Keep Calm And Discuss Retro Generally!

Sparks43 wrote: »

Think we need a Rhythm Tengoku thread?


Or i need help one or the other

From Sera, she says there's loads of touhou ones as well:

I think you should also try some different types of JRPG. I think you've just played too many square enix RPGs. These are built on the dragon quest template but there's a much larger range of JRPGs. A lot of games in the final fantasy main series and a few others have a very 'emo' style of art and writing that I can see being off putting. However stuff like Chrono Trigger, Grandia or Dragon Quest games are a lot more play and a lot more fun, the feel more like saturday morning cartoons than the emo angst of the FF games. The exception would be Dragon Quest V which has one of the best stories in videogames. Earthbount and Mother 3 also take that breezy cartoony feel really well but also deal with some very deep subject matter as well and not in the anime teen angst way of Final Fantasy.

Stuff like Etrian Odyssey are based more on dungeon crawlers like Wixardry and have more in common with western RPGs than most stuff from Square Enix. Japan has been churning out great dungeon crawlers long after they went out of fashion in the West and they are only now coming out here in now due to the success of Etrian Odyssey. If you want a more mature and story driven take on the dungeon crawler then definitely try Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.

Which nicely segues to the Shin Megami series which really has far more in common with western RPGs than with stuff like Final Fantasy. Player choice is a big element of these games and it marries player choice with excellent JRPG battle mechanics. All the games I've played in the series have had some excellent writing as well that is far more mature than even any bioware or bethesda game. Even when the games deal with teenagers like in the Persona games it's a realistic take on the issues, problems and life experience by real teens rather than the stupid big hair and swords of final fantasy. The phantasy star series pretty much ignores final fantasy and is more influenced by wizardry and ultima. The earlier games are very archaic but phantasy star 4 was a hugely successful modernisation of the formula and one of the finest RPGs ever made.

Then you've got something like Xenoblade which despite being from japan has a very western RPG feel to it with real time battles were characters attack automatically as in a MMO, multiple sidequests and massive non-linear areas to explore. It also helps that it's got the finest sci-fi story in any game for a long time. It's the perfect marriage of east and west modern RPG philosophies.

So what I'm trying to say is seperating RPGs between JRPG and WRPG is just wrong since there's cross over between them. There are RPGs outside of Squaresoft and Final Fantasy and many of these RPGs from japan stick close to the template set down by the Ultima games which is what most modern western RPGs are based on. Also there's many japanese RPGs that don't cling to the terrible anime cliche stories that squaresofts games usually fall into.

Even from squaresoft they can offer something different. Their strategy RPG offerings are usually great, Final Fantasy Tactics was created by a different team to the usual final fantasy games and has one of the finest battle systems ever conceived. I'm a huge fan of the Front mission series. And then there is Tactics Ogre. Great battle system, lots of choice in terms of tactics and how the story unfolds (possibly more than even the mass effect games or at least the decisions you make affect the story a lot more) and a wonderful storyline based on the break up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan war of the 90's.