JRPG general discussion

Seems to be the same team as Tokyo Mirage Sessions which I thought was aggressively mediocre in a lot of ways. Still there was enough in it that I enjoyed that I would try another game from them.

Have you tried Triangle Strategy. I've never played Tactics Ogre but it seems to be compared to it quite a bit in terms of gameplay. I'm really enjoying it so far. Dialogue can be a bit wooden but battles are great

Wouldn't say more hard-core but I'm finding it more tactical. Using terrain to your advantage is much more of a feature in TS. Turn order works on initiative based on speed, I think, whereas the FE games I've played are all phase based. There's also a lot more use of elements, like freezing the ground to slow enemies down, you can make ice walls to block paths and use oil and fire combos. TS also has much less a focus on developing your team into different classes. Each character has their own class and you promote within that class. So a mounted character will start out as a mounted character and always be mounted as you level them.

Story wise it's got a Game of Thrones kind of vibe with a lot of political intrigue and betrayal. Lot of exposition between battles and there's a phase before each battle where you can gather Intel and scope out battlefield terrain advantages.

After downloading it in 2016, playing the intro briefly in 2018, then on and off since 2020, I have at last reached the end of Tales of Symphonia. There will be no encore!

Been trying to get better at seeing the end credits roll on games I start since what gaming life I have is largely dominated by Assassin's Creed these days, the paralysis of choice is irksome, and my younger self would be appalled at the lack of focus on his favourite genre. (He'd side-eye peeps calling the new AC games RPGs too.) So in the past couple of years or so I've finished Suikoden III, FF1, Dragons Quest I through III. Most of those are short, sure, but I'm flying through them in comparison with the before times.

Ridley obtained the title of "Casual Gamer"

New Xenoblade Chronicles 3 trailer with release date.

I've played around 5 or 6 hours I think, just got my third party member. The combat gameplay is simplistic so far and the whole game is literally just repetitive fetch quests one after the other going back and forth between the same few locations. Despite that, it's got a lot of charm, a really nice art style, good music and likeable characters. So even though the story progress is glacial under the mountain of fetch quests, I'm quite enjoying it as a way to chill out in the evening. It's a nice change of pace after a bunch of big open world AAA games I've played through recently.

Great news, can't wait to play them again, although I haven't played Golden or Royal just vanilla

Port Persona 1 and Personas 2, cowards!