/svidya/ - Strict /v/

Final Fantasy V, VII, IX.
Chrono Trigger
Legend of Mana
Legend of Dragoon
Baldur's Gate
Dungeon Siege
I know there's some more I missed.

The world, and the characters are some of the most important aspects of a RPG behind the core gameplay. Though I feel at the moment, the current settings are stale and the characters are just unoriginal tropes. I'd like a new game that turns that all on its head with a unique setting and story.

Legend of Grimrock
Golden Sun
Temple of Elemental Evil
Divinity: Original Sin

Interaction between as much as you can have makes a good RPG. Interaction between the characters. Interaction with the environment.

SMT anything(except purse owner)

I've bought a ton of RPGs, and completed only a few. So many games so little time.

My list would have to be:
Persona 3
Disgaea
FF 6
Pokemon Leafgreen (and whatever else gen 3)
Hyperdimension Neptunia
Digital Devil Saga
Guided Fate Paradox

A good RPG should focus on gameplay as much as it does story, vise versa. Getting a great story but having to go through horrible gameplay just isn't worth it. Then again that should be obvious…

The only turn based rpgs I could stand playing were Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, FF:Tactics Advanced and Paper Mario.
Every other traditional rpg failed to hold my interest for long considering how static the formula is. In a lot of cases, after you've played a few you played them all.

>>104
To be honest, I wasn't too happy with Dark Dawn. I mean yeah, it did have a lot of the same issues as the original games, but it felt more prevalent about it. Plus it added its own issues to the mix as well, such as all those points of no return (I know they're rather common in JRPGs, but Golden Sun and TLA went out of their way to not have any, barring the parts after fighting the final boss fights in each) which can fuck you over if trying to access the bonus dungeon and/or get every djinn or summon, half the game being a fetch quest to fix what Garet's dumbass son broke (I know Golden Sun's story overall leaves something to be desired, but half the overall goal of Dark Dawn was just "wander the world until you find this enormous bird and slap it in the wattle"), and a cliffhanger with absolutely no word on a fourth game in sight. Honestly makes me wonder at times whether they even wanted to make more Golden Sun games beyond the GBA ones (which while they have issues are still pretty decent), or only made Dark Dawn because fans kept asking for more.

Honestly not real sure I'd want a fourth game at this point if it risked being the same quality as the third. Just my thoughts though.

>>116
I want a golden sun 4 so that it can make up for dark dawn and finish the fucking story.

>>120
True, some closure would certainly be nice (especially with how Dark Dawn just up and forgot about the Psynergy Vortexes and Isaac and Garet's research on them until the end of the game, simply to remind you that "oh yeah, that stuff was happening" and end with a "To be continued?" as if they didn't know if it was worth continuing with).

Personally at this point I pretty much just disregard Dark Dawn and consider Golden Sun and Golden Sun: TLA to be the main games worth giving attention to or simply replaying, especially since TLA wraps up nicely enough, even if it does have a few loose ends. Still, if they do make a fourth game, we'd better get to fucking fight Alex this time.

>>126
>alex

Stop triggering me.

>>130
I honestly hoped to be able to fight him in Dark Dawn, but nope, for whatever reason (I forget why, between it being a long time since I played it and not trying too hard to remember Dark Dawn compared to the first two games), he opts not to side with the Tuaparang duo any longer and leaves the party on their own to fight that stupid winged werewolf thing. I don't even remember if he was still around after that battle gloating or something, or if he fucked off to do whatever was next in his plan (which we'll likely never know.

>>138
Holy shit why can't we fight Alex though. After the golden sun event, he should have godlike psynergy powers now.

>>142
True, but with Isaac having gained a portion of energy that Alex would have obtained from the Golden Sun (as The Wise One uses some magic to connect the Mars Star to Isaac in the first game, which isn't elaborated on until the end of the second game), Alex may be powerful but is not all powerful either (I don't recall him being able to do much to The Wise One in TLA, suggesting a vast gulf in power between the two even at that point), as he otherwise might have been had he gained the full effect of the Golden Sun.

If anything it's simply made him hard to kill (I recall that Mt Aleph's collapse or whatever happened should have killed him but he managed to survive), and it's kind of hard to judge exactly how powerful he really is offensively as A) we never fight him, and B) the few (possibly only?) times we see him actively fighting NPCs, he's just murdering some soldiers that likely wouldn't be much threat to Isaac's party either (considering that at the point TLA kicks off, Isaac's party's likely about level 25-30 while Felix is still level 3 or so). I honestly forget how much he did in Dark Dawn besides wear that stupid looking mask and apparently fucking some chick in the timeskip between TLA and Dark Dawn. Probably some gloating here and there with Blados and Chalice, but otherwise I really don't remember. That's not to call him weak at all (especially considering he has that warp psynergy or whatever that Mia remarks would take forever to master), but as far as gauging his actual strength you're kind of stuck going off what other characters say.

>>149
Alex was a puppet master, considering everything that happened in the events of the first two games was so that he could achieve the golden sun. I'm not saying he isn't powerful now, but he could have been a massive closet fuccboi before.

>>150
Yeah, if he was really just some wimp before with a ploy to gain a massive amount of power, I could see that. But again, Mia knew him in the past (I recall them being relatives and having trained under the same master), and stated that Warp was a pretty advanced technique for someone to know and was surprised he knew how to do it, and Alex also makes very short work of the Tolbi guards with that geyser thing he can do. So I doubt that he was ever all that weak, at least during the events of the first two games.

On that note, he also had enough strength (or at least charisma) to keep both Mars Clan duos he had working for him in line. Hell, Agatio even remarked that he knew Alex was just using them, so I figure that their combined goals and Alex having enough strength at that point as is likely kept them from stabbing him in the back. Well, that, and the fact that fire is weak to water.

>>152
Do we have conformation that the psynergy alex used at the start of GS2 was just the deluge synergy? Or was it an unknown technique?

>>153
I don't know if it had an official name. He didn't use it in a battle screen either (even with him escorting Jenna out of Venus Lighthouse), but an on-the-field one. He shoots a massive geyser of water out of the ground with enough force to launch a person into the air, and he does that to multiple guards. Still, whether that proves the Tolbi guards to be weak (which I kind of doubt as they had to cross the Suhalla Desert just to get there, and it's a reasonably high level place in the game; though Isaac's group taking out the lizards making the whirlwinds likely helped make things more manageable) or Alex exceptionally strong, it's not all that clear. Either way he makes quick work of them.

Biggest issue with Alex is that, again, all you have to go off of for how strong he is is what the party members and NPCs say and what you see him do on the overworld (whereas with Saturos, Menardi, Agatio, and Karst, you have direct combat to aid in seeing just how powerful they are) because Camelot apparently didn't want the player to have a chance to actually beat him in combat.

>>327
I agree with the idea of having a big world (or multiple ones, in some cases) to explore. The lack of a true overworld in a fair amount of recent RPGs kind of annoys me, especially when it's just some narrow connecting paths between towns and dungeons, or worse, leaving those places just brings up a map to select your next destination in place of an overworld. Also, any sort of overworld with hidden stuff to find that may not have an impact on the actual plot (be it new locations, NPCS, or items), such as in Tales of Symphonia or Tales of Eternia, is always a welcome way to reward taking the time to go off the beaten path.

>Another important freedom, highlighted in these games, is having methods to avoid battles.
You ought to give the Wild Arms games a try some time if you haven't. The first game only has a repel style spell that really reduces the encounter rate while active, but from 2 onwards (in my experiences anyhow, I would assume that it also apples to 4 and 5) you can outright skip some encounters if you opt to not want to fight anything (like if trying to get back to town after a tough dungeon trek). Starting with 3 though you are limited to a meter of how many you can skip, with your Migrant level determining how much an encounter cancel will cost you (the game has a built in skip cost for enemies that your Migrant level is subtracted from), but it restores when sleeping at inns, picking up white crystals in dungeons, and from actually fighting enemies (1 point regained per encounter, though there's equippable skills to increase that). This lets the player weigh the cost and benefit of skipping, and the fact that the encounter cost is visible on the screen can also help one to check how high any enemy may be compared to them (for example, if an encounter in an area costs a whopping 6 or more points instead of 1 or 2, you've either been neglecting to pick up Migrant Seals to increase your level, or you're in an area you're probably too low level for; this is also important since in some of the games there is no built in run-from-combat mechanic, with their being a learnable spell that has that function).

>>83
Someone needs to help me understand Chrono Trigger. I just went to around 10,000 BC and I still have no idea what is going on. I just kill things and proceed. Does the story become more cohesive and direct?

>>401
So that I'm also contributing to this thread though, my favorite RPGs would have to be DQ 3, 5, and 8, FF:TA, as far as turn based games go. Legend of Grimrock 2 as a dungeon crawler, and Fallout New Vegas as a FPS RPG.

>>3755
It was one of my firsts on the PS1 too. I swear that console was the golden age for JRPGs.

>>3800
This might sound odd but the biggest reason for this in my opinion, is how weak it was in terms of 3D. (Even though at the time it was really good compared to other consoles.) Sprite graphics could look really good on this console, and that contributed to the rise of JRPGs on it.

>>3755
Reminds me that I see copies of that around a lot for about $35 and no one ever seems to want them at that price, but no one reduces the prices either, so they just sit there unbought. Similar case with Legend of Dragoon, which sold enough out here for a Greatest Hits print.

>>3760
What's so bad about Legaia 2? Just wondering since I've been meaning to look into what other ones I'm missing on my PS2, before prices might start rising (looking at Wild Arms 5, that one's jumped from about $30-35 to $60+ complete in the last year or so last I checked, though it might be going back down now; glad I got my copy when I did regardless though)

>>3800
4th, 5th, and 6th gen were a great time for JRPGs across a spread of systems. Hell, video games in general too.

>>3797
While I would agree about Pokemon being a JRPG of sorts, I think a lot of people tend to consider monster breeding, catching, and raising games to be their own thing, or at last subsection of it.

>>3801
Do note that not every turn based JRPG plays exactly the same. Some can be really rather simple, while other can have catch to it that requires more thought and input on the player's part (Paper Mario, Mario and Luigi, and the Shadow Hearts series come to mind there). Nor does JRPG have to equate to "turn based," as there's a decent amount of real time JRPGs around too (just saying on the off chance you haven't had much experience with the category; some people seem to assume all JRPGs are turn based). Even if you wind up not liking the first one or two you play, give some other series (or at least later games in the same series you've tried) a shot.

>>3805
I really don't mind some of the 3D games on it much (Crash and Spyro still look pretty damn good for they are), and even some of the 3D JRPGs on the system, like Wild Arms 2, manage to have their own charm with the way the graphics handle. But yeah, well done spriting and animation generally holds up a lot better than early 3D.

I do think another thing that may have contributed to there being a lot more JRPGs on the PS1 than, say, the N64 would probably have to do with people wanting to try developing for cheaper CDs (which can have a real benefit to stuff like audio capabilities, though they did tend to wind up with some loading issues as well) instead of cartridges. Might be wrong though.

For me an RPG has to have heavy customization, stuff like FF with class systems and bravely default and Pokemon

>>3828
You're right about that, developing for the N64 was a lot harder than developing for the PS1.

Alpha Protocol
The way the story changes even in subtle ways depending on how you play it is absolutely amazing. Sure, the game mechanics are as broken as they can get, but I'm willing to let that slide because no other game gave me that feel of having my own adventure. Bioware, despite millions of $ and years of making games still haven't achieved that level of storytelling. And I don't think they ever will, seeing as they still haven't figured out how to do proper animations.

>>3931
This nigger speaks the truth.

>>3828
>What's so bad about Legaia 2?
It isn't bad for what it is, but compared to the first one, it was a letdown. Without spoiling too much: the character are forgetful, no unique towns, the battle system is exactly the same from what I remember, shitty English dub, no TORNADO FLAAAME, forgetful soundtrack except for the tracks that were used in the first game.

The story that they had going on COULD have been decent, but they decided not to go in depth about it, so it's just your run of the mill 'stop this bad person from doing bad things' story.

>>4407
Guess I'll avoid that one for the time being then (might still play it after I play the first one just to see the difference for myself), and see what else I'm missing out on. Maybe Romancing SaGa.

>>3931
I dumped so many hours into this game with my brother back in the day. Fucking classic.

>>7254
Holy shit, thanks anon! Time to add to my backlog.