i dug my wii out specifically to play last story when it released and i can’t really remember anything about it besides yeah, snes rpg x gears of war, the title screen theme is nice and they recorded a lot of “oof!” samples for when you run into npcs
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Does anyone have the SNES Tactics Ogre ROM? I’m trying to make some iso pixel art and I’d like the ultimate reference.
Also, I guess, if you have references for other good iso pixel art please LMK. Thanks much
I’d say Odallus. I didn’t love either game, but I almost immediately abandoned Oniken, whereas I played a pretty decent chunk of the other.
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I last played it on release but always meant to go back to it. The combat system is pretty unusual and makes use of the environment quite a lot. There’s some interesting physicality that stems from this but very often you tend to need a wall to run up to do a really good attack. The way magic, aggro and healing work are all quite unusual compared to standard JRPG fare.
Music is pretty dang good. One of Uematsu’s more understated scores (except the final boss track which sounds like someone resurrected Final Fantasy battle music from the grave and ran a million volts through it).
The party is a mishmash of weirdos and some of the magic-using party members are canonically dangerously strong just because magic is super strong. The party also feel like a more natural group of people rather than a traveling menagerie that easily recruits others. They have more history together and have quite mundane conversations that you’d expect of people who live and work together.
The plot has a lot of familiar tropes but what’s most interesting is that it doesn’t mind irrelevant tangents that have nothing to do with the main plot. From what I remember the game just feels like a Sakaguchi idea bag. Like what if the party just dropped everything and had a Scooby Doo vampire adventure?
You can customise the colours of every character for some reason.
I’d say it’s better than Pandora’s Tower personally (although they’re very different games) and got massively overshadowed by Xenoblade.
I wonder if The Last Story might be what Sakaguchi would have pushed Final Fantasy into being around the time turn-based systems started falling out of the mainstream.
I think it’s definitely worth playing if any of the above sounds like what you’re looking for.
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I’m trying to remember the name of this really good PS1 game. I played it a lot with a friend of mine who passed away a few years ago. The name of the game is up there somewhere in my brain, just can’t get it out.
Key things I remember:
- Playstation 1 (POSSIBLE it was PS2)
- It took place in a dark world, possibly the underworld.
- You controlled a variety of cool and weird monsters. The monsters were in 3D, and the terrain was in 3D.
- It was two player. We would play against each other.
- The game had two main parts: One was an overworld-like thing, the specifics of I can’t really remember. The other part was when you got into a battle with the other player, which point it zoom into this isometric block of 3D terrain, and the two of you battled in real time with your monsters. You could somehow switch monsters. You’d move around shooting projectiles, or run directly at the other play to get in melee range.
- The title was something declarative, I think 3 words, like, “The Final ____” or “The Lost ____” or “The _____ War”. Almost positive The was the first word.
That’s all I remember.
JUST CAME TO ME 10 SECONDS LATER
“The Unholy War.” It was PS1.
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Hah, was just gonna say how it really sounded like the game played on a Scrublords episode.
Reminds me of Nectaris/Military Madness.
Majokko Daisakusen is a turn-based strategy game with action-style battles featuring characters from several famous magical girl anime series from the '60s, '70s, and '80s: Mahō Tsukai Sally , Himitsu no Akko-chan , Mahō Tsukai Chappy , Cutey Honey , Majokko Megu-chan , Hana no Ko Lunlun , and Mahō Shōjo Lalabel . It is in fact a reworked version of The Unholy War with all of the graphics, sound, and story completely replaced. The game itself, however, is essentially identical between the two releases.
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Unholy War is one of my top OPM demo disc demos. I poured so much time into that thing even thought all it did was give you two or three characters and an arena to fight in.
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The Unholy War rules, it was made by the people who made Star Control 1 and 2
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Kind of a funny subgenre to think about
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Was just reading into that, after wondering “what else did these guys make?”
Oh man though Majokko Daisakusen looks real shitty though!!! I like that the article mentioned how puzzled they were that Bandai gave them that property to work with, rather than Gundam, like they were hoping:
(From the Toys for Bob wiki article)
In the lead-up to their 1998 game The Unholy War, Crystal Dynamics was acquired by Eidos Interactive. Unholy War combined a fighting game with a strategic meta-game, once again drawing inspiration from Reiche’s two-layered game design of Archon. Reiche and Ford thought the gameplay could be re-purposed to work with a Japanese license such as SD Gundam, and Crystal Dynamics helped them get in touch with Bandai, who promised them an “even bigger license”.
Bandai would ultimately have them make Majokko Daisakusen: Little Witching Mischiefs based on Japanese anime from the 1960s, with several characters based in the majokko character archetype. The choice of license came as a surprise to Toys for Bob, and the development process was fraught with translation challenges. Majokko Daisakusen was released exclusively in Japan, and Toys for Bob never found out how well the game performed.
On episode 97 of internet interview show Matt Chat,[1] creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche described the unusual production style. The company were faxed design documents directly from Bandai which needed to be translated from Japanese before any of them could be implemented. The process was so laborious, the developers eventually turned off their fax machine in order to finish the game on schedule.
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I checked in every year on what Toys for Bob were up to like from 2000-2015. Very strange career progression. It took me that long to come to terms with the fact that small flashes of brilliance notwithstanding, the Star Control 2 magic had long since scattered to the winds
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And just connecting Star Control 2 to Skylanders!
Once you realize it it really does make sense that it’s a lot of the same people who see the value in physical, toylike experiences.
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Instead of letting Skylanders peter out they should have pivoted to Sky Control.
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tbh i think kyuuyaku megami tensei might be the ideal form of pure “arcadey” dungeon crawler megaten, but yeah i mostly recommended smt 1 because it’s my favorite of that era.
I couldn’t, in good conscience, suggest OG Megami Tensei, even the SNES remake. Maybe part 2 because it at least has some cool ideas and stuff, but Digital Devil Story 1 is kind of… shitty.