Category: JRPG

2016-08-102016-08-07

Game Ramblings #19 – Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

Genre: JRPG
Platform: Wii U

I’m gonna start this off with some big words. This is the best JRPG I’ve played this year. This is also probably the best JRPG I’ve played on the current PS4/Wii U generation of consoles. The only two traditional JRPGs I think have come close in that timeframe are Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei 4, which not too shockingly share a development studio and a lot of gameplay with this one. There’s something in the water at Atlus, and if you’re a fan of JRPGs, this is one I would go as far as saying it’s worth buying a console for.

It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that this is basically Persona 5, if Persona 5 wasn’t also coming down the pipeline. It shares a lot of the DNA of that series, and will be largely familiar to fans of P4. The main cast go in and out of an alternate dimension, they’re possessed by beings from that dimension, and they battle demons while in that dimension. Sure, the alternate dimension is all Fire Emblem, but that’s the story covering taking place here. There’s also the real-world interludes, this time showing the life of a Japanese entertainment agency, rather than a bunch of high schoolers, but when you aren’t battling, you’re doing a lot of relationship management similar to the Persona series.

The battle system also shares a lot with the Persona and SMT series, but starts to split away a little bit here in the specifics of how battles go. The core of the system is the same. The cast take turns attacking enemy demons, with order determined by built-in speed. Hitting the enemy with an attack or spell they are weak to still gives a bonus. However, rather than simply knocking over the enemy and gaining a bonus turn, the strength/weakness setup now initiates a chain attack among the entire party. As the game progresses, you gain the ability to chain these together with duo attacks, as well as the ability for out-of-party members to join the attack. Although the duo attacks are somewhat random, I’d seen up to an 18 chain, and suspect this could be pushed further if things rolled your way. This has the effect of drastically increasing the value of knowing the weaknesses of your enemies over past SMT-series titles. Doing anything greater than a 2 hit chain also gives bonus items and bonus money, increasing the need to take advantage of this further. Because switching characters out during fights is free and doesn’t incur any delay, it also means that you’re constantly shuffling to take advantage of these weaknesses, even in trash fights.

There’s also a number of sub-systems that offer a lot of flexibility to how you build characters. The short version is that any kill can drop an item type called Performa. This can either be generic, or enemy-specific. There’s also Performa that occurs from story events, or in treasure chests scattered around the world. All of these can go into three different things. The first is weapons, the second are character-specific skills and passive effects, and the third are Fire Emblem-style secondary class upgrades.

The most important of these really falls onto the weapons. Weapons are the thing that gains skills, similar to demons in SMT or Persona skills in those titles. The skills can either fall into main skills, combo skills, or passives. Each weapon can give 4 skills, and can be upgraded once fully mastered to continue giving more. Because of this, the main upgrade loop is entirely focused around maximizing the number of times you can get through weapon upgrades, and building out the individual skill trees from there. Because each skill type is capped in the number that can be actively known, there is also a bit of a sub game in making sure that the combo skills in particular are setup in a way to maximize the amount and length of combo chains that can be pulled off by any party configuration.

In the end, there really wasn’t much that bothered me about this game. To some extent it definitely has very SMT problems with bosses generally having one-shot mechanics. This is definitely not something I’ve ever been a fan of, but there are plenty of options there to either force avoidance of the attacks, or in a worst-case, simply dropping the difficulty down to get through a fight, which has no penalty. The game could probably be somewhat grindy if you aren’t actively doing the side story content, but the skill advantages of doing the side stories are so good that I don’t think it’s worth skipping that content just to save a few hours. As it is, this is about a 60 hour game, which is perhaps on the longer side of a typical JRPG, but not by much, and I think JRPG fans will enjoy the experience throughout.

2016-07-28

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.

2016-05-22

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.