JRPG general discussion

Suikoden I & II HD remasters announced.

Hope its a full retranslation. I enjoyed Suikoden 5 though I never beat it so I'd be up for a new version of the psx games.

Tried playing Final Fantasy XV again and I just can’t get with it, honestly feels like one of the weirdest games I’ve ever played. I can almost kind of see what they were trying to do with the whole ‘it’s a road trip’ but tonally it’s just all over the place. Like they took everything that was culturally popular during its development and threw it in there.

Started this the other evening on Switch (reduced to €8 in the eShop). Lovely art style, semi-annoying lead character but what struck me was the loading times!! Apparently they even patched the game but they are very poor. Between 8 and 13 seconds in and out of the random battles. I'm not sure I have the patience for a full game of that!

Chained Echoes is a great little game so far. About 5 hrs in and it's hard to put down. Lovely pixel art, soundtrack is great and battle system is nice.

"Great" saving getting the bundle of the 2 Persona games.

New trailer for the re releases as well.

Yeah the opening was great and there's been a lot more references and homages to classic games as it goes on, without ever feeling unnatural or forced.

I'm around 40 hours in, at the beginning of act 3 where I've spent several hours doing side stuff before I continue the story and the game just continues to impress me.

The battle system is superb. You really have to think about each character's stats and abilities and put a lot of thought into which skills to assign, what formation to use, which crystals and class emblems to assign to who. I regularly spend ages tweaking my set up. Then when actually in battle you have to use your whole arsenal. Damage over time, status effects, buffs and debuffs are all important in almost every single battle, and the way the overdrive meter works means you always have to react on the fly and adjust your strategy a little bit. The clever approach to the levelling system eliminates grinding and allows much tighter balancing of the difficulty too.

Outside of that, I've been enjoying the amount of side stuff as the game opens up beyond the first chapter. Just exploring and finding things is a joy where there's always something to discover, and there's neat little traversal puzzles here and there to keep that interesting too.

The characters and dialog are engaging and well written and there is plenty of humour. The overarching plot is fairly standard jrpg stuff for the most part, but there continue to be twists and revelations so I don't quite know where it's going.

Honestly right now I think it might be my favourite jrpg in 20+ years.

I was probably a bit hyperbolic saying it's my favourite in 20+ years, I don't know how you compare this to something fully modern like Xenoblade, but it absolutely feels like the very best of the games I grew up with and loved 20 years ago so if you have any nostalgia for the likes of Chrono Trigger, Suikoden, early Final Fantasy games etc then you won't be disappointed.

And it's free on Gamepass.

Pick my next RPG for me, please: Persona Q or Dragon Quest VII?

You really shouldn't need to grind - the game is structured so you can't really grind anyway as only bosses give you GP and you can't level up without GP, so you can grind regular enemies all you want and you'll never get new skills or major stat increases, though you can level up the skills you've already unlocked.

It is worth exploring and making sure you get all the chests and have the best equipment you can. If you're really struggling with a boss it might be worth restructuring your party and equipment specifically responding to their strengths and weaknesses, whether elements, status effects or attack patterns (I don't remember the specifics of that particular boss)

It is challenging for sure, I've had a bunch of bosses that took 3+ attempts to beat but it's always doable by switching up my strategy and I've never needed to go and grind.