Category: JRPG

2022-12-012022-12-01

Game Ramblings #165 – Star Ocean: The Divine Force

Genre: JRPG
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: PS4, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

This is a very particular type of game in that I don’t think it’s necessarily a good game, but it was a generally fun game. It doesn’t really do anything all that well. It’s generally a pretty absurd experience. But despite that, it’s never really a huge issue to play, at least until the end. However, that’s tri-Ace in a nutshell over the past few decades, so I guess I can’t really say I was that surprised.

I say until the end up there because I never actually finished this game. Per my PS5 tiles, I finished at around 94%. What this ended up suffering from was really a case of “but wait, there’s more!” Not that it’s unusual for a JRPG, but this had too many false endings. I’m pretty sure I’ve killed the main baddy three times already and was lining up for another. However, I hit another surprise dungeon that involved my two least-favorite JRPG tropes – removing your party and making you re-fight bosses as unnecessarily tanky versions.

It’s one thing to do either of those, but both at once is obnoxious. After spending 30 or so hours getting a party setup I want with skills that I want, the last thing I want to do is have to figure out how to fight with a now weaker party or one with different mechanical pros and cons. What I really don’t want to do is then redo fights I’ve already done. Not harder mind you, just longer. Not more interesting, just more boring.

Of course, that gets us to where I don’t really think the game is good. One of the bosses in this section is a great example. It has a mechanic where it splits into four around a target, then attacks toward center. As the player, I can dodge out of it fairly easily, regardless of taking some damage. If you aren’t the target, you just….have to stand around waiting to avoid damage. The AI really loved just pulling a Leroy Jenkins here and getting themselves killed in super tanky refight variant. So what’s the easiest strategy? Let them die and be just me and a healer, because the healer will always stay back and I will always be targeted, and there’s nobody left to die. So in this case, bad AI with bad tendencies and lack of situational awareness just makes for a draining fight.

Outside of situations like this though, the game is fun despite the jank. Combat is extraordinarily fast in a way that even the Tales games don’t approach. Is it pretty button mashy? Sure is! Does that make it fun? Sure does! This is backed by some skill tree and skill strengthening that does enough to make sure you remember there’s a JRPG in here somewhere, while also giving you some flexibility in steering your party’s play style. Traversal is largely the same. You sprint like a fucking psychopath through an environment that is far larger than it needs to be, then you’re given the ability to fly like a super hero. Does it make any sense? Nope! Is it fun? Yup!

So, this game exists in a weird dichotomy. It’s not particularly good. It’s incredibly janky. It has a really bad ending sequence. But despite that all, it manages to be fun. I guess in that respect I can’t really recommend it but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that it exists. It may not be a home run, and certainly doesn’t have the life of better supported mainline Square-Enix series, but it at least gives me some hope that the series isn’t just abandoned, and within the quality bar the series usually sets it doesn’t even end up being that bad. It’s a strange one.

2022-08-302022-08-30

Game Ramblings #160 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3

More Info from Nintendo

Genre: JRPG
Platform: Switch

It says a lot about a JRPG that I still want to play it when I finish. It says a lot that despite playing 80 hours I never felt like I was grinding. It says a lot that I was doing side quests just for the sake of exploring the new spots that they would lead me that you would otherwise never see on the golden path. It says a lot that changing your party to other class types was so fun that I was actively trying to complete the roster. This is just a fantastically good game that is worth going out of your way to play.

There’s a lot to cover about this game but I want to start in a specific place. This game is incredibly streamlined for a Xenoblade title. I mentioned in my ramblings for XB2’s Torna expansion that it felt like they were starting to embrace a bit of a less is more notion and that feels like it’s continued here. In this game you’re down to three main forms of experience: XP for leveling, CP for leveling your classes, and SP for leveling a skill tree tied to a story thing that I’m not going to spoil. This also fell into a balance curve that felt fair the entire time. Xenoblade 2 and X both had really weird difficulty spikes at the end that felt more like unfair mechanics than any inherent difficulty. Xenoblade 3 on the other hand just generally felt like it was trying to be fair across the board and ramping difficulty as made sense, rather than throwing some BS one shot mechanics at you to finish the game.

What this gets me for XB3 is that I spent a whole lot less time in menus and a whole lot more time just playing the game. About the only time I was going into the menus was when I wanted to change the class setup of my team, either because I wanted to try something a bit differently or because someone hit the class level cap and I wanted to start leveling on something else. There’s some other mechanics like skill mastery and some light gearing (accessories and gems ONLY) but for the most part it’s incidental and I was only changing it at the same time as changing my classes, so it was all done in a single pass. In playing, this felt a lot more in line with the remake of XB1 than the over-complex XB2 set of systems. You’re rewarded for playing effectively, you’re rewarded for leveling up, and you just go.

And boy do you just want to go. Combat in this game felt like another high point in the series. The base combat has luckily brought over XB2‘s hot key selection where your attacks are simple button presses when ready on the d-pad and face buttons. It worked far better than XB1‘s scrolling menu and it’s good to see if return. However, that’s not the main point of interest. Without getting too spoilery, the core plot point of this game is that it’s smashed the two universes of the first two games together into one. What you end up with is some party members that use the time-based skill recharge of XB1 and some party members that use the attack-based skill recharge of XB2. This is where classes come into play.

Classes are earned by completing hero quests and using those classes starts to unlock the ability to equip that class’ arts while it isn’t actively being used. The main restriction is that you can only equip arts of the opposite universe. For example, if your active class is earned from a character in the XB2‘s world, you can only secondary equip skills from a class earned from an XB1 character. There are inherent power advantages to activating skills from BOTH at the same time, but because they are on different recharge mechanics you’ve got to be a little more patient with your timing that just hitting the button that is glowing and ready. There’s also some inherent advantages with mixing skills from different class archetypes to broaden what a member could do at any time. This gives XB3‘s combat its important feel.

What I started really getting in-tune with was seeing how many XB2 arts I could activate within a full XB1 art recharge period. If I could optimize my movement to get in three arts instead of two between dual-arts, then I just increased my power curve. If I could chain XB2 arts to cause them to recharge faster, then I just increased my power curve. Those all contributed to a really solid rhythmic feel of a fight as I found class combos that I really enjoyed. If I mixed some healing arts onto a tank, then I could go with fewer healers in my active party and power through with more damage. At the same time, I could use a DPS’s aggro reduction skill on a healer to reduce their incoming damage and give them more time to actively heal others, again allowing me to focus on more damage. It’s these types of things that let you to increase your power curve and ultimately your skill level that allowed them to get rid of all sorts of systems from XB2 and allow you to just be good at the game.

Luckily the streamlining also generally applied to combat. Chain attacks from XB2 are still there, and they’re still fun. However, elemental orbs are gone. The distinction between driver and blade arts is gone. Swapping blades is gone. What you’re doing is basically the following:

Apply your artes properly (ex: bonus for hitting a specific art from the back of the target).
Use the bonuses to charge up a chain attack meter.
Activate the chain attack.

That’s it. It takes the core fun of the big numbers and dramatic sequence from the XB2 chain attack system and gets rid of a bunch of complexity to just keep that part that worked the best while getting rid of some of the RNG nature of XB2’s orbs.

Story DLC aside, if this does end up being the end of the Xenoblade story they sure nailed it. This feels like a culmination of the story, but more importantly it feels like a culmination of the gameplay. It’s got things that worked from both of the previous mainline titles while getting rid of a whole bunch of extraneous nonsense. It results in a game that doesn’t get tiring despite its length. It’s one of those games that despite the Switch being old and underpowered compared to the current gen of consoles, it’s worth going out of your way to try out.

2022-07-122022-07-12

How’d It Age #2 – Star Ocean: First Departure

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: JRPG
Platform: PSP
Also Available On: PS4, Switch
Originally On: Super Famicom

This is definitely one of those games that kind of got away. It didn’t come out in the US until the PSP, and I completely missed the boat on that. It coming out again a couple years ago on modern consoles reminded me of its gap in my library, but it still took until now for me to finally get around to picking it up.

It’s been almost 6 years since the last Star Ocean in my playlist, and the benefit of hindsight shows so much of how that game ended up where it was. My likes playing that one basically read like a laundry list of my likes here.

This is a relatively short game, clocking in at under 15 hours. Because I finished around level 75, you can get a good guess about how quickly I was leveling up. The other benefit is that this allowed me to power through the skill list extremely fast. That in particular is one of my favorite things about leveling in this game. Ya, you get your leveling stats, but the skills are key. Want to load all in to offense with random armor breaks and offensive boosts? Go nuts, load into those skills. Want your healer to just spam heals to support your glass cannon shenanigans? Go ahead and load into skills that reduce cast and cooldown times. Take all of that and load into skills that reduce your point usage and increase your EXP gain and you’re just flying through the game. The customization possibilities there are a lot of fun and really end up being the focal point of a core metagame that still really works well 25 years later.

The combat also still manages to be fun, despite its relative simplicity. There’s definitely been games that have done it better in the years since, not the least of which are newer SO titles let alone series like Tales Of. However, this works well enough to allow me to just forget about how modern action-focused JRPGs have gone. The simplicity of having movement, an attack button with a fixed chain, and a couple of skill hotkeys is such an easy thing to fall into. I’m not remembering combos and weaknesses and anything extraneous. I’m just watching out for attacks, dodging them when I can, then spamming the hell outta my attack button to kill things. It combines with some of the skill stuff above (hell ya random dodge chance!) and the short length of the game to really just be enough to keep me going.

The things I do end up missing though are some of the little modern features that just aren’t here. The first of these is really just a lack of direction, and I don’t mean that quite so literally. Every story cutscene ends with a point where you’ve kind of got a random chance that they actually tell you something useful about where to go. More often than not I was just aimlessly wandering. Sure, people will complain about being handheld, but having a blip of like just generally go around here goes a long way to letting me explore and check things out while still eventually knowing the right way to head. I also just severely miss autosaves. Again, I think a lot of people will go “well, they make the game too easy” but I would argue just the opposite. Autosaves allow games to be much harder without wasting the players time. Save often, make individual combat situations difficult, and let players die without time loss. Modern JRPGs have started leaning into this a lot and I much prefer having a quick retry / reset to just before the fight to regroup option because a lot of the general fights in this game were just needlessly easy.

This is stupid, but I also just hate the town layouts. Why are the shops and inn so far apart from each other in pretty much every town? Why are the layouts all mazes without central squares? This was made more frustrating by the fact that you run faster in straight lines than diagonals, so navigating towns was just a slow process.

So then the question is less of a did it age well, because it did. It becomes more of a is it worth playing now? I think it’s a yes, perhaps with a bit of hesitation. If you’re kind of on the edge for the genre, I’d perhaps steer you to something modern likes Tales of Arise. If you’re a heavy JRPG fan, absolutely. There’s enough here to be fun, it’s short so it won’t waste a bunch of time, and it’s still entirely modern enough in combat feel to not be distracting. I may recommend waiting a bit for a sale, but even at its current price of $21 on PSN/Nintendo eShop, that’s not too bad of a deal for a pretty solid piece of gaming history.