What Games ya Playin' 2012 - Suplex a Train Edition

[superaielman]

Criticism is one thing. Constant cheap shots and snide comments just start stupid arguments like this.  You don't have to like FF, but at least have enough personal respect for people to not constantly pick fights.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'm definitely with Meeple and Super on this one. I don't want Rob to leave and I certainly don't expect him to change his opinion. But constant one-liners that do nothing but start fights whenever other people are discussing the game are lame. We get it, you don't like the game. Meeple doesn't like Persona 4, Super doesn't like MMXCM, I don't like Lufia 2, Ciato doesn't like Breath of Fire 2, etc. You know what? The difference is that all of us are adults and don't launch into tirades which are repetitive at best and include personal attacks on the game's fans at worst whenever the game is mentioned. And everyone is happier for it.

Chrono Cross is disliked by a far higher percentage of the DL than FF13 is, but gets a tiny fraction of posts dedicated to how much it sucks and its fans suck.

[Meeplelard]

Chrono Cross is disliked by a far higher percentage of the DL than FF13 is, but gets a tiny fraction of posts dedicated to how much it sucks and its fans suck.

Just gonna echo this as to why the Chrono Cross parallel fails.

[Grefter]

So the last five pages has had 4 posts from Rob even related to FF13 tangentially. 2 of them were pages ago bashing on bad lines and generic complaints of time travel plot.  In the intervening time he has had an actual conversation with people about games with the discussion of KH actually rooted in him bashing on it. 

Let me repeat the way this conversation went.

Fenrir mentions that FF13 feels pretty easy, there is a bit of discussion between some of us about the relative definition of easy in an RPG.  Games NOT FF13 get mentioned by Fenrir as descriptions of things that people need to be actually "good" at RPGs at to autopilot through and FF13 just gives you autopilot.  Then Rob says "A good player" being anyone who can read a text document, of course."  WHICH IS APPLYING TO EVERYTHING ESPECIALLY THE NOT FF13 GAMES IN THIS DISCUSSION.  Then Super jumps down his throat about bashing mindlessly on FF13.  I sit here and go !?!?!??!?!?! while you guys form a fucking lynch mob because the guy that is known for speaking his mind, especially when he isn't "supposed" to, does that exact thing.

Rob comments very specifically (because you know, it is a short one sentence post) on a larger thing that he sees as a problem in RPGs and you guys arc up on him for shit he was talking about 5 fucking pages ago which in the intervening time he has in fact talked with people constructively about games you guys haven't played (but Fen has!) Noting that Fenrir is one of the people Rob is in a dialogue with in this thread right now.

Would you rather every time someone posts something about it he posts a giant treatise on that part of the game and why it specifically sucked?  Because that is what it felt like I was doing and that was no fucking fun for anyone other than spectators.

And yeah so its cool with Chrono Cross because no one likes it. I am going to bold this because this is pretty fucking pertinent and I am baffled that I need to point this out. There is a tiny fraction of posts about it because no one is playing it right now and this is the what are you playing topic so no one is having discussions about how it feels to play and its high and low points.  Discussion happening outside of a contextless void?  What the fuck is up with that?  This thread can be something other than people blogging about what they are playing.  Not all of it is going to be positive discussion.  You know what the counter side of this looks without Rob or I coming in to snipe at it?  It looks like someone playing a game goes "Oh this part isn't so great" and then a sea of people going NOOOOO GAME IS GOOD Y U HATE?

Which is a whole other kind of Internet we don't want to be.  I agree it is great that the DL does trend at a slightly more analytical indepth post on average than say Gamefaqs.  That doesn't dismiss the fact that sometimes "FUCK THIS SHIT AND FUCK EVERYONE WHO WENT INTO MAKING THE FUCKING" is in fact part of the discourse and in fact actually has its place as a catalyst for discussion .

If you want the dialogue to reach a different point from "FUCK THIS SHIT AND FUCK EVERYONE WHO WENT INTO MAKING THE FUCKING" then instead of grabbing forks and pitchtorches maybe you could you know, bring the level of discourse up to where you want it to be?  That is the actual good part of the DL.  Not that we hold a high standard all the time, but if you want to there is that level of discourse to be had.

So RPGs these days are still fundamentally super FAQ friendly.  How would you go about fixing that Rob?  Would you like to see a more Action oriented direction for RPGs?  Maybe some more randomised content?  What is a design direction you would like to see?

[Tide]

As someone who speedruns, I can tell you that just remembering the text, formulas and numbers doesn't really do anything for me >_>. It makes playing the game a whole lot easier sure, but I find much greater fun in applying all that stuff in the planning and then the execution. So yes, you can be "out of practice" due to execution elements or planning a challenge run and completely screwing up something beforehand. More importantly, too often there are random elements you can't plan around and then its a test of how good you are at thinking on the spot and what your intuition about a certain situation may be (see speedrun fight with Kraken. Fun times). Playing well often means making those split second decisions that determine the efficiency and ease of how battles end, which if you don't play the game for a while, is very easy to screw up.

[Grefter]

But that only applies in the context of "good" being fast, in a turn based system that doesn't necessarily apply (although it is an impressive skillset!).  As someone who has watched people who are "good" at a game by virtue of having an encyclopedic knowledge of a game in a turn based system take a long time to take a turn mathing out the most effective thing to do, I consider that pretty compelling and interesting gameplay myself, but it isn't for everyone.  That doesn't mean it is an avenue I will offhandedly dismiss as worthless and not worth investigating though either.

[Luther Lansfeld]

This particular issue has made this topic less fun for me to partake in for a long time; as Super said it's a matter of respecting the people you interact with, not just some opinion on a silly game. I think that ignoring/ostracizing people who act like jerks is generally the best course of action, but it can be difficult to avoid the negativity if you want to read the topic fairly often.

As for the other side discussion, RPGs have always been a genre where knowledge is power. There are plenty of genres where reflexes, memorization, etc are the best ways to be good at the game. If you want to read a text file and make the game easier, then obviously that's fine, but don't be surprised when the game is easy. It depends on what you're looking for. If you want something that challenges other things then pure RPGs probably aren't for you, but some of us enjoy piecing together that knowledge without a FAQ. :p

[Fenrir]

I kind of like FF13 and don't really mind this vitriol. I like the discussion.

Actually I've found that "Read FAQ" -> "Congrats you're a super player" applies to WRPGs far more than JRPGs because WRPGs tend to be filled with countless options you may not want to try, or be able to try (one or two of them being totally broken)
JRPGs have way more limited options and give you access to everything eventually. There's a good chance you might try everything; this forces most JRPGs companies to put some kind of better balance in there.



Clear Tranquill: Wow, Disney had Doom?
I really can't see how you can be walled by him and not by eidolons before, but I've always been playing really aggressively.
It looks like the game allows you to do amazing stuff (like in the second video), but it's too impenetrable in a lot of ways, so I don't see myself caring that much about mastering it. There's too much chaos on screen; when taking damage it's always hard to tell who's harmed who (and how), so something like using a sentinel effectively at the right time sounds like a massive headache to me.

The game does manage to be fun and challenging in a casual way.

My six default paradigms are:
(Fang/Vanille/Sazh)
Com/Rav/Syn: Every battle begins with this one, Hastehastehaste + damage
Sab/Sab/Com: Let's put 6 status effects on one boss in 10 seconds, guys
Com/Med/Rav: Healing
Sen/Med/Com: Healing except things are getting serious
Sen/Med/Syn: Healing except things are really getting serious, we don't even care about the combo jauge anymore
Com/Rav/Rav: The standard
They've all been fairly useful to me, though I should probably ditch a healing one.


I'm in Chapter 11, did  about 15 missions, got stuck on the second sahagin one and moved on to the main plot, and got Vanille's eidolon (FINALLY)
The plains were a lot of fun, but what's with the map? Both the mini map and the menu map rotate with the player, and there are no cardinal directions anywhere. There's no way to fix this. I was disoriented all the time and had to go to the menu map about 3x more than I should have. TERRIBLE design in such a polished game. (Obviously irrelevent up until Chapter 11)

By the way, every environment is drop dead gorgeous, and every monster looks like a mess. There is no normal plain enemy to be found anywhere (look at what they've done to goblins), everything is overly stylized, making the game sometimes feel very artificial and lifeless. What a weird game.

[AndrewRogue]

The thing is, under some game structures, FAQ isn't going to help that much. The trick is making sure the game has active decision making. SRPGs are easiest at this because of the various facets you need to manage, but I tend to think of it like board games. You need to make it so that decision making is dynamic and that you have to take risks at points.

Fenrir: Eh... kind of depends. It sort of falls back to my decision making statement earlier (re: SRPGs). wRPGs have a tendency to be a little more sensitive about execution/positioning/how you enter a fight. FAQs do tend to make them a little more breakable due to more/stronger options, but I guess it comes down to how much FAQing we're talking about.

[Captain K.]

I liked Chrono Cross, therefore all of you are assbags.

=========================

Conquest:  I have a fully evolved Hideyoshi.  Too bad he's banned in Ubers.

Perfect World:  I made some of the strongest axes in the game.  At least until next week when the next strongest weapon in the game is released.

[hinode]

New Super Mario Bros 2: Completed World 1 in its entirety, with all the Star Coins obtained and the warp cannon located. Now I've got both World 2 and the Mushroom world unlocked... probably going to finish W2 first.

The level design is quite good so far, although kinda derivative of the original NSMB; I managed to find the secret exit in W1 Fortress purely on the basis that it reminded me of how to reach NSMB W1 Fortress' secret exit. Kinda disappointed they went back to only having 1 power-up stored on the touchscreen again, unlike NSMB Wii which copied SMB3's item inventory. That made the mushroom houses actually useful, whereas here they're basically just extra hard save points until you (presumably) unlock the save anytime function by beating the game. This also means no Hammer Bros-callback monster stages for items sadly.

Strangely they decided to bring back the Raccoon Leaf in the same game where they dumped so many of NSMB Wii's design cues, but I'll take it. The nostalgia power when I first got one was strong (whee flying~ ^_^). The nostalgia of having my fingers hurt from mashing B too much to fly was not so good, on the other hand, although I guess it serves as a natural disincentive to play for too long an extended period of time.

I'll reserve full judgment until I complete the game, but for now I'm not impressed by this whole "collect a million coins" theme that Nintendo is pushing as the theme of this game, sorta like how multiplayer was the theme of NSMB Wii. The latter worked out so way better in practice than on paper due to the sheer variety of ways in which you can screw up your fellow players, and how you can shift from cooperating to backstabbing in a blink of an eye, all in ways that were completely new to Mario gameplay while still fitting in with 2D Mario mechanics completely. Coin collection, by contrast, is just giving you another incentive to do something that you were going to do anyways, just with a whole bunch more ways to get large quantities of coins added in, usually without a whole lot of difficulty. It's like an RPG explicitly setting you out a goal to grind for a whole bunch of exp, then handing you a bunch of ways to grind more effectively; not exactly a clever twist on established gameplay premises.

Moreover, the massively inflationary aspect of all these new coins has real side-effects on the core platforming gameplay. One-ups are massively downgraded in value since you get so many lives just from coins (I have 61 already, at the end of World 1!), so there's much less motivation to perform any sort of risky platforming manuevers to grab a green mushroom. The overwhelming quantity of coins makes me care much less about any individual coin in a stage as well; with (seemingly) a couple hundred coins in every stage, I can't be bothered to grab every single one of them in any given point since there I'll just run into a buttload more in the next screen, and I can replay an easy stage as many times as I want to hit that one million mark, which I hear isn't even all that rewarding. Meanwhile, I do care about getting all the Star Coins since they are finite and permanently collected, so they provide an actual incentive to explore every stage thoroughly and not just farm something easy like 1-1; luckily, the level designers have been doing reasonably interesting things with Star Coin locations, considering it was just World 1.

[Magic Fanatic]

Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One - So I played a lot of this game over the weekend.  Started a (mostly) new game and played it to the end - took about...  12ish hours to do on Normal with two people?  It was a fun run, at least.

Gameplay - It's something of a halfway explorable stage-shooter and can go up to 4 Players at the same time, but if you're playing solo, you're given an AI companion to help with some of the co-op gimmicks and puzzles, like the Vac-U Mortar Toss and things like that.  Sadly, with the exception of one weapon each, the characters are mostly carbon copies of each other.

Speaking of co-op gimmicks, this game has a good one!  If you and an ally are using the same weapon and hitting the same enemy, not only do you get fire rate bonuses, but also damage bonuses on top of that.  It works pretty well, in practice.

Of course, the most important thing about a Ratchet & Clank game is the weapons.  Quite a few of them are pretty standard (pistol-like, grenade launcher-like, rocket launcher-like) and have an expected performance, but then you get to stuff like the Arc Lasher (electric whip that you can hold in place and it stuns enemies), the Critterstrike (weapon that turns enemies into critters, mostly pigs.  Works on everything that isn't a boss - yes, even the mini-bosses with those big life bars can be transformed.  It ignores lifebars), and the Frost Cannon (works on the same principle as the Critterstrike, but it makes everything OHKO-bait instead, kinda like Freeze status in SO3).

...I'm not sure what I can talk about to try to hype this game.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

I think Chrono Cross is a great game, if a poor sequel. If it's not a top five RPG for its generation, it isn't only because its generation was ridiculously rich in RPGs - I don't think Chrono Trigger is as good, but it has less competition so it easily hits top five.

There's not really much to say about it that hasn't been said, though.

Of course, the same could be said of Final Fantasy 13, but meh. I agree with about half of the ritualistic denunciation of it, find even the parts I agree with tedious to read repeatedly, and don't think it negatively impacts the thread to have them repeated. Better than most anywhere else, where such ritualistic denunciations await any JRPG by dint of their being JRPGs.

Terraria

Finally got people to play this with me. It remains fun and I remain bad at it. Our world is almost entirely Hallowed so we may abandon it for less blue-green pastures before giving the hardmode bosses another shot.

Civilization IV: All of the Subtitles

Balance tweaks good, build lists good, AI... still not so good. In my current game I have a score of 450 and the best of the AIs I've met is sitting on 150. :\

League of Legends

Had, if not my best game, my most interesting one. I was solo top Nunu, we had a Kog'maw and Lux on the bottom, Alistar mid and Malphite jungling (badly). Ashe and Master Yi top, Diana mid, Kayle and Miss Fortune bottom.

We fell behind by a kill and a tower. The kill was Lux's fault, the tower, mine and Malphite's - this was my first time solo top in PVP and I overextended, running out of MP and HP, while Malphite didn't seem to get that at some point the jungler needs to actually help in lanes, say, by ganking low health enemies. I suspect it was a case of him being new to jungling, not new in general, because later in the team fight phase he was quite good. I got an early Dragon, my team got an early Baron (but at the cost of a teamfight we got the worse of), we scored an Ace - but we were still trailing in kills and towers. It remained close, never more than two kills down, but at one point the enemy had super minions in all three lanes and our Lux player proposed a surrender.

We didn't take it.

Instead we took a second Ace while the enemy had the Baron buff, killed all the super minions, and, behind great play from our Kog'Maw, turned the tables. Kog'Maw ended up with 37 kills and more damage (980,000) than the rest of our team combined, almost as much as the entire enemy team. I ended up with one more death than kill, but had a lot of assists for my troubles.

[Crystalgate]

YS Origin: Beat Yunica's story. The gameplay was like Ark of Napishtim, but better. Generally, enemies and bosses are better designed. The controls makes it easier to attack ground bound enemies, but it's far harder to hit aerial ones.

Unfortunately, YS Origins stick to the formula of making levels matter way to much. I've encountered a late game boss, toke about 18 points of damage from an attack and eventually lost. Then I realized I'm only about 200 exp from a level up, re-fought the boss with one more level and now I'm only taking 13 or so points of damage. Also, as I progressed trough the game, bosses didn't seem to do more damage than before, instead they became harder to avoid. In other words, the game counters the player getting more and more HP by making bosses hit you more often instead of making them deal more damage. This meant that getting from level 45 to 46 late game had as much impact as getting from level 13 to level 14 did early game.

To be fair, I expect levels to have a huge impact in YS games. However, I'm not so found of the game relying on me getting hit a lot. I prefer systems where you can survive less hits, but in return it's easier to avoid damage. I found the first two bosses the most fun to fight for that reason.

That said, bosses are surprisingly well designed when it came to concept. Most of them did a good job to give me a lot to think off and there was plenty of strategy involved, not just reflexes. Most cannon fodder enemies leaves you with plenty to learn and that without breaking from a fast and furious hack and slash style.

I ended up using wind magic the most. Lightning seemed to situational and fire broke away from Yunica's style. Also, I found the greatsword inferior to the axe. The Phoenix is invaluable against some bosses though.

I also loved the blessings. It's like the game saying "here's all the cool stuff you will get!"

The story is bad. I don't expect a good story from an YS game, but this game toke a lot of potential and completely wasted them. It takes place during the fall of YS, but you don't get to even see YS. There are some good mysteries going on in the tower though, but they usually turn into disappointment as well.

Yunica looked promising at first, but the poor writing eventually got her. Her final confrontation with twin bandanna man ended up being a low point of the game despite the game setting it up as the opposite.

Fortunately, you can ignore the story for 95% of the game and just go with the fun gameplay.

I started playing as Hugo a bit, but I've decided to take a break from YS Origin and resume later.

[superaielman]

I think Chrono Cross is a great game, if a poor sequel. If it's not a top five RPG for its generation, it isn't only because its generation was ridiculously rich in RPGs - I don't think Chrono Trigger is as good, but it has less competition so it easily hits top five.

I find myself thinking the opposite of the PSX generation. It's aged very poorly on the whole. There are a lot of mechanical limitations (load times, tons of disks, lots of silly minigames, unskippable animations) that were unique to that generation.  There was improvements on story and characters in the PSX era, but we didn't get actual coherent translations until the PS2 era.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

It invests too much effort into trying to make you feel bad about what happened in Chrono Trigger.  Like spontaneously all humans are super-racist and science is bad so maybe you should have let the world die, huh?  It's like the director realized he'd never be able to make anything that good but he was supposed to do a sequel to CT anyway, so he decided to try and frame up everything that happened totally differently.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

I find myself thinking the opposite of the PSX generation. It's aged very poorly on the whole. There are a lot of mechanical limitations (load times, tons of disks, lots of silly minigames, unskippable animations) that were unique to that generation.  There was improvements on story and characters in the PSX era, but we didn't get actual coherent translations until the PS2 era.

Huh. Taking the two generations combined, I'm not sure I'd put even one PS2 RPG in a top 10, and certain I wouldn't in my top 5. I'm struggling to think of a PS2 game that would knock off Xenogears, Brigandine, Wild ARMs 2, Suikoden 2, Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, Valkyrie Profile or, yeah, Chrono Cross. Not coming up with anything.

What do you consider standout from the PS2 era? For me there's really only five PS2 RPGs that I consider really good: Wild ARMs 3 and 5, Final Fantasy 10 and 12 and Dragon Quest 8. Those five at least compete with the better PS1 games. Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 were pretty good, same with Legaia 2 and Suikoden 3. Suikoden 5, Star Ocean 3, Valkyrie Profile 2 and Stella Deus were all right, I guess. I'm probably forgetting something, but then, that means I found it forgettable.

Convenience boosts like skippable animations and cut scenes, single discs and shorter load times are nice, but I can't say they factor into my overall estimation of a game. Translation is the one area I agree with you about the jump from PS1 to PS2. None of that makes up for "the vision thing," which I just don't see in PS2 RPGs.

Wild ARMs was fantasy in the wild west with ancient space magic, Suikoden was gritty down-to-earth fantasy before George Martin made it the in thing, Final Fantasy 7 was dieselpunk dystopia, Legend of Dragoon was just bizarre (in an awesome way, for all its flaws), Xenogears was space fantasy done fascinating, Valkyrie Profile was structurally unique, Chrono Cross was crazily ambitious and vivid. Almost every game had a unique setting or at least a very unusual take on its setting. The stories were big and complicated and weird, and given room to spool out, without shitty voice acting to spoil them, or good but expensive voice acting to force them to be shortened.

With the exception of Final Fantasy 10 and 12, the PS2 RPGs feel ossified in comparison. When they did stretch outside the fantasy box they seemed to feel they had to justify it by being at least a quarter parody (Shadow Hearts) or all parody (and also shitty) (Disgaea).

Final Fantasy 12 should surpass this (gorgeous, deep, creative setting and some clever bits of storytelling), but doesn't because it seems embarrassed about being a story, or perhaps over budget. The balance of gameplay to story skews way too hard toward the former; if it had two or three times the cut scenes to tell its story I'd consider it far better.

I'll admit I don't have any logical reason to rank Final Fantasy 10 below the PS1 RPGs, though. It does almost all the same things and does them very well. Plenty of story (and better done story than a lot of its predecessors), unique setting, good pacing, excellent gameplay.

It invests too much effort into trying to make you feel bad about what happened in Chrono Trigger.  Like spontaneously all humans are super-racist and science is bad so maybe you should have let the world die, huh?  It's like the director realized he'd never be able to make anything that good but he was supposed to do a sequel to CT anyway, so he decided to try and frame up everything that happened totally differently.

Poor sequel? Absolutely.

But if the director thought he could never do anything as good as Chrono Trigger, I disagree with him. I think Chrono Cross is the better game of the two by a wide mrgin, so it being a shitty sequel to CT matters less to me. CC gets by on an ambitious story concept, a cool setting, gorgeous graphics (it still looks good today, which is absurd for a PS1 game), arguably the best music of any game, and arguably the best gameplay of any non-tactics RPG. The execution of the story was weak, and the large cast was an excuse to develop few to none of them, so it's hardly flawless. I just think it did a lot right, and what it did right it did better than almost anything else.

But then, I don't rate Chrono Trigger all that highly. It's the second-best SNES RPG by dint of there being one amazing, surpassingly good SNES RPG... and a bunch of fair to middling ones. CT is a good game, along with Lufia 2, and good is good enough for second place.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I personally thought most series improved in the PS2, with the exception of Valkyrie Profile and Breath of Fire. Wild Arms 3-5 felt much stronger games than 1-2 (neither of which I much liked); Star Ocean 3 was a far better product than Star Ocean 2 (actually had some story worth caring about + a battle system which rewarded something besides button mashing); Grandia 2-3 are both significantly better than the too-easy, bad-port Grandia 1; Final Fantasy 10 blows away its predecessors; two great Suikodens are better than one (and I'll take Suiko3 over 2 myself). I haven't played Legaia 1 but it sounds like that series continues this trend. Then you have Shadow Hearts 2-3, Xenosaga 2, Dragon Quest 8, Mega Man X Command Mission, the Mana Khemia games, etc. It probably doesn't help that I thought both Chrono Cross and Vagrant Story were bad games, I suppose.

Of course I'm pretty gameplay focused, especially compared to you so this colours my opinions. I think for plot originality the fight is much better, although even then my favourite pure story game is probably Suikoden 5 (but the PSX has a few excellent contenders certainly, such as Xenogears and Suikoden 2). For gameplay not so much, most series improved pretty drastically even before bringing up the things Super mentions which I agree with (animation times, load times, and translation woes in particular). It's been almost a decade since I got my PS2 and it's still sitting out prominently in my living room, and even discarding non-RPGs I've been through several replays this year (FFX, Shadow Hearts 2, Grandia 3, Shadow Hearts 3), while the only PSX games I have bothered to play at all recently are FFT and Saga Frontier (the latter being a quirky game I didn't actually play until a couple years ago anyway).

So yeah, PS2's far and away my favourite RPG system, though the PSX at least makes a respectable second despite its quirks.

[Yoshiken]

Going on the discussion.. I'd say the PS2's better for me, but only marginally. I prefer PS1 mainstream (FF7-9 and BoF4 being the most notable examples) but I prefer the new series that have come up on the PS2 (Shadow Hearts, Persona 3/4, and MegaTen in general). That said, there's a lot of PS1 cult classics I've not played (VP being the one that comes to mind) so might be slightly flawed judgement.

FE10: Near the end of Part 1! Still doing the low-level run, which made the swamp stage kinda awkward - nobody was tanky enough to hold off the initial rush from the north except for Sothe, so I had to have almost everyone else head south, but then Sothe couldn't handle the attack, so I had to have Ilyana/Micaiah/Aran go north, with Aran only there to stop the mages getting hit. Eventually got Meg/Edward a few late kills and gave Rafiel a stupid amount of experience. Meg/Fiona are bloody awkward to use still, although Meg has apparently been MVP once. >_>; (That may have been because I decided to farm experience for a short while, though.)
Thankful to be near the end of this section, though. It becomes a lot easier to get things like Bonus Exp and good skills once I'm out of Part 1.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

When it comes to RPGs, it's worth noting that I'm not judging them so much on plot as on what I called vision. I much prefer a gorgeous mess to competently executed extruded fantasy product. Setting is incredibly important to me in JRPGs because it's the one area where, at their best, I consider them better than any other fantasy media in the world. Written fantasy sometimes goes in that direction, but rarely (and most of what has, has done so in the last ten years after the PS1 JRPGs got there), and no other visual fantasy has the combination of vision and budget to). A lot of what are widely considered the "better" PS2 JRPGs don't have secondary world settings - I'm thinking here of MegaTen and Shadow Hearts - and being "secret history" games rather than out-and-out secondary world fantasy easily docks them a point from me.

With that said I can see the case for Wild ARMs 3-5, because 3 and 5 are really damn good and I know the DL rates 4 highly as well. (Regardless of all its other plusses and minuses relative to other Wild ARMs games, I couldn't get past the replacement of puzzles with twitch challenges.) I preferred Grandia 1 to 2 (haven't played 3), but agree on Legaia. And on Final Fantasy for that matter. Tactics aside, the PS1 FF games don't rate all that highly for me. Suikoden 3 over 2, well, I don't agree, but from a gameplay focus it makes sense. Suikoden 2 is definitely held back by its gameplay, whereas Suikoden 3 is the only entry in the series where I'd call that a plus for it.

But Suikoden 5, really? I don't... understand how someone with a gameplay focus could even play it. It's one of the few JRPGs where the gameplay was so bad that I felt it actually took away from my enjoyment. I didn't feel it carried through on the promise of its story, either.

Besides, Suikoden 4 was on the PS2. That has to count as at least -2 points on a 1-10 scale for the system as a whole. ;)

[superaielman]

Convenience boosts like skippable animations and cut scenes, single discs and shorter load times are nice, but I can't say they factor into my overall estimation of a game. Translation is the one area I agree with you about the jump from PS1 to PS2. None of that makes up for "the vision thing," which I just don't see in PS2 RPGs.

This I disagree with. I wouldn't touch a lot of PSX RPG's (Including FF7, which I adore) nowadays due to those problems.The vision part... sure, I'll agree. Square in particular made a lot of unique games for the era, and other developers did as well.  Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Saga Frontier, Parasite Eve, Final Fantasy 7, Brigandine,  Parasite Eve, and even Valkyire Profile (ugh) were unique games that developed interesting settings. The PSX era was breaking away from the DQ1/FF1 style of gameplay and story and doing something different. I just don't think the writing was there. Even when the writing was there, the translations were so awful that it actively hurt the games. A lot of those really interesting games were unfinished.

Have you read the Esgares script for GE, by the way? *whips* go to Forsena and read it if not.

FFT/SO2/Brig/OB/Saga/Suiko2/FF7 vs PB/FM4/FM5/Suiko3/Pers4/TotA/SN

Yeah, I'm very evenly split.  I will say, I played a lot of those PSX titles later for the RPGP (Xenogears, VP, VS) and they held up well enough. Though granted I hated VP anyway but. It's held up.


Edit: We don't talk about Suikoden 4.

[Fenrir]

PSX RPGs definitely had scope. They are the huge games you wanted as a kid. Gameplay suffered too often, because it wasn't that important. Xenosaga and Skyrim are modern PSX RPGs.
PS2 RPGs just try to be good at what they do, have a tight focus and more streamlined gameplay. The worlds feel more limited, with fewer crazy secrets lurking.
Both can be equally innovative.
PSX RPGs = All you can eat restaurant, PS2 RPGs = Sushi restaurant
(PS2 wins)


Final Fantasy 5 Ancient Cave:
It's real.

Pros:
- Final Fantasy 5 Ancient Cave
- Treasure chests everywhere
- Bigger AP gains from monsters
- There's a 10 minutes countdown until the game stops, you get 5 minutes everytime you go down a floor. A sensible solution to prevent the player from grinding.
- You need to throw your FF5 habits out of the window.

Cons:
- The "ancient cave" part isn't really relevent, it's just a roguelike FF5. You don't get blue chests or anything.
- Translation patch is still lackluster
- The killer: Randoms are too easy, bosses are too hard.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I tried to replay Xenogears on an emulator recently and literally couldn't force myself through it.  Janky controls, masked load screens everywhere, no scene skip, translation occasionally bordering on nonsense. But Parasite Eve aged even more poorly than XG did. I don't know if it was hardware limitations or what, but the text speed and the "character model animates, then text scrolls, then next character does something" makes every scene take twice as long as it should. It's incredibly frustrating particularly when you can't change text speed.

It also doesn't help that PSX-era CG and polygonal models looks comically bad now, while 2D sprites held up comparatively well. It doesnt really do XG any favors to have these sprites that look great at a distance zoomed way in on because the polygon engine lets you do it, so they look like ass and really tear me out of the scene.

[Scar]

If I had to pick between PS1 RPGs and PS2 RPGs I would probably choose....

Oh boy this is a tough one.

SNES!

>_>

No really, I find myself enjoying the PS2 games a tad more.

It's crazy because at first I wrote I liked the PS1 games more, easily...and then I looked at my collection and sifted through them.

I mean, I am glad that I don't have to CHOOSE ONLY ONE RPG console, because that would really take away from numerous classics in my collection.

But even in the PS1 days and more recently, the loading times never bothered me that much. I mean, I did use to have to sit my PS1 on its side just to play through FF7, but that gave the system some charm!

[Meeplelard]

Add me to list of people who prefer PS2 as an era to PS1.  Ok, PS1 may have had more in terms of originality, but as far as I'm concerned, execution > concept.

Awesome ideas can be made painful if its executed poorly.  Flipside, seemingly awful ideas can be made good with strong execution.  This isn't just Video games, but really any media.


Also, Tactics Ogre being a PS1 RPG isn't fair.  It was an SNES RPG originally that never made it to the states; the PS1 version is just a port that we did get.  Kind of cheating truth be told.  Branching from that, Tactics Ogre also has some of the worst gameplay in an SRPG I've ever seen (there's worse, but its best we not mention the worse ones); this doesn't include the PSP remake which is...well...a remake.


Counting in those Non-remake Ports leads to a lot of hole filled situations.  Alter Code F, for example, is a legitimate full remake of a game, to the point where its essentially a whole new game that has the same characters and story, but when its basically a transferred port? Yeah.