i surprised myself a while back by beating ff15 and enjoying it tremendously, so i decided to put together a list of other jrpgs to try out, in an effort to educate myself and widen my tastes.
i’ve had a weird relationship to jrpgs for a long time. even tho i’ve played and enjoyed a number of them, i tend to burn out or lose momentum before the end. i think on some level i kinda felt like they just weren’t for me, especially if they were turn-based.
but after having such a good time w ff15 it occurred to me that maybe i just wasn’t playing the right ones. after all there’s so many of them, and it didn’t sit right with me as a game designer, to have this “not my thing” feeling toward such a huge subset of games.
i’m now six games into my list and can safely say that i actually love jrpgs! i think i just needed to get a little older, and to familiarise myself with the genre some more. that and i think just putting the games together in a list like this changes the way i approach each game. if i don’t like one of them then oh well. think critically about why i didn’t like it and move on to the next one.
anyway here’s a brief overview of what i’ve played so far:
final fantasy xv
game owns. love to roam around with my boys in the luxury chrysler audi. i love the towns. i love the super detailed food models. i actually really enjoyed the combat too, and i think it was a nontrivial part of what kept me playing.
this was my first mainline final fantasy (i’d previously only played crystal chronicles) and i played all the way through and even did a bunch of optional dungeons and super hard quests. the weird platformer dungeon is so good and it is crazy to me that it’s hidden away like that.
resonance of fate AKA
time and eternity no wait that’s the other ps3 gunpegend of eternity
this game is pretty dumb but i had a good time. as i have since had confirmed, resonance of fate is a classic tri-ace game: it has really amazingly designed systems but couldn’t write itself out of a wet paper bag. it’s also like weirdly cruel and sexist to its only female protag in a way that i just don’t understand even a little. everyone is a cunt to her even though she is nothing but kind and helpful.
unfortunately this game has a case of too-fucking-long-and-not-enough-level-design-itis. i played for like 30 hours before it introduced a battle arena that wasn’t a flat box with some walls in it. really weird cos its battle system owns and is crying out for exciting level design.
if this game wasn’t written by a sexist toddler (and if it had even an ounce of pacing) it could probably be pretty good! oh well.
final fantasy vii babeyyy
speaking of good writing and pacing! what can i even say? i love aerith and i love tifa and i love putting magicite in my got darn equipment!
i’d never seen or played any ff7 before (at least not the original. i’d seen advent children and i watched dylan play some of the remake) so apart from the culturally osmotic spoilers the whole thing was new to me. i was kinda blown away by how huge it was, and how well the story trundled along the whole time. even in the switch version the game was beautiful, although, as with all squeenix remasters, i don’t understand how anyone could think that upping the resolution was in any way a good idea.
i wasn’t as in love with the combat as i was with the previous two games, but it didn’t feel bad either. i want to be exposed to lots of different systems anyway, just to see how different games approach them and what effect that has on the whole experience.
anyway it owned and i played it all the way through.
valkyrie profile 2: silmeria
another tri-ace through and through. not a single writer to be seen but god damn they’ve got some combat designers. also the towns! oy vey the towns in this are so delicious. shame about the actual dungeons which are extremely lackluster.
i played through like the first 4 dungeons or something like that and jesus christ the plot was just glacial, and the world was nowhere near as compelling as resonance of fate. still, i enjoyed it enough that i might give vp1 a go sometime idk. that game has nice graphics.
dragon quest 11
good lord what a game. they really said “what if we made it extremely good all the way through” huh. there is nothing particularly special about any of its ingredients but the mixture is just right.
i’d played some of dq7 on the 3ds but kinda fell off because i was a baby child and not ready to play pegs yet. still, i’m glad i put dq11 a little further down in my list because it has so many of the things that i feared in jrpgs: really straight-forward turn-based combat, standard fantasy world, extremely long and wandering story. i think if i’d played this before ff7 i wouldn’t have been as ready to enjoy myself. as it was i had a real good time! the whole game goes down easy and the plot just keeps on ticking along at a rate that feels so nice. also every party member is cool?? why doesn’t every game do that??? they’re all cool and my friends and i love them.
i done beat the whole game and i was very ready for it to end by the time it did. game is too long. also idk if i feel the desire to play any other dragon quests (there’s none on my list atm) chiefly because, as i understand it, they’re mostly the same. i respect the series now a lot more than i did before i played it, but i don’t feel compelled to explore any more of it right now. that being said, it really has set the standard for pacing in a way which none of the others did. really a remarkable achievement and i do not regret any of my time spent with it.
panzer dragoon saga AKA azel: panzer dragoon rpg AKA graphics: the videogame
this game is a luxury item. it’s refined. it has no cruft whatsoever. it also has no equal; there are no videogames like panzer dragoon saga. even the other entries in the series (which are beautiful, don’t get me wrong) don’t hold a candle to how excellent it is. it feels like a game from the future, a future where the medium has matured and thrown off so much of the bullshit that holds it down.
all that being said, unlike some of the previous games on this list, saga does not go down easy. i had to work to focus on it and play it through to the end, which seems incongruous, given how much i loved it the whole time. i also don’t really know why this was the case or what could have been done differently (either in terms of its design or in my approach to playing it) to counter this. i want to lay the blame at my own feet rather than the game’s, because i think the things that made harder to swallow are precisely the absence of cruft and excess and skinner-box evils that make it feel so futuristic. it has no grinding or side-quests or time-wasting of any kind. it has plenty of secrets and the world feels rich and dense. it respects itself too much to string you along with little dopamine hits. it’s frankly a miraculous game. i spent my whole playthrough waiting for it to pull some bullshit that would sour everything and it never did.
anyway yeah extraordinarily good game. audio-visually stunning. beautiful towns. great writing. mechanically triumphant. constantly surprising and so well put together. it’s crazy to me that team andromeda did such incredible work and then just fuckn dipped. criminal.
and that’s where i’m up to. as you can maybe tell, i’ve been trying to alternate between “classical” and “fushigi” type games. games that are part of the canon and those that are weirder and more obscure. which means that the next game on my list falls into the first category, and that game is final fantasy xii.
idk if i’ll write about it straight away or if i’ll go through a few before continuing (i have no shortage on games in my list) so we’ll just have to wait and see.
jrpgs! they’re pretty good!