The Video Game Thread: Come for the circlejerk, stay for the spiteful sexism debates & endless textwalls regarding JRPGs.

Pretty much. I was hoping this thread would at least survive from all of that, since it's rampant on every other website. But alas.

Tactics wrecks your shit the first time you play it, and then you realize how to manipulate the AI and simply boost your levels right at the beginning and the rest of it is a breeze save for a few impossible random encounters. Still, if you attempt a "complete" file with all of the secrets and all of the hidden items for a complete inventory (hardest part) you will find yourself resetting quite a bit.



Brutal.

PSA: Tropico 3 is free on the Humble Store today.

Man, I came here just to say that! This is awkward... so, uh, nice weather we are having...?

Playing P.T at the moment. Its awesome.

I don't entirely disagree. FFX is the 3rd best to me.

1. FFIV
2. FFVI
3. FFX

It had interesting themes and characters. Tidus is a brat with 1st world problems and then suddenly sees how life is for other people. There's the prejudice against the Al Bhed when they're actually in the right for distrusting organized religion and providing awesome technology.

For me there's a huge gap in awesomeness between the 2nd and 3rd best Final Fantasy. FFVI is just way better. The differences between FFIV and FFVI is paper thin and they're nearly tied. Just like FFVII would be my 4th favorite and just a hair less than good as FFX.

If I had to provide a top three, it'd go like this:

1. Final Fantasy IX
2. Final Fantasy IV
3. Final Fantasy II/Final Fantasy VI

IX really is the crowning pinnacle of the series, as it's way, way better than everything else. It's got the best characters (especially goddamn Freya and Beatrix), the most interesting world, the best music, a great story, and a main character that's not constantly doubting himself (except that one time). If I had to pinpoint a single weak aspect of the game, it would be that the Trance system was kinda balls and the bosses after Oeilvert had too little HP.

I played XI back when it was new, got 100% and did everything (cards included), but for years now I've just felt kind of like "I don't get it". It was awesome, but I can't say I remember anything special about the plot, characters, Kuja, etc. I didn't like the music as much as the others and the battles felt dragged, but I know you can speed up the ATB in FF's and am not sure if I did it back then. Needless to say I still think it's solid and have been interested in giving it another go one of thesedays to see how I feel about it now. I had a bit of a change of heart with FFX and some of the others, so who knows.

I doubt my ranking would change though, honestly I'm not sure if I could divide out my top favorites and order them in any way... but they are:

FFIV - Traditional awesomeness with such great charm. My favorite final dungeon (musically, visually) in the series to date, love the sci-fi touches later on, a final boss that'll fuck your ass up if you aren't ready, and it's just all around a great simple game. I like the 5 party members thing too so it stands out a little. Beaten it three times, Chronicles, GBA, and the PSP remake which was fantastic, would have loved to see V-VI in that style. Anyways, the story won't completely take your breath away or anything, but it just simply does everything right to me.



FFV - Arguably the best gameplay in the series because the game is consistently challenging with standout bosses and a higher difficulty curve than the others (outside of the more archaic NES ones). Then there's the job system which easily lends itself well to multiple playthroughs and experimentation so the replay value is great. There's also Gilgamesh. Also, let me be honest... ExDeath is my favorite villain the franchise. I would put Kefka above Sephiroth and others, but he's still nowhere near the level of say Luca Blight, Albedo, or well... ExDeath to me. Kefka wanted world domination, then just hangs out waiting for you to win. ExDeath on the other hand spouts that THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE MEAN NOTHING and his ultimate goal was to completely implode the universe bringing it to absolute nothingness gladly sacrificing himself along with it. Now that's batshit insane. Whether he's truly a branch or not, who cares, that's hilarious, that's personality, and his armor set is one of the coolest designs in the whole series to me. I felt that the pacing in FFV is better than FFVI, later on it becomes a chase with ExDeath racing you to the ultimate weapons while ripping vortex holes in space merging worlds and summoning an army of monsters from hell. The final dungeon amazingly cool as well being some weird unorthodox combination of a bunch of things, fittingly so for crossing over dimensions. What can you say about Kefka in the second half of FFVI? I can't really think of anything. He's just hanging out at his tower. Guess his goal was to be bored?

I just can't recommend the Anthology version when it comes to FFV, opt for the GBA release instead or a fan translated rom. The Anthology script was terrible.

FFVI - Hah despite all that I still love FFVI. I just wish it wasn't so piss easy and the pacing isn't the best, but I've played it so much maybe it's just reaching that point of being a little outplayed. All in all a fantastic JRPG, but not perfect in my book. Still, its strengths come through and make me put it on par with my other favorites here and way above the others.

FFVII - Well I hate most of the characters and the plot is bonkers at times (Tifa going in Cloud's mind, I just can't stand that segment haha). But... I just love the beatdown tone to a lot of the game, the atmosphere, the music (it's got a weird early dated PSX sound that's kind of like SNES stuff), I love the Materia system, etc... it just really comes through on the gameplay aspects for me. This and FFVI I've replayed the most.

I think the problem with a lot of the JRPGs like FFVI and Chrono Trigger is that the difficulty is scaled toward people not being familiar with the battle system, not knowing the boss patterns, etc. Basically you're meant to be learning as you go, rather than going in as a multi-year veteran - they were meant for kids, after all. So like, when you go into a boss fight, you're meant to be able to learn his patterns and beat him all in one or two goes. You're meant to not know exactly how each spell works, which are the best, etc. There's tons of shit in FFVI that just sucks, or isn't really worth using - like Gau and his 90 billion unlockable moves. A knowledgeable player who is playing to win will just go "fuck that" and replace him in a second with Sabin or Strago or somebody. You're also not meant to know all of the sidequests - the late game especially is clearly balanced around the player not finding every single character, not killing all the side bosses and getting all the best espers - and really, unless you know ahead of time, some of those sidequests are pretty hard to figure out, like finding Gogo by letting your whole party get swallowed by the sandworm.

I was obsessed with XI the first year or so it was out, but it just got too time-consuming, even for me. I hated not being able to solo anything after like the first couple of hours of gameplay. I can't remember what level I was, maybe 30ish, and I simply gave up. I was sick of running away from every single mob. I was too preoccupied with Runescape back then anyway, really.

So blizz just canceled titan. i had completely forgotten about it until i saw the article. here's to WC4 maybe???

An interesting way to look at it. Good points honestly. Most main FF's could be the gateway for new players.

Maybe I' am skewed towards stronger difficulties myself. I've never liking limiting myself in any game so yeah I just simply prefer when the base vanilla game is tougher in general. But with this comparison, it's just easy to say FF in general are super easy. FFIII (NES), FFIV (Chronicles hard type), and FFV are the only ones that really had much challenge for me. This is even when I was newer with the games and much younger, but I can also admit I was nuts with grinding and doing 100% back when I was a kid and had all that time. I think the first time I played FFVII I was level 50-60 or something at the end of the first disc, haha. But yeah you have a good point. It's interesting to imagine how cool simple difficulty levels would have been, they could have just easily scaled some stats or something.

Wasteland 2 is definitely solid so far. Best isometric RPG I've played since...something released a long time ago. Fallout 1/2 fans will definitely dig it (pun intended heh heh heh make sure to pick the shovel up at the very beginning).

Question for those who've beaten Castlevania CotM before: do you keep your items and cards in new game plus? Been trying to find an answer to this via google but all I'm getting is stuff about the different game modes you can unlock.

I had to check this right after I finished Subweapon mode and turned off my GBASP

You don't. Circle of the Moon's new game+'s are challenge modes, that is about it, iirc

I'm at Dracula and I've missed 5 action cards and 3 attributes, seems sort of pointless to go hunting for them if I'm just gonna lose them when I beat the game. All I've really got left to do in the castle is the battle arena, and you don't even get to use magic in there.

Just looked up magician mode and it seems all cards are unlocked by default. Well I just have to go find them now, or it'll feel sorta like cheating.

EDIT: You know, fuck this. Maybe in an alternate dimension where I have enough free time to murder every different enemy over and over a hundred times just to find they only drop potions and wristbands.

When in doubt, wiki it. The Castlevania wikia has a good amount of information. Sometimes I just go onto the site just to look at the sprites of enemies and bosses of the castlevania games I don't have.

I've been rusty on the Castlevania games. Years ago I lost my copies of Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. I got used copies last year. But man, As much as I love PoR, the grinding for subweapons is hell. I can't remember how much patience I had 8 years ago. At the moment I'm trying to do a bunch of No-Glitch speedruns without getting hit. I used to be extremely OP in Castlevania. Time to sharpen up those skills...

Sure, replace him with one of the very few characters that's even worse.

That's not true! Strago has very powerful magic! It is kind of a pain to get him to learn his best spells, but once you do, he's very good.

Which is pointless because the standard spells are plenty powerful enough, and you can cast them with characters who don't suck.

If you're cool you use Mog, Shadow, Umaro and Kappa.

I kind of regretted focusing Faris on blue mage in FFV as well. I think there was the usual White Wind/Shield spell near the end that's absurdly OP, but that was about it. But even the black mage gets a bit neglected later on when time mages start getting attack spells that were really good. Two combinations of White/Summon/Time creates a deadly team.

I could have solo'd Kefka's tower with just Terra, Mog, Celes, and Gogo. The only real trick is "figure out how many times you can conceivably cast Ultima in a short timespan" and the whole game is butter.

Yeah that's the thing, players aren't meant to find the Gem Box AND Ultima AND Quick AND Gogo AND the Economizer AND figure out all those ridiculous combos that make the game a total joke. I'm pretty sure I would've missed at least a few of those without a walkthrough, and of course the game came out before gamefaqs and whatever.

I do wish you got some of the off-characters earlier, though. Umaro is actually fairly interesting in that they give him a fair few unique items, and his unpredictability can make him exciting. Also I'm not even sure I know what all of Mog's various dances can do, just because every time I got him I already had a rock-solid party of four and put him on the back burner. Basically my only experience with some of those guys is the end sequence where you have to use everyone.

All this talk kinda makes me want to play through the game again, except with the least typical characters possible - Gau, Mog, Umaro, Relm?

I've been playing red Faction Armageddon.. Anyone into it? Been playing it on XBOX 360. It's an awesome game! Never thought I'd be saying that about a game made in the 21st Century..

I always used Relm anyway, because if I was going to have a caster in the party (Edgar/Cyan/Sabin/Gogo mimicking Sabin go go go!), it might as well be the caster with the highest innate MP and Magic stats.

It's awesome in the beginning, but it really loses its appeal after a certain time. There are only so many ways you can wreck stuff until it gets boring, which is only somewhat delayed by your improving arsenal. The repetitive gta-like open world mechanics don't help.

Edit:Eh sorry, I misread and thought you were talking about Guerrilla. Is Armageddon any better in those respects I mentioned? I think that one still lingers untouched in my Steam library due to inferior review scores.

Although I said I hate limiting myself in games, I feel like FFVI would be an easy exception. I've been really wanting to replay it again and plan to force myself from limiting magic/summon usage across the board, only have that available for the few magic users basically. I think that alone should really change things up.

Still, you've got Edgar's bloodbath chainsaw, Sabin's Hadoken's to the face, Cyan's crazy combos, Shadow's ridiculously powerful throws if you know what to throw... etc haha. Even their base skills can be really over the top.

Who do you guys even see as the main character though? Guess that might be opening a can of worms. Some people probably love it, but I do wish there was a stronger singular entity for the main character. Is it Terra or Locke? Well both kind of disappear for huge chunks of the game. Celes? Takes awhile to even get her. The characterization is really broken up. I've always favored Edgar the most since he's the suave badass pimp king, but yeah. It makes more sense that Locke or Terra would be it, but still...

I've always liked Celes more than Terra myself.

Celes > Terra, it is known

I don't think there's a single main protagonist though. That's what I always liked about it. You start out thinking it's Terra but it turns out to be quite different.

My favourite party is usually Sabin (though sometimes swapped for Edgar, they're both great), Terra, Celes and of course Shadow.

Exactly, it's an ensemble cast. At first it's Terra, but then other characters start to become more prominent, and then WoR happens and Celes is your main character for a while. Not to say the characterization is super deep, but they're all quite memorable in their own ways, despite there being quite a lot.

My typical party was always Edgar and Sabin, then some combination of Cyan/Locke/Setzer/Celes.

They're not deep, but they're awesome in the same way other characters from video games and movies of the 90s were awesome: memorable and likable character traits. Locke's insistence on being a "treasure hunter," Edgar's womanizing, Cyan's straight-man act and shyness around women, etc.

Can we talk about a real RPG, like Wasteland 2?

FTFY

How far are you in W2? I just bought it on GoG, will probably start soonish. Heard good things although apparently (?) its combat pales in comparison to Original Sin's?

I've only played a few minutes of D:OS.

The combat is basically your standard isometric fare a la Fallout 1/2 + some XCOMisms. Movement/cover/ambushing/etc is similar to XCOM. That combination to me makes a lot of sense and turns out to be a lot of fun.

I've played for maybe 5-10 hours. Grad school keeps getting in the way ugh. I just decked my people out with a bunch of new guns, bout to play actually

I'm still hell new to the game, but so far it's not boring or repetitive at all. I'm enjoying it. I'd like to find and use more rifles and guns etc but I guess that will happen as the game progresses. Definitely give it a go.

So much this. Modern JRPG characters are so fucking boring and/or insufferable.

Speaking of retro/JRPGs, I've been playing this game lately:
Skyborn

It was on sale recently, for a measly $3.74. Yes, it's RPGmaker, but it's surprisingly awesome in the way classic jRPGs were; a fun and memorable cast, a cool (if not all that original) story, a really neat setting, great soundtrack, and the battle system really impressed me too. For once, I find myself using status attacks all the time, for instance. Never bother with those in most jRPGs, but they're very useful here, almost OP even. Each party member plays completely differently and complement the rest quite nicely and you can customize them a fair bit too. It's a bit easy though, I had to put it on Hard because I was otherwise rarely in danger, but on Hard it becomes a fun little challenge without becoming overwhelming. Also, there are no random battles, you see the enemies à la Chrono Trigger... and they seem to never respawn, so I don't think you can actually grind, but I find that perfectly okay because it's never necessary if you do the side quests like the Arena battles. Uh, except that one optional mega-hard boss I just encountered that pretty much wipes my party instantly, not sure how I'll deal with him just yet...
It seems fairly short, I have 13 hours clocked (taking my time and exploring for secrets) and I'm approaching the end-game (the game warns you quite explicitly that you're approaching the point of no return), but I don't mind because that way it won't overstay its welcome. And, well, I did get it on sale, some might find the standard price of $15 steep for that length, but for less than four bucks, a 15-hour game is perfectly fine with me.


You wrote the same thing he did...


No.

Speaking of old-school rpgs I've been seriously craving some of the games ofnmy youth lately. I'm probably gonna have to track down things like Breath of Fire III, Xenogears, and Suikoden soon here, like once I'm done with Dark Souls. Speaking of Suikoden though have any of you ever played any of the sequels? I never bothered and I'm wondering if they'd be worth tracking down at all.

I haven't played it yet, but how's the actual RPG elements? The little footage I've seen was all combat, which seems squad-based. This has worried me a tad in that it may not be as personal as the single character action of Fallout (allies were AI-controlled). I really enjoy Fallout's combat, but that alone isn't what made it so damn good. The atmosphere and the setting, the characters and factions and the ability to play a variety of very different characters who handle situations noticeably differently held it up to a very high standard. So how does Wasteland 2 hold up in these elements?

It's amazing to me that so much is still said about FFVI (FFIII US) after so much time. It's the only Final Fantasy I ever had extensive time with, and the only one I played twice. I spent hours trying to get Gau to learn ridiculous numbers of moves.

I recall Terra being disappointing to use, but can't remember Celes' movesets. I usually used Cyan (powerful), Edgar (chainsaws), and Locke (thief). Probably Celes or Shadow in there as well. When you have 99 Excalibur blades, might as well have Shadow throw them at bad guys for consistent 9999 damage.