TrishaCat
The Cat in the FAF
I've been playing so much cool shit lately I'm having a blast. Do any of y'all like JRPGs too? What have you been playing?
Give me a moment to talk about some games I've been playing.
Resonance of Fate HD
First up is this remaster of this ps3 game by Tri-Ace (most known for Star Ocean). Resonance of Fate is such a bizarre thing to experience. Its extremely gray, something I've never actually seen to be a problem in JRPGs before. And yet, the game is weirdly gorgeous and uses the cobblestone road, stone bricked, gear infested world to its aesthetic. Its really pretty. Beyond that, the game's plot is bizarrely cryptic. See, the game is structured to have one main quest and 2 or 3 sidequests each chapter, with chapters ending once you've completed the main quest and returned home. Typically you get a cryptic cutscene without much context at the beginning and end of each chapter, and you sorta have to piece together the plot. The game's setting is a gigantic tower that no one knows how it came to be and is slowly falling apart. People have separated parts of the tower by class with the higher up in the tower you are, the richer or more political power you have. And yet, the tower is so disconnected that people only find out news through hearsay. Its a rather poor state of affairs, and you and two other gunman do odd jobs for these aristocrats. Combat is super confusing at first and you HAVE to play the optional tutorial to know how to play, but once you get the hang of it its a really stylish 3rd-person strategy game with time that moves when you do. Also hot take but I think JRPGs peaked with graphics like this. (disregarding the color)
Octopath Traveler
Octopath Traveler is also a really pretty game, but for very different reasons. It blends 3D environments and structures with 2D pixelart characters, yet it makes this work and blend really well by making the textures on 3D objects pixelart. Though the game does have a very strong depth of field blurring effect on the edges of the screen at all times. I personally found that annoying, but was thankfully able to turn that off with some fiddling in the .ini file of the PC version.
Anyways, I'm amazed at how much content is in this game. I've played several hours and I still haven't done chapter 2 for any characters yet. Each character has their own story and its taken a good deal of time to go through each character's chapter 1. Its kinda cool that there's so many different actually interesting stories to tell. I'm most interested in the dancer Primrose's tale.
Combat has been admittedly rather simple and dungeons are usually not very complex or long, but its serviceable enough and scratches that itch for a JRPG with a fairly normal combat system.
Also, I'm a sucker for any game with overworld abilities. Its so cool being able to do things like steal from random npcs throughout town or coerce them into following you.
Dragon Quest XI S
I never played a Dragon Quest game before the demo for this released on Steam (excluding a very brief bit of VIII, but I didn't play for very long at all), so I was really surprised to find that this game is fantastic and that I've been missing out! I haven't played a game with this strong a sense of adventure in forever. Like first thing you're doing is doing a little cultural thing for your town, and then you're on a quest to see the king only for the king to betray you, and then you're on the run as a fugitive with a thief monk type character which is a really unique blend of character traits. There's so much constantly happening and it really feels like you're on an adventure. The game never interrupts your gameplay for very long and I dug that. This game is also pretty. A little disappointed that the lighting, shadows, and flora are a bit downgraded in the S version, but it still has so much extra content its the version to play imo and I still had a great time. Its minor and the game is still rather pretty imo.
Baroque
This game is weird. I played the Wii version, which is a port of a remake of the original PS1 version. It has some changes that I think were a bit unfortunate to it atmospherically (it used to be darker visually and less anime), but its still got a lot of atmosphere and strangeness to it.
In Baroque, you wake up in this strange otherworldly place where you're told by an angel to go to the bottom of a great tower that lies across the desert. Once you're in the tower, the game plays like a sort of roguelike, where you move through the very strange layout of the interior of the tower to find the portal to a lower floor, picking up equipment as you go and fighting monsters. If you die, you respawn at the outside of the tower and have to start over, with you even sent back to level 1 and losing some of your stuff. Its rather brutal, though the game is fairly similar to Mystery Dungeon conceptually. I haven't gotten too far yet but the actual combat function is basically a two button attack system and kinda clunky/slow. Its not great but the game lives on its weirdness and atmosphere.
TL;DR:
I love JRPGs. (heres some games I've been playing I like). Do y'all like JRPGs? What JRPGs have you been playing?
Give me a moment to talk about some games I've been playing.
Resonance of Fate HD
First up is this remaster of this ps3 game by Tri-Ace (most known for Star Ocean). Resonance of Fate is such a bizarre thing to experience. Its extremely gray, something I've never actually seen to be a problem in JRPGs before. And yet, the game is weirdly gorgeous and uses the cobblestone road, stone bricked, gear infested world to its aesthetic. Its really pretty. Beyond that, the game's plot is bizarrely cryptic. See, the game is structured to have one main quest and 2 or 3 sidequests each chapter, with chapters ending once you've completed the main quest and returned home. Typically you get a cryptic cutscene without much context at the beginning and end of each chapter, and you sorta have to piece together the plot. The game's setting is a gigantic tower that no one knows how it came to be and is slowly falling apart. People have separated parts of the tower by class with the higher up in the tower you are, the richer or more political power you have. And yet, the tower is so disconnected that people only find out news through hearsay. Its a rather poor state of affairs, and you and two other gunman do odd jobs for these aristocrats. Combat is super confusing at first and you HAVE to play the optional tutorial to know how to play, but once you get the hang of it its a really stylish 3rd-person strategy game with time that moves when you do. Also hot take but I think JRPGs peaked with graphics like this. (disregarding the color)
Octopath Traveler is also a really pretty game, but for very different reasons. It blends 3D environments and structures with 2D pixelart characters, yet it makes this work and blend really well by making the textures on 3D objects pixelart. Though the game does have a very strong depth of field blurring effect on the edges of the screen at all times. I personally found that annoying, but was thankfully able to turn that off with some fiddling in the .ini file of the PC version.
Anyways, I'm amazed at how much content is in this game. I've played several hours and I still haven't done chapter 2 for any characters yet. Each character has their own story and its taken a good deal of time to go through each character's chapter 1. Its kinda cool that there's so many different actually interesting stories to tell. I'm most interested in the dancer Primrose's tale.
Combat has been admittedly rather simple and dungeons are usually not very complex or long, but its serviceable enough and scratches that itch for a JRPG with a fairly normal combat system.
Also, I'm a sucker for any game with overworld abilities. Its so cool being able to do things like steal from random npcs throughout town or coerce them into following you.
I never played a Dragon Quest game before the demo for this released on Steam (excluding a very brief bit of VIII, but I didn't play for very long at all), so I was really surprised to find that this game is fantastic and that I've been missing out! I haven't played a game with this strong a sense of adventure in forever. Like first thing you're doing is doing a little cultural thing for your town, and then you're on a quest to see the king only for the king to betray you, and then you're on the run as a fugitive with a thief monk type character which is a really unique blend of character traits. There's so much constantly happening and it really feels like you're on an adventure. The game never interrupts your gameplay for very long and I dug that. This game is also pretty. A little disappointed that the lighting, shadows, and flora are a bit downgraded in the S version, but it still has so much extra content its the version to play imo and I still had a great time. Its minor and the game is still rather pretty imo.
Baroque
This game is weird. I played the Wii version, which is a port of a remake of the original PS1 version. It has some changes that I think were a bit unfortunate to it atmospherically (it used to be darker visually and less anime), but its still got a lot of atmosphere and strangeness to it.
In Baroque, you wake up in this strange otherworldly place where you're told by an angel to go to the bottom of a great tower that lies across the desert. Once you're in the tower, the game plays like a sort of roguelike, where you move through the very strange layout of the interior of the tower to find the portal to a lower floor, picking up equipment as you go and fighting monsters. If you die, you respawn at the outside of the tower and have to start over, with you even sent back to level 1 and losing some of your stuff. Its rather brutal, though the game is fairly similar to Mystery Dungeon conceptually. I haven't gotten too far yet but the actual combat function is basically a two button attack system and kinda clunky/slow. Its not great but the game lives on its weirdness and atmosphere.
TL;DR:
I love JRPGs. (heres some games I've been playing I like). Do y'all like JRPGs? What JRPGs have you been playing?
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