Granstream Saga only had the main guy, right?
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I think there’s a fair number of these in ~5-hour-long indie JRPGs. Single-character JRPGs tend to have a faster learning curve and lower difficulty ceiling so they’re perfect for short-and-sweet games.
I recently played Helen’s Mysterious Castle (turn-based but with intricate action-time management) and Grimm’s Hollow (MP starts at 0 every battle and you build it up with regular attacks)
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i think dream master is this, but i haven’t played far into it so i don’t know if they eventually throw party members on you? the system seems built around 1on1 fights tho
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Sword of Vermilion is mostly a traditional style RPG with a single protagonist, although the battle system is realtime
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7th Saga is kind of single character
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dragon view on snes
ys orgin
fallen makina
brave fencer musashi
odin sphere
the magic of scheherazade
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The latest Paper Mario for Switch (Origami King) has just one one party member – the companions are basically just special moves you can use.
One of the FFV community-invented challenges is to beat it as effectively a solo JRPG (kill off the 3 other party members as soon as possible whenever something revives them). One streamer has additionally set the rule that the remaining character must remain in the same job the entire game after it becomes available, and done this with 13 different jobs so far:
Love the way he reviews spreadsheets on one screen while instinctively doing left-right-left-right grinding with the other hand
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How have I never heard of Tsugunai? It looks incredible. For my own suggestions, both Eternal Ring and Evergrace are single player right?
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I think this is technically an Action RPG but I just want to bring up Gandhara: Buddha no Seisen again because it’s very weird
I haven’t played it but I really love thinking about it. I think playing it would probably be hell.
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i think if it ever gets a translation, it might be worth playing (or if you can read japanese). the only big barrier i had was having no idea where to go or what to do.
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I couldn’t remember, but I must have heard about it from your blog! I took out the boring MobyGames link and replaced it with yours 
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Kind of Secret of Evermore as an edge case? Perhaps too much action, and technically you have the dog as a sidekick, but 
I read this as Secret of Mana and started thinking about why that’s a good contra-example that reveals a lot of what single-character design needs: Mana has lots of attacks that lock a target in (casting a spell), lots of enemy attacks that stunlock a character (enemy spells, attack chains), assumption that player parties will be frequently healing (wasted turns in single-player), the attack power meter (given this mechanic’s use in Final Fantasy Legend, it’s clearly intended to be a proto-stamina meter, but in this case, it works as a party coordination tool).
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Pokemon
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i was talking about this with friends last night… i know what you mean but even though only one is out at a time i think pokemon creates enough intentional mechanical space between your guys in that it takes a turn to switch them out, they get managed separately for levels, healing and status ailments, they can individually die, etc., that makes it a consecutive-character game rather than a single-character game even beyond the in-game fiction. like watching ranked competitive pokemon it does not feel like a single-character game since almost everything is about constantly baiting and switching and that consecutiveness is specifically central to meta strategy and party composition. it’s interesting in its own right but a different thing, imo.
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very nice
that was more a prompt than a serious suggestion, it really straddles exactly in-between and has elements of both
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The one turn to bring in a different pokemon if you end up doing it as an action always feels like an absolute eternity of getting hit in the face. The ridiculously overpowered 0-turn-character-switch mechanic in FFX is more what I like
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It’s interesting; I think it’s a hump-shaped utility at skill levels. At low skill, players are sloppy with turn momentum and switch out to protect, say, low-health members that will no longer be swapped in. Gain skill and an understanding of how valuable turns are and it is less useful and justifiable. Then at very high skills you see players move to a low-commitment mode, building the turn-bluffing game against each other and you see a move to very heavy swapping.
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