what do you mean? the p1 psx ost rules!!!
it absolutely does not fit but these are such bangers out of context
there’s a fan patch that restores some of the original music which hypothetically would make it the best version to play given the dire state of the original’s localized psx version but there are significantly fewer tracks in the psp version’s ost so a lot of the og soundtrack couldn’t be reinserted
oh I’m sorry! I am a baby who can’t read
relatable
also an honourable mention to wildermyth, which is combatwise just good enough but makes by far the most genuine effort at fixing the geoscape and procedural storytelling aspects of Western SRPGs I’ve ever seen
NiGHTs is a weird game thar deserves better controls than the PC Port has and a keyboard. I have started eyerolling at “hangout” game at this point but if you aren’t tickled with the audio-visual experience than the simple (but deep) game isn’t going to hold you.
Kimimi has an extremely thorough explaination of the game if you have 30 minutes.
I mean watching someone who knows what they’re doing and getting an explanation of the mechanics certainly makes it seem like there’s more game there, but I think you are right and I’m not intrigued enough to dive back in. Thanks for this though!
This is a very long written article but yeah.
I think the two ways to enjoy NiGHTS are “I don’t know what any of this stuff does or have even the faintest understanding of the primary objective of this game” or what the person who made that is doing. Anything in between is bound to leave you unsatisfied
As an early high schooler I was HIGHLY MOTIVATED to figure out how the hell to play NiGHTS, because I happened to play Sonic Pinball Party on the GBA and I was really into the music and aesthetics of the game as represented there. That game actually has a heavy amount of NiGHTS content, including a huge portion of the soundtrack rendered in fuzzy GBA tones.
Check out this frankly terrible rendition of the Soft Museum song:
So I went and got a Saturn and NiGHTS on ebay and studied hard to figure out how to get through the game. If you put in the effort, it’s pretty rewarding. But I still had kid patience at that age. If you put a game like that in front of me for the first time now, I’m not sure I’d actually follow through.
Game is good though! But yeah, you can not play it with a keyboard. It’s all about using the analog stick to fly around like a graceful acrobat.
What do these mean in this context?
While this is true of the first one (where you can promote at 10 but shouldn’t) I’ve never found this to be the case with SF2. The only characters i promote past level 20 are Chester or Rick due to the placement of the pegasus wing.
I also never use characters once they I’ve put them in reserve, so maybe that’s why 
Edit: also I’m pretty sure Bowie needs to be promoted to use the Achilles sword to kill Taros, which happens approximately around when he’d reach level 20. All new weapons after this point are for promoted units only, so I think that’s the game telling you that waiting til level 40 isn’t necessary
that the game is sufficiently big that you can’t consistently perceive and deploy hard counters, but you can use plenty of sufficiently elaborate counters that can significantly impact momentum
I was on a SRPG kick earlier this year and the ones I enjoyed the most centered themselves around some unifying gimmick. Like Jeanne D’Arc had a transformation thing where certain characters could change into a super version of themselves once per stage, which gave them the ability to move and attack again each time you knocked out an enemy. It had a nice rhythm where you would weaken the enemies, pop the power, then clear out the map in one intricate mega turn.
Playing a bunch of SRPGs that all ended with big immobile 100,000 HP bosses confirmed for me though that end bosses are never good.
I love FTL but never tried Breach and I think this is why. I’ve worked on my own game projects where I smooth out all the moving parts until it gets to a point where the decisions in the game are so clinical it’s really more of a puzzle.
games that have lots of mechanics offer more varied tactical approaches than something like fire emblem’s rock-paper-scissors weakness system
I would call Sting games low impact maximalism because Knights in the Nightmare and Yggdra Union are Numbers Soup but it doesn’t feel like there’s more than one way to play those games–no matter what you do or how you organize your party it feels like your macro goals in a battle are the same
I’ve played through the first three Disgaea games and I wouldn’t know how to classify them, the amount you can counter specific units and formations is determined by your willingness to use its universal mechanics (throwing, geo tiles, etc) to treat the encounter as a tile puzzle more than a SRPG, but then it has a ton of wild and intentionally arbitrary SRPG mechanics that encourage grinding and metagaming to do “builds”
Disgaea is so weird… granted I only played V but the progression of that game felt like “SRPG-themed chew toy” to “very precise SRPG-themed bejeweled” without a part in the middle that would teach me how to play or understand the latter.
There’s little that annoys me more in an adventure game than poking around at a bunch of stuff trying to get a clue for how you should proceed, then figuring out what you need to do and realizing that you have to go undo a bunch of the crap you fiddled with in order to trigger a specific sequence of events. Moncage is full of that. I like the concept in general, it’s cute, but after one or two hearty groans when I realized how much backtracking I needed to do, I decided to call it quits.
I felt the itch to play a battle royal so I downloaded CoD Warzone and I have no idea what the fuck is going on.
Shoot King Kong in the balls.
this is definitely true, but it’s very depressing that they clearly were inspired by dragon quest as far as JRPGs, but unlike dragon quest they don’t actually have interesting battles. a single random battle in dragon quest makes me use my brain more than an entire map in shining force
lol that’s interesting, cuz the only unit i promoted as late as 20 was i think arthur when i played SF1? everyone else i promoted between like 10 and 15, and my experience of the game was mostly wondering why it was so unbearably easy
i do think a lot of games assume you do this, but in my experience most SRPGs definitely just let you roll through with a couple strong dudes or the same small squad. i think XCOM does a good job of incentivizing the player to spread the love tho with its various mechanics outside of the immediacy of a battle