Tag: jrpg

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How’d It Age #10 – Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Gamecube

It’s been long enough since the original came out that I only vaguely remember the feeling of playing this game, but not so much the specifics of playing it. I can remember the feeling of the combat being good. I can remember the feeling of the characters and story being funny. What I remember more are the places where newer entries in the series felt like they “fell apart” for me. However, replaying Thousand-Year Door is making me realize that a lot of what I don’t like about modern entries already kind of existed in this one.

Now don’t get me wrong; the combat is this game is still fantastic and was really the driving force behind me playing the game. I would still argue that the core Paper Mario combat is one of leading examples of how to make turn-based RPGs heavily engaging to the player instead of a passive activity. Tying each attack to a different series of inputs for better damage gives the player that little bit of action to keep them involved in combat in a way that keeps their interest and allows it to feel more rewarding to not skip combat. Tying a defense boost to learning and remembering the various enemy attacks gives the player that little constant reward for being involved in combat that makes fighting an enemy for the tenth time more than just a chore.

It’s such a little thing but it makes the combat so much more fun. Other JRPGs have tried different things to get similar feelings. The Persona and SMT series have used type weaknesses to grant the players extra turns to achieve a similar result. The Bravely Default series allows the player to manipulate turn order to stack attacks and blow away enemies. Heck, the combat in Paper Mario was a direct evolution of the standard set by Super Mario RPG. Just giving the player something to do other than pick the attack and fall asleep is such a better result than the norm for the genre.

However, combat is one of those spots where doubt started to creep in. One of the things that really bugged me about more modern Paper Mario entries was how odd the power curve felt. It always felt like it was going in really weird jumps because the numbers were always inherently small. You’d kind of get to a new area, be beat up a bit, then be given a magic power upgrade and suddenly be effectively overpowered by only gaining one attack. That absolutely exists in TTYD, and wasn’t something I really remembered.

The places that I really started to notice it were when the jump and hammer upgrades were not in alignment. I’d suddenly be in areas where one of the two attacks effectively did 2-3 less damage, which meant that it took trash fights from one to two turns per-enemy or would do so much less damage with flower point attacks that the weaker one would be effectively useless on bosses unless mechanics of the fight required the specific attack. This was likely exacerbated by the way I was building, which was to go all-in on badge points so occasionally I would just get a HUGE upgrade swath because I would stumble upon a badge or two that added attack power that would totally change the way I tackled fights. When a boss has maybe 50 HP, suddenly being able to do 3 or 4 more damage per-turn is enormous. It felt off in a way that made me realize I honestly kind of prefer the larger numbers and slower power curve style of the Mario & Luigi series to this, because that at least feels like I’m making consistent growth throughout the game.

The other thing that I really forgot about was just how much walking there is. Holy hell do they like sending you across the same environments about 10 times per chapter for no reason. Sticker Star and Color Splash were somewhat guilty of this in that you’d be walking around a lot simply collecting the right cards for combat. Super Paper Mario was definitely guilty of making the player re-traverse areas way too often. Thousand Year Door just does it too a level that I don’t remember, or perhaps just shut out of my brain. It was so jarring at points that I’d literally put the game down for the night because I was tired of going through the same areas. The island chapter in particular was egregious for this where the hub town for the chapter and the goal for the story were on entirely different ends of the world and you had to cross it at least 4 or 5 times for different reasons.

I guess all that is to say that while this game is still good, it definitely has rough spots. The remake is definitely a strong product, and it brings the game to modern consoles in a visually gorgeous package. However, this is still a 20 year old games with 20 year old problems that at this point hadfaded from my memory. The thing is though, this came out within six months of the Super Mario RPG remake and that game has aged so much better. That one has the nice combat advantages of this series, but was a lot less quirky in the remainder of its JRPG tendencies and has much better overall environmental flow. Like the Mario & Luigi subseries, I think up against this game it ends up being the victor because its mechanics have just aged so much better.

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Game Ramblings #182 – Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne HD Remaster

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch
  • Originally On: PS2

Normally this would probably be a How’d It Age, but honestly I don’t really want to talk about the game here – at least not specifically. The game under normal circumstances would have ramblings specifically matching my shelving of Shin Megami Tensei V. What I am instead going to talk about is specifically the Merciful DLC that they added to the remaster and why it’s the best thing that Atlus may have done for their core JRPG gameplay in years.

Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster_20240112192935

At its core Merciful is an easy mode, and it definitely is easy. However, it can be turned on and off at will, so I generally ended up using it for making the trash grind more mindless. Trash has never been difficult per-se in SMT. Once you learn the weaknesses of the enemies in the general area, it’s butter. Being on easy just meant that I could concentrate on the story and bosses. However, easy mode also came with three numbers I want to focus on:

  • Encounter rate – Approx 1/2
  • Experience – Approx 4x

However, the most important one is 18:36. That was my time to completion, +/- a bit of untracked time to deaths.

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Judging by How Long to Beat, I shaved on average about 30 hours or about 60% of the average run. To me, that sits about where these games should be. These should never be 50 hour games with a ton of useless trash fights, because that isn’t the fun part of the game. They should be relatively quick and fast leveling so you can crank through a bunch of different party setups and summon as many demons as possible and have them be immediately powerful and useful.

One of the biggest problems I had when I shelved SMT5 was that it was taking me 25-30 fights to get a single level. It was such an absurd level of grind that it sucked all of the fun out of what is an inherently very good turn-based combat system. In merciful mode, I was getting levels every 5 or 6 battles, if not quicker. It was such an incredible change to the flow of the game that it makes me want this XP rate in standard difficulty.

Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster_20240112195934

The other part that I really noticed was improved was the overall dungeon flow, thanks to an overall reduction in trips back to town. In SMT4 it always felt like a slog getting further in a dungeon. You’d slowly make your way through a dungeon getting stronger, generally getting to a point where you could comfortably make it one save point further before needing to teleport back. Frankly, the Persona subseries is the same way in that regard. It’s just such a time sink having to retread the same ground over and over purely because there’s so much combat and the XP rate is so slow. On Merciful though? I could get through dungeons in one go without losing all my items, so I was able to be prepared to go back up to normal for boss fights.

I get why this might come across as a negative change, and honestly I don’t necessarily disagree. I guess where I fall with this is that I want the overall dungeon mechanic to change. Rather than mid-dungeon save points being a way to get back to town, I would rather they be permanent fast travel points across the board. Allow players to continue their progress at any point where they get to a safe spot, reducing overall retread churn and increasing the pace of play as a positive. Combine this with the increased XP rate to really tighten up the game as a whole.

Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster_20240109210314

The Shin Megami Tensei series is the perfect example of a JRPG that is long for the sake of being long, and it’s one of the few series that hasn’t really adapted to a tighter modern gameplay loop. Merciful mode may not be exactly the solution, but I think there’s ideas here they can pull from. These games have never had the pure content amount to support being a 50 hour experience and cranking through this one in sub-20 proves that to me. This is a series that would benefit from keeping its difficulty but modernizing to be a faster experience, because even this little experimental DLC feels like such a huge improvement. Combine the quick XP rate and reduced encounter rate with a better overall travel system to reduce retread, and I think SMT6 could feel surprisingly modern without having to lose its soul.

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How’d It Age #8 – Star Ocean: The Second Story R

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Windows

In a year of wonderful remasters and remakes I’m finishing the year on another wonderful remake. This one is very similar to Super Mario RPG in that it left the gameplay largely intact while overhauling the visuals, but it took a decidedly more retro approach. Luckily, like SMRPG, it is also similarly still a ton of fun.

Having somewhat recently played some Star Ocean I apparoached this kind of knowing what kind of game I was getting into. I knew that combat wasn’t going to be overly complicated, but I knew it was going to be fun. What surprised me was how well this one scaled between low and high enemy counts, which is something that newer entries don’t necessarily do.

One of the big things that separates this entry is that there’s a very well telegraphed attack tell, which you can combine with a dodge button to knock away at a stun meter. You can also do that through normal attacks, but the dodge is way more effective. In a one-on-one or party-on-one situation, this is INCREDIBLY effective at knocking down the meter and stunning an enemy. However, you can also play a game of prioritizing attack cancels and just preventing the enemy from attacking nearly wholesale. This works great in multi-enemy fights as you can spread your party to focus on individual one-on-one fights. However, there are some fights that really penalize this and force you to set the party into full focus. Figuring out the fights with different strategies really works well to push some variety and keep combat from getting stale. It’s surprising to see how well this is achieved in such an old title, as the newer Star Ocean games really failed in this regard.

However, you start to see the age of the game when it comes to balance. It happens sort of slowly throughout the game, but over time the game’s intended balance of what you’re fighting and the practical balance of the bosses got clearly off. I never really narrowed it down to what I was doing wrong, but to not be one-shot by the end game bosses, I was ending up about 15-20 levels higher than the game was telling me was “appropriate” for my party, but it got me through. Luckily the game compensates – intentionally or not – with some grind reduction systems. Once an enemy icon changes from red to green, there’s a system to auto complete the fight in the overworld. This basically runs stretches of getting a level from minutes to 30 seconds or less, so the time to actually level up and move up is pretty forgiving. If you aren’t at the right spot in power, you just run around and auto battle a bit, adjust strategy a bit, and good to go.

This was ultimately probably a problem of me not digging deeper into the underlying crafting systems, partly because I’m lazy and partly because they are just too deep. There’s a three-page menu of crafting and helper-style stuff that you can level up per party member. It runs the gamut from actual equipment crafting to item creation to cooking to buff creation to stat up creation and more. It’s just so deep that unless I had time to really invest in a strategy to min/max my party, I was always going to fail on doing it right. As it stood I did it well enough to get decently high end items, but I think there was a clear path for me to do better and get more out of it to make my overall path through the game far more efficient.

The rest of the remake from a visual and audio perspective is extremely impressive. It’s obvious that Square is really leaning into the HD2D style that they started pushing in Octopath Traveler, but this one is a bit different. The environments are still pretty low-tech, but they’re a lot more traditional 3D with really good 2D character sprites to create a fairly interesting mix in styles. From an audio perspective it’s still the pieces you’d want with modern orchestration and voice acting. Where HD2D feels like a fun idea that can be a bit kitschy at full scale, this feels like a more practical middle ground that allows for them to be a bit separated from the environmental restrictions of the full HD2D titles. This is mixed with some modern UX touches (thank you wonderful maps) that really feel like they’re pointing at a way to do a SNES/PS1 style sprite RPG in a modern wrapping.

I guess if nothing else I’m glad this exists and I’m glad that it’s good. Star Ocean has had a pretty rough draw since the 360 era (and I know some people would also tell me that Star Ocean 3 was garbage). This one proves that there’s a place that the series should maybe go that’s a bit lower budget and a bit lower scope and really just make a fun sci-fi story that isn’t trying to reach to AAA status. The Divine Force felt like it was moving in that direction, but in full 3D. This title perhaps offers another path they could go. It feels like a game that is still worth playing despite being 25 years old, and that’s something to celebrate.