a little surprised by the amount of Reborn love, like it’s not bad but y’all gotta try more rpg romhacks! im always saying this
one vision is so much more interesting for me to play and think about and doesn’t have the pixel remaster ick. i think the only ways reborn could win me over is if they wrote the story they wanted before they ran out of space in the original and had to remerge the branches in chapter 4, or if they added classes (maybe even multiple demihuman class portraits???) instead of cutting them
it’s the last of sting’s dept. heaven games, i’ve only played about an hour but a friend i respect when it comes to matters of big brain rpg design says it’s really good. you also might be into yggdra union which is part of the same series, the writing isn’t profound but the design is incredible (and it’s on steam!). knights in the nightmare is the entry in between those two and it’s of course one of the greatest games ever made but maybe too mechanically off the wall if you’re looking for relatively traditional srpgs.
I tried multiple times to get into Gungnir but it was weird seeing Sting do a classic isometric FFT-like, it fell a little flat, the flaws were more clear. They work better when they try to reinvent the wheel as they usually do
TRPG romhack talk makes me think about FE Gilmore Girls again
was gonna throw this hat in the ring as a fire emblem enjoyer but it’s already been thrown so i’ll instead just toss my two cents into it to help weigh it down. genealogy completely rips, all timer. especially given path of radiance already being on the list in the first post i think genealogy is a must. best fremblem game to tackle such large scale battles, imo best srpg to tackle em, each chapter is just a monumental beast. the damn game lets you save each turn of battle.
i also really appreciate its weird little brother / the last kaga directed + scenario designed FE, thracia 776. its a weird gnarly little thing but i really enjoy its dedication to you having a bad time fighting battles with a small force and stealing shit off of the guys you beat the hell out of.
also his post-FE stuff is great. tearring saga is good honest self-ripoff and berwick saga is just goddamn bonkers.
i havent played the vestaria sagas but mostly i respect that this guy made a series, then left the company to make more with the serial numbers filed off (and instantly got sued cause he flew headfirst into the sun re: copyright), and now doesnt even consider himself a game designer but still keeps making them with a few buddies and now makes them in literally SRPG Studio. a game engine made to replicate… uh… his games. lmao. tho the default SRPG Studio style is not “sfc fire emblem” its more like “gba fire emblem with double the pixels and half the artistry” but like. iunno i think it rules that the guy who is essentially the father of the console SRPG now essentially just makes freefangames of his own shit with kinda shitty tools as some manner of psychologically necessary hobby (thelocalization that some folks did costs money on steam tho)
Weirdo Sicko pick that probably doesn’t really belong in this thread - Kowloon Highschool Chronicle, which has a battle system I think I described to a friend as ‘first person, single character Fire Emblem with guns’. It’s also basically a VN with some gross stereotypes though.
Having beaten both R-Type Tactics games, I largely enjoyed them quite a bit. Psyched to see there’s a remake coming down the pipeline.
I could’ve used more variety, but the story’s pretty cool (particularly the Bydo campaign), the vibes are creepy, and the gameplay kept me on-board all the way to the end. Made me want to see if there were other fleet-scale turn-based tactical games out there like this.
there’s only one game, but yes it’s basically half VN, half dungeon crawler but the battles take place in specific rooms and revolve around tile based movement and player / enemy phases. Attacking from the side / back deals more damage and each enemy has a weak point somewhere on their sprite that deals critical damage if you aim at it with a gun.
Main thing is that the 1st person perspective doesn’t change in battles so when enemies are out of your range of vision you can’t see where they are moving.
After considering a few other games, I ended up starting the PS5 version of Phantom Brave the other night and I’ve been staying up way too late playing it ever since. They did a nice job with the PS5 port. The big pixels in the cutscene sprites against the painted backgrounds are more stark in high resolution, but that’s better than applying an ugly filter. (There is a CRT filter option for the whole screen, but I didn’t end up using it.)
I did have to immediately turn off the voices as usual, but it’s fine that they are there for players who want them.
I don’t think I used any kind of guide when I played the original release 20 years ago, and I’m learning things I didn’t know about before. For example, you get little bonuses as you reach higher elevation on the home island, culminating in a free character from the class of those bottles that deliver the mail (which, it turns out, is very useful for capturing items).
I’m enjoying this game so much that I’m afraid I won’t be able to resist getting the sequel and being disappointed thereby.
this is one of my favorite extremely sideline mechanics in this game. like i love all the nonsense around fusion and titles and learning to make good use of the friction of surfaces in battle but i absolutely adore that they encourage you to stack your guys up like a tower and make your own janky platforming challenge just for little secret treats
I finished final fantasy tactics the a few days ago. My playthrough ended quite anticlimactically as the boss hit itself for the last blow whilst my last surviving unit was a confused black mage that happened to just walk out blast range.
I like this game a lot, I like how I can customize my units with different skills and equipment to suit them for the situation. The most fun I had with the game was when I found the right setup of different classes to make the fight easier (or have a situation be less disadvantageous). But I also hate the later half of the game because they start including boss fights with stupid high damaging attacks that you have no way or next to no way of mitigating. Its also the same reason I hate summons cause they don’t charge that long, have large area of effect, do high damage, DOES NOT HURT FRIENDLY UNITS, and cannot be evaded.
But overall I like the game. I like the little things, like how armor increases your base health instead of increasing some kind of defense stat that is used for calculating damage reduction because it makes it easier to understand how sturdy a unit can be at a glance.
Or how every unit has a name assigned to them regardless of plot importance (even the creatures have their own thematically appropriate names!!!).
You can even recruit a chocobo to your party and use them to ride into battle just like in those cutscenes and illustrations you see in the game! (Granted, I didn’t find that great of a use for doing so because having a creature in battle takes up a slot for a “regular” human unit that most of the time is much more versatile and actually riding the choco takes up a turn for the rider to mount it)
Alright… Now to finish that FE4 playthrough I started like a year ago
Ok, so I’ve been trying to play the original tactics ogre and im kinda miffed there’s no real best way to play this cause the SNES english patch is buggy (I accidentally pressed the cpu interrupt button in one of the fights and the game gave control of Vice over to me, and after I ended the turn with him the cursor scrolled out of the map and the screen got filled with garbled graphics, forcing me to restart. In a different instance, I was training my units and after finishing training, checked their stats and Denim along with Presance got their Mentality set to 7), the ps1 port sounds weird (the music sounds off and the sound effects have odd and unfitting replacements) and has lots of moments when the game pauses to load something (everytime someone in a battle is about to do something, the whole game freezes for a short bit before they start moving).
There is a translation of the saturn release which looks promising but it says that they use the english script of the PSP version and im not quite sure what to think about it considering what happened with the PSP release of FFT…
Speaking of the game itself tho, level scaling seems a bit agressive for the first few fights I did after Amorika castle and levels also seem to matter a lot? A level 4 unit has a hard time hitting and doing damage to a level 5 unit. Only sure way to hit someone is from the back.
I found out quickly that Denim has the unique ability to invite enemy units to our team, was cool getting a disgruntled skeleton to switch sides. what wasnt cool was getting ganked by only four lizardmen in a random encounter
idk stuff feels kinda rough but I found out just like with FFT there are guns in this game so maybe ill try to stick with it for a bit longer
Yeah this is a big issue with the Snes / PSX version. It matters a bit less later on
Unlike FFT, the guns have infinite range too!
My #1 Tactics Ogre tip is that bow users can shoot outside of their shown range, if it makes sense. I recommend experimenting. You can have Canopus fly to the top of a building and fly arrows from afar.
I did do that in the next fight after he joins your party, but found that for that battle it was better to have him apply pressure to the leader up close with the spear whilst everyone else moves up after dealing with the two soldiers and skeletons
Oh, and a quirk I found out was that even if you do a ranged attack right next to someone, they won’t attack back for some reason? maybe an oversight.
well, this was on sale again so I picked it up. paging @felix for any beginner tips or whatever, I know owlcat games have a reputation for being fairly overwhelming/impenetrable mechanically
