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JRPGs/SRPG/Japanese games in 2008 - Who's getting what?
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This post, and that thread, finally convinced me: I just ordered this game from Play-Asia. The only other japanese games I've ever imported were freakin Ouendan and Band Brothers. But I've been itching for a Diablo-style dungeon crawler for my DS since forever and this looks so, so awesome, an beautiful. I look forward to struggling with all the crazy moon language.
god damnit I want to touch a damn witch, but there's soooooooo muuuuuuuuch texxxxxxxt
playing a japanese text-based adventure game
probably a bad idea
Wait really
How much kiddy porn is there
Valkyrie Profile DS: The Accused One.
Whippy.
What.
Why.
This, pretty much. I mean, they aren't horrible, but they're overall pretty generic. The battles in all of them are dreadfully boring, and...the graphics...I just don't like them. I mean, I can get over the graphics in, say, the NIS games, but Gust graphics just really get to me.
And the characters are generally more miss than hit, mostly owing again to the genericness.
Hey now, I've never played Ar Tonelico (it never came out here) but the only one of the Irises I'd really describe as properly generic was the second one and that whole game made it painfully obvious they were just being incredibly lazy.
Iris 1 was a clusterfuck of random half executed ideas that came about from trying to make a traditional JRPG that was still somehow an Atelier game but dammit, that game had heart. Most of the cast were on some level pretty generic but they were a lot better fleshed out than most JRPG casts plus it had Veola, who could easily have carried the game on her own (and to some extent did, the most worthwhile part of the game was her storyline, if you tried to play it focusing on the save the world plot then you were doing it wrong).
Iris 2 had two very good ideas in the core mechanic of the battle system and having what should have essentially been a traditional Atelier game running in parallel with the traditional JRPG bit. Unfortunately, they got lazy, cut Viese's bit down to the absolute minimum and spent probably five minutes designing the entirety of the combat system leading to boring repetitive move sets and a flat out broken implementation of the core mechanic.
There was actually an extremely good game buried somewhere in Iris 3 but I can see how you could miss it. Basically, it needed to either be a third of its actual length or have a much more in depth character leveling / customisation system. It also would have helped if they'd toned down the extra damage in burst mode and made it easier to build decent amounts of stun on enemies (without using that one skill that practically induced break on its own, that may as well have just been a status effect). The skill gauge was balanced absolutely perfectly though. You normally had enough that it didn't devolve into spamming normal attacks but never had enough to just spam uber-moves without paying any attention to it. If you were going for fast kills and weren't massively over-leveled then the normal encounters actually required some small amount of conscious thought which puts it above 95% of JRPGs and there were quite a few fun difficult optional bosses. Plot and character wise it was kind of weird. They seemed to be trying to recapture what Iris 1 had where side plots could carry the whole game but none of the side stuff was quite fleshed out enough to do it and the main plot was even more terrible than Iris 1's.
What I've seen of Atelier 9 (Mana Khemia) looks really promising. It may not be going back to the traditional Atelier game paradigm but there certainly seems to be a good reason why they didn't call it Iris 4.
I know it's by Idea Factory.
In other words: Forget it.
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Basically.
Most? Counting mostly the fairly big name stuff that actually gets localized? No. A lot? Probably not. Maybe better than a few terrible games, but not any better than any decent games. It doesn't help that all the interactions are forced to take place around and through generic RPG hero #207.
I did note that there are some hits. Veola here, and Hama in Ar Tonelico are fine. Great, even. The fact that minor characters are consistently quite a bit more endearing than anyone in the main cast is a problem, though.
Avoided 2 based on pretty much universally poor reviews.
I bought it, but haven't opened it yet. Not really sure where my expectations lie at this point.
I'm not saying it will be bad, and I may pick it up eventually, but you can just sense that it will have all the same problems plaguing it, marring whatever it actually does right.
And Ar Tonelico had the worst battle system of them all. It manages to be entertaining for around fifteen minutes a couple hours into the game before just becoming an excercise in tedium. I could actually tolerate the two female leads, and Krusche was okay as a character, so I guess it had that going for it...
I really liked Ar Tonelico. What could be more fun than holding off Freza while Goku charges the spirit bomb?
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Their designs were okay. Misha's Japanese voice was all right. ...basically just the designs, I guess. I'm a sucker for alternate costumes.
But that's the only RPG I've ever played from Gust so I can't really comment on the others.
My comment about the fleshing out of the characters could probably do with a little fleshing out of its own. There was a lot of non-essential, not really plot related dialogue in Iris 1 (Atelier 6). That's something I can't remember seeing in very many JRPGs. The ones that do make an effort in this area tend to come off kind of forced and Eternal Mana just didn't to me. The writing may not have been the best ever but the character interaction seemed to be handled a lot more naturally than similar stuff I've seen. I came out of the game feeling like I "knew" the characters a lot better than I do with a lot of these games.
Character interaction mostly takes place with or around Klein because he's your viewpoint. He doesn't get fleshed out properly for the same reason silent protagonists don't speak. Besides which, any personality he displays that isn't there solely so that the save the world plot can advance is a 50/50 mixture of being the only character with any kind of common sense and a socially clueless obsessive nerd. which isn't quite how I'd describe the generic JRPG hero.
Veola is not a minor character. She may not be a party member but she is the focus of a "side" plot that has at least as much dialogue devoted to it as the "main" one. Probably a lot more.
You can see the origins of pretty much all of GUST's issues, along with everything that was good about Eternal Mana in the nature of the first five Atelier games. They do seem to be gradually getting over their issues though. Each game they put out seems more competently designed than the last one. Azoth of Destiny was better designed than Eternal Mana even, if only because it did actually seem like someone put (no more than five minutes of) conscious effort into designing Azoth at some point instead of it just being a random pile of ideas that wound up sort of working like its immediate predecessor.
I would think that too, but it has Growlanser and Shadow Hearts cameos going for it.
And it's going to be released only at GameStop, so I figure this'll be gone in a week or two, tops.
Maybe it'll be budget priced.
And I had fun with Tonelico's battle system, even if it was the easiest RPG ever. Didn't die once, not even at the end(though it was close).
Fully charged magic does ridiculous amounts of damage.
The story wasn't anything amazing, but it had moments.
Though the end game was just ridiculous.
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My expectation is that is similar to the situation in which Gamestop had Wish Room for DS slated for release for a very long time after Hotel Dusk was released, not knowing that they were actually the same game.
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I'm less skeptical, but still skeptical. Normally these crossovers are a licensing nightmare in the states.
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Especially since O3 games are usually budget priced.
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As for 3, I understand what it was trying to do, but the overworld system made me feel cloistered. And I just plain couldn't get into AT.
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Just to add my vote, for what it's worth - Soma Bringer is fucking awesome. One of the better dungeon crawlers I've played, beautiful, engaging, compelling, rewarding, all that good stuff. Great, great gameplay mechanics, tremendous, shockingly brutal combat given there's no blood and it's a handheld game, looks and sounds amazing.
The NeoGAF thread reinforced why I don't go there - they're a lot more knowledgeable than GameFAQs but they're just as nuts, in their own way. Far too many Xenosaga/Gears lunatics blinded by big words and the mere mention of hifalutin' thematic material - and disappointing art direction? Say what? The game is gorgeous. Anyone who says otherwise needs professional help. ...well, okay, apart from the furries, it's gorgeous. :oops: But everything apart from them is wonderful. Still, if they get more people interested, more power to them.
It's very playable even if, like me, you can't read a word of Japanese - lots of your inventory is done with pictorials, if you've played any other dungeon crawler you can work a lot of things out by trial and error and there aren't many objectives beyond Go Here, Talk To This Person, Kill This Huge Monster. Still, apparently it's close to an open secret it's getting localised. Nintendo haven't admitted anything yet but a lot of the gaming press are getting that impression, by all accounts.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
And I was severely disappointed to learn that the Break System wasn't about chopping parts off your enemies. That is the one mechanic that every action RPG needs to rip off.
It's the song sung at the end of Phase 3. Phase 3 which was actually pretty painful to play (for me anyways .) Phase 1 and 2 were a lot of fun though.
Despite whatever other praises may be sung of Soma Bringer, good art direction (for the characters, mind), is not something it can boast.
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I personally am freaking for it to come out. Watching those vids has made me want to play it forever.
Azoth of Destiny wasn't a bad game but it lacked a lot of the charm of its immediate forbear. While the design was a little cleaner and it was slightly more competently put together overall, there was nothing there to make up for what it lacks in comparison to the first one. I enjoyed playing it but I felt no compulsion to go back and finish up stuff that I'd missed after beating the final boss. The ideas in the game were good but I can't really forgive it for just how incredibly lazy, bare bones and in at least one place, outright broken the execution was.
Grand Phantasm was so close and yet so far from being a great game. I like that it kept the focus local and personal most of the time, that's what GUST are good at but it made the save the world plot even harder to swallow. It was mechanically pretty much completely consistent and coherent which is something you definitely can't say for either of the other two Irises. Actually, it was very tightly designed given that there were several elements in there that worked really well specifically because they played off of each other. The problem was that it was seemingly intentionally designed to be simplistic in a way that would have worked really well if it had been 20 hours long but it wasn't, it was more like 60 to see the real ending. It could have held up for that length with relatively minor tweaking to the battle system, a skill system that forced you to experiment with custom move sets rather than presenting killer combos to you on a platter and just a bit more (and less repetitive) content. It was kind of a shame in that way.
The only reservation I have about what I've seen of Mana Khemia is that they've ditched the skill gauge.
No. No, it really, really can. It's not the best out there, but it's far better than, say, the ghastly, characterless mess of Lost Odyssey, where all the characters appear to be from different games and the designers appear to have tried to make each one stand out by hanging different pieces of pointless, random crap off their armour.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
I'm not artistically minded, so I can't really speak towards the "design," of the characters in LO, but I like them. To me, the very different design for each simply points towards their disparate backgrounds. I don't want everyone to look like retarded dolls like in Blue Dragon just for the sake of some sort of artistic style. I'm not really trying to disagree with you, I think mostly what I'm saying is that for someone who isn't artistic, LO is visually satisfying to me.
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Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
And I think we're only going to get the Summon Night Action-RPGs.
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Here's the actual quote: "And if you liked this bit of good news, you'll absolutely love what we're getting ready to announce next week..."
I wonder if that first clause offers a clue:
Option 1 - Next week's news is directly related: we're getting the DS remakes of the PS1 Summon Night games. This would be awesome: for my money, Summon Night 3 is the best Strategy/RPG I've ever played.
Option 2 - A big DS related announcement (not necessarily Summon Night). Etrian Odyssey 2 perhaps?
Option 3 - A big announcement (not DS, not Summon Night). Could be anything.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Though I'd really like to see SRT/G DS show up here, though I know it won't happen.
OG PS2 would be mind-blowing.
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OGs would come out and sell a billion copies, and SquareEnix would be motivated to get off its ass and bring over Front Mission 5, and all would be right with the world.