modern JRPGs, I didn’t ever reach the point where I was bored.  There’s a lot to say about the over reliance of fluff in modern JRPGs, and PS3 offers a good show of focusing the experience for the player to get the most out of more limited hours.

That’s not to say everything has aged well though.  While it is interesting that you can customize the relative strength of character’s magic spells, I never really dove into the  system beyond heavily leaning towards the strength of single target heals.  The shop and inventory system is also simply bad at this point.  Items give no description, gear shows no stats, and also doesn’t show what characters it can be equipped to.  This is nothing that an item list from Gamefaqs couldn’t solve, but is definitely a little strange to have no information in the shops.  Purchasing and selling is also one item at a time, inventory is capped per character at only 15 items, and items can’t be stacked.  It’s just kind of frustrating, and not even something that even games of similar age tended to do.

So, I wouldn’t say this game has aged that gracefully, but end of the day it had enough going for it, and a length short enough that it didn’t grow old.

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Game Ramblings #8 – Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre:JRPG
  • Platform:PS2
  • Also Available On:Android, iOS, 3DS (Japan Only)

Progress

  • Full Story Completion
  • Roughly 75 hours

Dragon Quest 8 is really a classic of a very core RPG.  It has a simple turn based battle system, but a good story, entertaining characters, and decent voice acting, all in a bright and large overworld.  If someone was to point at a great example of what the core mechanics of any JRPG should start at, it would be this one.  While it hasn’t necessarily aged that gracefully in the last 10 years, it’s still a fine example of the type of JRPG that was coming out at the tail end of the PS2 era, and any fans of the genre would benefit from playing this one.

What I Liked

The gameplay overall is simple, but pretty fun.  The battle system is a standard turn-based affair.  There’s some entertaining moves, particularly Jessica who has an entire over the top sex appeal category of moves to distract enemies.  In addition, the characters can essentially save up turns to pump themselves up and do enhanced damage in subsequent moves.

Visually the game has also held up really well.  It’s similar to Wind Waker in the sense that the cel-shaded style really helped simplify the visuals of the original, but have ended up holding up a lot better than “realistic” attempts of that era.

What I Didn’t Like

Unfortunately also a stand-in of older JRPGs, there were some grindy segments of the game, particularly in the late game.  As I got to the last boss, I basically had to grind to a point where I had near-max gear, as well as three characters to revive.  Once I got the three revive, the final boss was fairly trivial, but until that point I couldn’t keep up with healing to save my life.  To some extent I expect it within the genre to have to grind, but this game felt a bit overboard.

What I Was Indifferent To

The largest side-quest thing I found was the monster arena, where special monsters you defeat in the world can battle out against each other.  There’s some good prizes to be had, but I honestly couldn’t be bothered to run around finding the strongest monsters and run back to fight them out.

There is also an alchemy system for gear and item production.  I used it a handful of times for gear, but without going to gamefaqs to come up with specific recipes it’s a lot of finding books in the world that give vague descriptions of recipes that may or may not be of any use.  Helpful for end-game gear, but really only if you know specifically what you’re trying to make.