as the person who loves random battles and plays jrpgs four times each and will fight trash for fun even if its my thousandth time, i really enjoy people being critical of the most boring battle system in jrpgs. ffvis actual battle system sucks, the gimmicks of characters within the menus tries its best and carries the battle system sometimes, but GOD ITS BORING AND OBTUSE
the big fault in that game is sabins moves not being told to you until AFTER you do the first one. no where in the battle system up to that point do you like, input anything beyond menu selection, AND ITS IN THE FIRST COUPLE HOURS OF THE GAME! yes I know its in the manual but i rented i cant afford 80 dollar final fantasy vi!! at least in a boy and his blob i knew i had to experiment with beans. ffvi has no direction
it has memorable setpieces and there is obviously cultural value because it wont leave our memories. but yeah. rebalance hacks forever
on my last playthrough of ff7, i found myself wishing that every minigame was split into its own entire fleshed out game, including battle square. like, the battles in that game are really fun, but outside of battle square, theyâre all too easy and simple for that to ever come through (except the ruby/emerald weapon fights, but those have a different problem that theyâre dumb gimmick battles where you die if you donât do exactly the thing the game wants you to do)
i find all of this discussion kind of weird because FF6 is one of the few JRPGS iâve played that i did enjoy. iâm not really a JRPG person but i played it like 10+ years after it came out for the first time and enjoyed it. i dunno. has some cool music and setpieces. it felt unpredictable and i really liked how it jumped from story to story. i certainly liked it a hell of a lot better than FF8 which i also played around the same time and lost interest in because the story was dumb and i got tired of grinding. i never took JRPG combat very seriously other than as a vessel for getting to the next point in the story unless itâs a tactics game though.
This is pretty much me as well. FFVIII was my first JRPG. On PC! Then I got a Playstation and got about 80% of the way through FFVII. Then, in like 2002, I got my first SNES and played through FFVI and loved it way more than the other two, felt more human and involving and unabashedly romantic but also goofy and grim. So nostalgia + 90s prestige pedigree was not a factor for me.
I like this discussion though and realising JRPGs that are sloppy sandboxes full of broken toys might appeal to me more than finely-tuned clockwork ones because that does feel like work to me and not a kind of work I want to do for 20+ hours.
Just want to say that only getting into Final Fantasy because my subscription to Nintendo Power came with the complete playerâs guide to Final Fantasy VI (and because I subsequently got the guide to each following game when I bought them) means that I am uniquely unqualified to evaluate how challenge and learning in RPGs has ever worked.
I always react to rpg battles with a slight pang of annoyance, but thereâs also some curiosity and satisfaction for problem solving mixed in.
The annoyance comes from the fact that theyâre unavoidable, repetitive, and often fattened with wait times. But thereâs an interesting nesting doll scheme of problem solving in these games. Thereâs the immediate problem of surviving battle, the midterm problem of making it to a destination, and the long term problem of growing a character that can defeat the final boss. The most efficient solution for ending a battle could leave me resourceless before I get to the bottom of a dungeon. Playing conservatively can suck up real time and might mean that I am failing to notice something about the systems at play.
FFVI is cool in my book because of all the fun ways you can approach the long term goal of growing your characters. I think thatâs the real core of what I like out of JRPGs, something shared by Nocturne and Vagrant Story. Iâm currently playing Okage and part of the readon Iâm not feeling the battle system is that I have no choices on how the characters develop. I just win battles and numbers go up.
Final Fantasy VI is the only one of the main series games I have played and I liked it well enough. I certainly was way more into the silly set pieces and the story more than anything, but the battle system always seemed serviceable to me. I will admit Iâve played fewer jrpgs than many here on the forum so my judgment isnât very nuanced.
Its mechanics may not have aged that well, but Iâd argue FF6 was a success in the USA in 1993 due to its mechanics as much as its other elements. Most JRPGs for sale at the time were tediously simple, and FF6âs profusion of systems to try, most of which turned out to work well enough to beat bosses even if I played sloppily, I found lots of fun.
The points of comparison in this thread are mostly complex and tight RPGs that werenât good sellers (or for sale at all) in the USA at that time like SaGa, SMT and FF5. We can debate about whether Square was off base in not even bothering to sell FF5 in America, but that attitude didnât come from just stereotyping. SaGa 2 (FFL2) was for sale in the US but it was massively outsold by the FFMQ-team designed dead-simple SaGa 3 (which flopped in Japan). I can imagine tightly designed JRPGs were easy to bounce off of in frustration when no friends or internet were around to give you tips or establish the right mindset.
Receiver 2 is such a cool game, need to play more before I say I like it more than the first. Wasnât sure when I first watched the trailers months ago if I liked the character of the voice acting. I was really fond of the blankness from the first game. But now I see the narrative tone they are creating with this new voice actor, the diary entries you can collect, and certain other things which can happen to you and surprise you, I gotta say I am really impressed and unnerved by Receiver 2.
Itâs kind of edgy in an interesting way!! Getting Paul Schrader vibes.
Unlocked the âarcade of the futureâ mode in bubble bobble 4 after finishing the normal stages, I love it! They finally made good use of the stages as vector fields and designed it so you can chain all the enemies, Iâm relieved because the main stages were p uninteresting.
I did a superficial playthrough of Strider, using rewind and slow down to see how high I could get the rank. Now that I know whatâs ahead, screen real estate shouldnât be too big an issue
I know that Nocturne is a revered JRPG but I donât know the first thing about it and the trailer doesnât really highlight whatâs interesting about it. Itâs coming to PC and I wonder if I should care? Is it for me if I like FF7, FFX, DQ8 and XI, Shadow Hearts 2, dislike Pokemans, BOF: Dragon Quarter and have never played a Persona? (I hope you can work with this dumb overview - I donât really know whatâs relevant to Nocturne)
Maybe! For me, recruiting demons is fundamentally different than catching Pokemon. In Pokemon, the play cycle is a bit like this: get to new area, look around for new Pokemon, catch the ones youâre missing while trying to evolve what you have. In Nocturne, the cycle isnât as focused on recruiting all the new demons and more on setting up good fusions. Thereâs a somewhat complicated series of charts that tell you how you can combine two demons into one and you are even given some leeway in choosing the skills of the final amalgamation.
When I play Pokemon, I canât help getting invested in âcatching 'em allâ and I rarely have to come up with specific teams. When I play through the story in Nocturne, Iâm much more aware of the skills each of my demon buddies has and I try to cultivate good skillsets that will help me defeat specific encounters.
This is to say nothing of Nocturneâs impeccable atmosphere, writing, and demon designs.
imo everyone should care. itâs my favorite game! of the games you listed there the only one thatâs kindasorta relevant is dq8 since it has the tightness and elegance of a great dragon quest game, but itâs really its own thing. classical jrpg battle system tuned like a drum with a small number of seemingly-obvious innovations that completely change the feel of the game and make it unlike any other rpg that came before it, including the previous megaten games. itâs all about chaining together weaknesses and crits to rack up turns and going heavy on buffs and debuffs, exploiting builds and changing your affinities to manage fights where the enemy is usually capable of killing you quite easily and you canât rely on rng to go your way. this is a cliche a million ways from sunday but if youâre a fan of the slapstick element of eating shit in a souls game then you might appreciate the feeling of making one tiny mistake and getting punished through a hysterical domino effect in nocturne. seconding minty in that demon recruitment is intentionally simplified and reduced in centrality compared to previous games in the series. you need to recruit to get started and there are certain benefits for continuing to do so, but the focus is more on fusion and constructing builds by getting certain skills onto certain demons, and the compendium feature means that once youâre doing okay on money and have done enough recruiting and fusing you can usually just buy back low level demons for cheap to make the ones you want if you know the formulas. austere and mysterious, like a 3d medieval illumination or a stylized expressionist film. probably the most visually beautiful game ever made and one of the most creatively autonomous and uncompromising. very little âcharacterâ but a remarkable amount of structural and thematic depth beyond the broad-strokes ideologies. i could talk about it forever, hmu if u want to chat. i wrote a silly article about it for fanbyte last year (didnât choose the title/section headings, sorry about that).
side note: the remaster is quite expensive, and while mostly beautiful, not all of its changes/additions are wholly positive (if you do play it that way, disable voice acting). itâs a fine way to play it, but the ps2 version also emulates well.
Thanks, yâall! Youâre hyping me up for it and I donât know yet if thatâs a good thing.
The atmosphere is mostly what makes me interested in it, yeah. And like formulasofsexuation said in the article, it looks like a depressing game you play alone in your room, which is something Iâm always up for. Thatâs why I mentioned Dragon Quarter, which promises that, too, but just didnât do anything for me. Even though itâs structurally brilliant. But if I canât get to grips with the gameplay I canât explore that structure.
@shelter Thatâs a great explanation and also a great article. Thanks, I enjoyed that very much! And from the way you describe the battles in your post it makes me think itâs got stuff in common with ARPGs. Like, you know, the importance of the buffs and debuffs, crits, managing builds and such, only in turn based form.
Noice.
I wishlisted it on Steam. I may or may not try to emulate it before I buy it to make sure itâs my kind of jam. Sometimes itâs better for me to just pay up though because then Iâm more likely to play the game and give it a real chance.
Is the merciful difficulty thatâs in the digital deluxe edition an easy mode? Is that a worthwhile thing for people who donât want to have too much of a frustrating time or does it completely defeat the purpose?