Hm it was hard posting on my phone.
Here are the series and games that I feel most strongly attached to. I feel like rambling, sorry.
Suikoden: I mentioned it all before! My favorites in the series are in this order: II, V, I, III. But all are quite good. No other rpg really quite grasps that political feel and the sense that your actions are relevant within the setting like Suikoden did. Not only that, but it's amazing how much they were able to make me feel for single characters in a cast of literally over a hundred. They could really make you truly hate or love a character on a personal level, and in the older games, they did this using a mediocre translation. S2 especially, replaying it so many times made me realize how many mistakes were made in the localization; it was kind of a testament to how brilliantly resonant the story was that it didn't matter to me at all when I first picked it up.
Vagrant Story: In places where Suikoden was vast and epic, Vagrant story was compact and elegant. A tiny, intimate story most rpgs don't attempt to touch, given that it took place entirely within the span of a day or two, in one location, with a cast no bigger than a typical Shakespearian play. Everything about the game was designed meticulously. It was beautiful for a PS1 game, probably the pinnacle of its graphics, but more importantly every visual choice was made to accentuate the atmosphere, and it was "directed," as if it was a movie, with an eye for dramatic camera angles and scene pacing. The battle and gear system may have perplexed some and frustrated others, but its intense trial and error as well as complexity was really appealing to me and very much unlike most other games of its day. It really feels like a dungeon crawler precursor to some later PS3 era games like Demon Souls in how brutally it punished you for not thinking carefully or learning from your mistakes. The most remarkable thing about the game though is that it's actually an unfinished product-it was intended to be much bigger and a lot of its mechanics went into FF12, which I'm not convinced was better for it, personally.
Wild Arms: I've only played the 3rd-5th, and watched lp and read the story of 2, but it's still a pretty important series to me. Though the storytelling usually isn't that complex, the wild-west elements are really unique and the design team really did an excellent job of making the games feel like an anime. Not just adopting the aesthetic but going so far as to incorporate common plot structure and pacing from a typical popular anime, even having the opening play at the beginning every time you start up the game, but ALSO having an ending play when you quit, as if your play session was one episode. 3 was really aggressive about fighting back against all jrpg trends for reasons I mentioned earlier; it was an awesome game even when the translation was iffy. 4 brought in a really unique and fun battle system and 5 refined it further, with a really colorful aesthetic and simple (almost as subtle as sledgehammer) story that was fun light entertainment. Like almost every game series I enjoy, it has really strong musical work. Also underappreciated: its quality of life mechanics, including more ways to speed up battles or avoid them entirely than probably any other rpg I've played. 5 even allowed you to individually decrease the frequency of a character's voice acting in battles and the field if you found them annoying. That's just ridiculous...
Valkyrie Profile: Great game with a wonderful aesthetic, unique battle system, gameplay and story pacing that reflects the setting, and one of the strongest soundtracks ever created. There's honestly not much I can say about this game other than everyone who likes jrpgs should play it, if only for the uniqueness of the experience. The second game is a bit more of a hit or miss, but I still loved it all the same. The fact that every party member had to die in some way to join your party (not much of a spoiler given that the lead is a valkyrie.) appealed to my tragedy addiction, even if this storytelling method limited how much they could be developed. Also some characters were just useless. I'm looking at you, Grey.
Persona: I'm one of the few who played Eternal Punishment before P3 came out and became hugely popular. I never thought I'd love a disgruntled, middle-aged tap buster and extortionist who wears loud golden suits so much. The high random encounter rate was irritating, but the negotiation system, which I liked in Nocturne and other SMT games, was still fun, and the story involving kotodama (rumors becoming reality) is madly appealing to my modern fantasy sensibilities. I think Persona should be respected as a rare rpg series to not be sci-fi or fantasy; that is something people really take for granted. I just wish I'd played Innocent Sin back then, though there wasn't a port, so that was pretty impossible. It's really only half a story. P3 and P4 were great games and some of my favorite ones, but P2EP still holds a lot of weight with me, mostly because it dealt with adults with believable, modern, adult problems, something you don't see in a lot of games.
I also really liked Xenogears, Tales, and Star Ocean. I played Shadow Hearts Covenant and loved that game as well. I could ramble for ages about these games and pick apart why I liked them again and again and it'd never be enough. If even a little bit of these games enters a newer title, I'm at least somewhat positively disposed towards it.
I have to admit I'm a little disgruntled. I feel that to many in the West, jrpg was defined entirely by FF, yet most of the games I enjoyed avoided the pitfalls that later damaged FF and by extension the jrpg's image in the west. (Though that was IMO also due to aggressive marketing from Western developers.) As someone who never really "got" the more freeform, choose your own adventure style wrpg, I've got a huge bias, to say the least. Games like Baldur's Gate 2 and Fallout were fun in their own ways, but failed to engage me the way a lot of console rpgs did. I guess I was just a sucker for getting railroaded.
Here are the series and games that I feel most strongly attached to. I feel like rambling, sorry.
Suikoden: I mentioned it all before! My favorites in the series are in this order: II, V, I, III. But all are quite good. No other rpg really quite grasps that political feel and the sense that your actions are relevant within the setting like Suikoden did. Not only that, but it's amazing how much they were able to make me feel for single characters in a cast of literally over a hundred. They could really make you truly hate or love a character on a personal level, and in the older games, they did this using a mediocre translation. S2 especially, replaying it so many times made me realize how many mistakes were made in the localization; it was kind of a testament to how brilliantly resonant the story was that it didn't matter to me at all when I first picked it up.
Vagrant Story: In places where Suikoden was vast and epic, Vagrant story was compact and elegant. A tiny, intimate story most rpgs don't attempt to touch, given that it took place entirely within the span of a day or two, in one location, with a cast no bigger than a typical Shakespearian play. Everything about the game was designed meticulously. It was beautiful for a PS1 game, probably the pinnacle of its graphics, but more importantly every visual choice was made to accentuate the atmosphere, and it was "directed," as if it was a movie, with an eye for dramatic camera angles and scene pacing. The battle and gear system may have perplexed some and frustrated others, but its intense trial and error as well as complexity was really appealing to me and very much unlike most other games of its day. It really feels like a dungeon crawler precursor to some later PS3 era games like Demon Souls in how brutally it punished you for not thinking carefully or learning from your mistakes. The most remarkable thing about the game though is that it's actually an unfinished product-it was intended to be much bigger and a lot of its mechanics went into FF12, which I'm not convinced was better for it, personally.
Wild Arms: I've only played the 3rd-5th, and watched lp and read the story of 2, but it's still a pretty important series to me. Though the storytelling usually isn't that complex, the wild-west elements are really unique and the design team really did an excellent job of making the games feel like an anime. Not just adopting the aesthetic but going so far as to incorporate common plot structure and pacing from a typical popular anime, even having the opening play at the beginning every time you start up the game, but ALSO having an ending play when you quit, as if your play session was one episode. 3 was really aggressive about fighting back against all jrpg trends for reasons I mentioned earlier; it was an awesome game even when the translation was iffy. 4 brought in a really unique and fun battle system and 5 refined it further, with a really colorful aesthetic and simple (almost as subtle as sledgehammer) story that was fun light entertainment. Like almost every game series I enjoy, it has really strong musical work. Also underappreciated: its quality of life mechanics, including more ways to speed up battles or avoid them entirely than probably any other rpg I've played. 5 even allowed you to individually decrease the frequency of a character's voice acting in battles and the field if you found them annoying. That's just ridiculous...
Valkyrie Profile: Great game with a wonderful aesthetic, unique battle system, gameplay and story pacing that reflects the setting, and one of the strongest soundtracks ever created. There's honestly not much I can say about this game other than everyone who likes jrpgs should play it, if only for the uniqueness of the experience. The second game is a bit more of a hit or miss, but I still loved it all the same. The fact that every party member had to die in some way to join your party (not much of a spoiler given that the lead is a valkyrie.) appealed to my tragedy addiction, even if this storytelling method limited how much they could be developed. Also some characters were just useless. I'm looking at you, Grey.
Persona: I'm one of the few who played Eternal Punishment before P3 came out and became hugely popular. I never thought I'd love a disgruntled, middle-aged tap buster and extortionist who wears loud golden suits so much. The high random encounter rate was irritating, but the negotiation system, which I liked in Nocturne and other SMT games, was still fun, and the story involving kotodama (rumors becoming reality) is madly appealing to my modern fantasy sensibilities. I think Persona should be respected as a rare rpg series to not be sci-fi or fantasy; that is something people really take for granted. I just wish I'd played Innocent Sin back then, though there wasn't a port, so that was pretty impossible. It's really only half a story. P3 and P4 were great games and some of my favorite ones, but P2EP still holds a lot of weight with me, mostly because it dealt with adults with believable, modern, adult problems, something you don't see in a lot of games.
I also really liked Xenogears, Tales, and Star Ocean. I played Shadow Hearts Covenant and loved that game as well. I could ramble for ages about these games and pick apart why I liked them again and again and it'd never be enough. If even a little bit of these games enters a newer title, I'm at least somewhat positively disposed towards it.
I have to admit I'm a little disgruntled. I feel that to many in the West, jrpg was defined entirely by FF, yet most of the games I enjoyed avoided the pitfalls that later damaged FF and by extension the jrpg's image in the west. (Though that was IMO also due to aggressive marketing from Western developers.) As someone who never really "got" the more freeform, choose your own adventure style wrpg, I've got a huge bias, to say the least. Games like Baldur's Gate 2 and Fallout were fun in their own ways, but failed to engage me the way a lot of console rpgs did. I guess I was just a sucker for getting railroaded.
ã€Œè’¼æ°—ç ²ã€ã‚’使ã‚ã–ã‚‹ã‚’å¾—ãªã„!
AV by Kura-Ou
Wiki (Last updated 01/16)
My Balmung profile.
AV by Kura-Ou
Wiki (Last updated 01/16)
My Balmung profile.
