MagusSmurf

Breath of Fire - 5/10 My opinion from prior playthroughs was that this game was a pretty mid SNES RPG with some decent ideas but janky execution. And...yeah, that's still my opinion but even more so. Soundtrack is good but they usually are for any reasonably decent JRPG. imo there's an artistry to old sidescroller graphics that most overhead view games really struggled to match in comparison - and that's generally the case with the exploration segments here. The battle scenes are better and actually very good for a 1993 SNES JRPG - but it's not quite at the technical or stylistic level that they enhance the enjoyment much for me. The character designs for the party are great, but the in-game assets aren't quite able to fully convey their appeal. Gameplay is pretty whatever. Mostly generic RPG stuff, and tends to be really easy at that. I don't necessarily mind an easy JRPG but there's not enough here to make the gameplay experience especially compelling. The dungeons are reasonably good I guess. But there's a lot of really weird balance and jank: While most enemies are nothing, there are a very small number of normal enemies with extremely disproportionately powerful attacks that can totally screw you over if you don't off them ASAP - but there's little to watch out for otherwise. A lot of bosses have neither group attacks nor particularly powerful single-target damage nor much else going for them so they can't really do much to threaten you. Like, for real, on group attacks: Gremlin has one, and then Cloud has one mid-game (that in my experience he's not very consistent in using), and Myst has one too that I think was weaker than Cloud's, and other than those I don't remember any with any notable strength until HornToad which is pretty deep into the game. Some pieces of equipment, despite having good defense values for the point in the game they become available and nothing to indicate there's a problem (some of them are even normal storebought stuff), have a hidden negative extra effect of increasing damage you received by a hidden multiplier (varies but up to x2), for no apparent reason. The WolfHt deserves particular note as one of these; Gremlin is much easier when Bo isn't taking double damage from his group attack because of it. After the first third or so the main character can transform into a dragon that typically makes him much stronger, but it takes up a turn to do so and normal battles mostly don't last long enough to make this worthwhile. Does speed up the typically nonthreatening boss battles a lot though. Then lategame you get a super special dragon transformation that all 8 party members have to turn into that has 999 HP and deals 999 damage to all enemies. There's no real catch; if you have it and use it, then with a few healing items (and sometimes you don't even need them), it just kind of wins the last several boss battles for you mostly on autobattle, and it's even required to unlock the true final boss. Your 5th party member, Gobi, kinda sucks. He has fairly bad stats and his spells only work underwater and there's only one underwater dungeon. He joins pretty weak with bad equipment and with no other characters in the party, you have to reach a town you've never been to and aren't told the location of, with shops, inns, and save points inaccessible until you get there - but if you game over (and the enemies can be pretty threatening when Gobi's by himself) the game doesn't really have a sensible place to send you back to that's consistent with how the game generally works, so it just spawns you at the save point at your destination with the (not super punishing) game over monetary penalty deducted. It's not a major problem but feels unfair and super dumb. One of your party members, Karn, gains the ability to get much stronger by fusing with some other party members (this persists outside of battles)...but it's so much of an improvement that, except for brief sections where you need their overworld abilities, Bo and Gobi might as well not exist after you get it. Ox stops existing lategame as well for the same reason. One of Karn's fusions can only be used when underwater. At the earliest point you can get it, the only underwater sections left are a couple brief trips to reach other sections of the overworld - and by then you have underwater transportation available that nullifies random encounters. Mogu joins so weak so late he's pretty much useless. While the rest of the game isn't immune from such issues, the endgame feels particularly padded with questionable time wasting and NPC quests - climbing up to and through Tock Tower twice (the developers seemed aware this was annoying; when the story dictates you'd have to go a third time the game instantly sends you to just before the end of it; and then there's a fourth time if you want to get what was in that last treasure chest it teased you about, which ends up not really being worthwhile); gathering the items for the amnesia cure; fixing the elevator; finding out you suddenly need to go get a special item elsewhere when you get to the top of the elevator...this is pretty much all back to back and then there's more to open up the final dungeon a little later. The experience/gold received for random encounters in the last few dungeons seemed just outright worse than it was previously. There's no indication of how much experience it takes to reach the next level up - and the increasing amount of experience to level up scales up very hard sometimes. Most of this stuff isn't a big deal and not all of it's necessarily even bad but all together the game feels very unpolished. The general set-up and storytelling are heavily reminiscent of Dragon Quest, and Dragon Quest IV in particular, but I don't think Dragon Quest storytelling is particularly good. It produces reasonably memorable local RPG crisis scenarios for your party to solve, but often doesn't care much about a running or overall plot, or even about your own party members beyond maybe how they fit into the local crisis where they join. So over the course of a 20+ hour game the stories often up feeling kind of hollow. I suspect Yuji Horii knew the potential shortcomings of this style too, which is likely why so many of the Dragon Quest games have unique gimmicks to how they're structured to spice things up. I admire the attempt even if I'm not too impressed by many of the results. But Breath of Fire 1 doesn't really have a similar gimmick, and the negative effect this had on the storytelling, despite some neat ideas for local RPG crises, is apparent. Another miss is that almost all of the local crisis villains (some of which are reoccurring!) for the first two-thirds are generic evil empire commanders who don't even names or unique designs until they transform for the battle where you kill them. This was also not one of Ted Woolsey's better translation efforts, but given just how bad Capcom's own work there for the sequel would be, letting Square handle the localization on this game was probably the right call.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/vance-project-2025-book-trump-heritage-foundation oh okay we didn't REALLY need confirmation that trump supported project 2025 but thanks vance

Never played RE2make but while OG RE2 is a pretty good game and all, I've never been super impressed with it. It was great for 1998 but I'm not gonna endorse any of the horror and atmosphere, the combat, the story, the map design, or the resource management as being particularly transcendent. I feel like it owes a lot of its reputation for being good relatively early in the genre and being the sales high water mark of this style of game - so it has a history, playrate, and exposure a lot of its competitors don't. I do think RE1make is basically better and echo Sumez as wanting to know why RE2 over RE1make. I'm not a diehard RE fan but I don't feel I've ever seen a particularly good answer on this in Resident Evil series discussions. The old school fans who prefer the older style games always want to hold up RE2 and have a go at 4 or especially 4's successors but why they're holding up 2 as the best of the old school games over RE1make seems to not get examined.

ATTN: Biden gtfo I don't care who replaces him, the man is a walking corpse. The Democrats are holding an empty hand with him as the nominee. Choosing someone else could go terribly but even so that would just leave us in a situation only as bad as the status quo, because Biden's almost certainly not winning.

Dragon Warrior I & II SNES - 5/10 Had played the GBC version of the remake before but never this one. It's way more tolerable than the NES versions but doesn't really ever rise above "okay." Also the English patch that doesn't have ridiculous glitches still lacks a proper "English localization", so you get nonsense like the DQ1 villain being "King Dragon." Have some goddamn sense, translators. This is DQ1, not a ProZD sketch. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - 4/10 Having a "beginner RPG" with relatively simple mechanics, lowish difficulty, and good QoL was an idea that made sense. They way overdid it though and also forgot to attach those things to an actually good game.

Yeah I'll readily agree that NES FFI has a lot of problems, I'm not a fan of the game, but when you take out all the challenge and resource managements aspects, what's the point, really? Agreed on PS1 Origins probably being the best version for fixing the QoL and the more egregious glitches without taking a hatchet to the gameplay. I wouldn't recommend any version of FFI either way though. Too little of what people really care about the series is represented there. Go with FFVI or FFVII.

5/10 Lackluster combat redeemed somewhat by good graphics and music but stretching gameplay I don't think is very good in an action genre that generally asks you to actually pay attention across a 20+ hour game still kind of annoys even with good production values. Story and characters have a few amusing gags but don't have much going for them either. If they had put more effort into the dungeon design and had cool puzzles or structurally interesting places to explore I'd probably be more generous but instead it's mostly just straightforward hallways to have combat in and given what I thought of the combat that's not doing the game a lot of favors. Agreed on Final Fantasy Adventure being better. I kinda think almost every reasonably reputable Zelda-ish game of the era is better.

For me, there's an element of "which one do I dislike less?" there. I think they're both sorta bad. (I dislike Dragon Quest I too!) -Dragon Quest II is a lot more polished but still fundamentally has NES-era menus and the typical Dragon Quest lack of one-button-press interaction with the world so that doesn't take it as far as it could...but is still very worth noting when its opponent here is freaking FFII. -Dragon Quest II feels less special at this point. There are lots of old JRPGs with exploration and a boat. FFII feels like it has, if not necessarily uniqueness, then at least much more of a niche to fill with its weird stuff. -Dragon Quest II more than any other game in its franchise I've played likes to throw particularly aggravating random encounters at you. -The Cave to Rhone is grueling but can be figured out through trial and error and notekeeping and once you know exactly what to do you should have a reasonable chance at getting through it each attempt. The hours of grinding in Rhone afterward are a massive bore for me, though. I remember the worst parts of FFII not even being the stat-raising/lowering system everyone complains about. It's all the glitches and how unpolished everything is in ways I remember feeling much more consequential than they were in FFI.

The N64 might not have particularly many RPG and Strategy games but they do exist - including Japanese ones with no translation patch. Is playing the untranslated ones really a realistic ask here?

3 and 8 were the only ones I voted Dragon Quest on. Haven't played DQX, DQXI, or FFXI. Quite sure I'd be voting FFX and DQXI for those if I had played both choices though, I'm not an MMO guy.

Symphony of the Night's particular area design and balancing often means new areas you explore and even some bosses have zero difficulty and struggle to damage you even your first time through. Like, has the Death boss battle killed you? Do you even remember what he does in the fight? I'm no for both and I don't think the former is because I'm particularly good at the game. Fellow same-series Metroidvanias Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia heavily mitigate this big issue of SotN's while still having map exploration and RPG mechanics. I don't think Symphony of the Night is even a notably longer game than the latter three. Symphony of the Night is good and I appreciate its ambition for its time period and some of its weird quirks but I don't think it's as well put together of a game as the other four I mentioned. (It is better than Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance though) If anyone wants to make the case for why Symphony of the Night's actual gameplay and game design (as opposed to being nostalgic, influential, 10/10 voice acting, or whatever) is better than those latter games in its own series, I'm all ears.

Fantastic game but not the best in its series - that would be Trials & Tribulations.

I’ve played “hacks” of these games in the sense that I’ve beaten both 8-bit FE games with unofficial translation patches applied! But not substantial gameplay alterations like you’re talking about. Not a fan! The quality of life and interface issues are just too much for me. I’ll give Gaiden credit for how its quirks and oddities minimize a lot of the issues and I see it as the much better game as a result but in exchange it kinda doesn’t bother with actual map design. My biggest problem with the actual mechanics was probably the critical rate. Later games tended to have mechanics to let you mitigate enemy crit rates but I don’t think the first two have any of that. So going heavy on ranged attacks like you did sounds like a good approach. Good luck!

It’s kind of like Chrono Cross in that the audiovisuals are really great but the story and gameplay both go some overly weird places and have issues - here the story is the (comparably) normal if quirky part but the gameplay goes completely off the deep end into weird experimentation whereas In CC it’s the other way around. FFVIII has an actually good main character though in Squall. If you like Squall, he can probably carry you through the sometimes rocky beats of the plot (I ain’t gonna defend the orphanage thing) and a supporting cast that generally doesn’t fill their roles quite as well. I didn’t care for the battle system much but from all I’ve heard I did it wrong in my single playthrough. Apparently the better way to do is to play a decent amount of Triple Triad and then use your rewards from it to break the game to the extent you see fit? Cool card stuff certainly sounds better than spamming Draw Magic at any rate.

Mario has the deepest lore