I totally want to talk about JRPGs.

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Some favorites are Dragon Warrior III (Dragon Quest), EarthBound (SNES), and uh...most of the Zelda titles, which technically aren't RPGs.

Good memories watching my friend play BoF3, but I'd like to beat the first two games first, and...I keep getting sidetracked there...

Lots of nostalgia for the first two FF US games (I & IV), and V, and sometimes from watching my friend play VII, but playing them today turns into more of a chore for me.

This week I've been playing Ever Oasis (3DS), and it gets really good once the tutorial stuff finally eases up.

Ugh, same here. In BotW it was tolerable, but I wish most games would let you disable it.

Also annoying in newer US games where you walk through a town and there's two different voice actors, with NPCs saying the same four lines over and over as you pass them

To answer this question, since I'm a fan of the games, Legend of Heroes is a series of RPGs by Falcom (most known for the Ys games), and is split into a few subseries about different countries on a continent (except for 1-5 which have no relation to the later games and AFAIK aren't recommended). They're worth playing though but do know that the first game in each series is typically slow-paced and more focused around character development than plot development.

Trails in the Sky involves a couple of apprentice Bracers (ie. mercenary police, basically) in the monarchy of Liberl who are travelling to get experience as Bracers, and to find information about their missing (also Bracer) dad. Trails of Cold Steel is about a bunch of kids attending a military college in the neighbouring Erebonian empire, a militaristic country which is facing a potential civil war between the upper-class faction & the regional ruling families, and the emperor's assigned chancellor and de-facto ruler.

Those are the two series that have been released in English and it's recommended (but not necessarily required) to play Trails in the Sky first, on account of some returning characters and lore context.

It's pretty hard to describe it as a series. Trails in the Sky has a lot of charm, fun characters and a nicely escalating plot in the second game. Cold Steel has a much better story IMO, a better battle system and some excellent music. One thing the games are known for is that almost every NPC has a story and is reasonably identifiable; some of them have some pretty involved dialogue chains that evolve with the plot and have no bearing on the story or anything else but they're there, and it's a nice detail.

I love this! I probably have about 10 or so new games to look at!

The RPGs I like best are Pokemon, Rune Factory, Dragon Quest, Fantasy Life and Lunar: Dragon Song (haven't played the last one in ages though, but I loved it when I did).

I could talk about JRPGs all day. Have you ever played Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne? It's my favourite JRPG.

You've probably at least heard of Persona, which is a sub-series of SMT, and Persona 5 in particular is highly recommended IMO (in fact, SMT is the most consistently strong series of JRPGs there is). Whereas the Persona games are based around the visual novel elements as much as the combat and attrition-based dungeon exploration, the main SMT series games are full-on dungeon crawlers with a more extensive focus on monster-collection.

Nocturne begins with your character witnessing the apocalypse and being transformed into a 'demi-fiend'. You wake up and begin exploring the ruins of Tokyo, which have curved around to form an enclosed sphere. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic premise and the game doesn't focus on story at all; the game has a real sense of humour and even implied deprecation of its own premise at points, with many of the demons you encounter being silly, confused or pitiable rather than intimidating. Anyway, your strongest ability is that you can recruit demons by persuading them to join your team. At any time you can have three demons in your party, plus yourself. You can fuse together demons, and to some extent you can select the skills which a fused demon will inherit, which allows you a lot of customisation options. Demons can also evolve. Your character gains abilities at level up by equipping one of many magatama, which allows a good degree of customisation of your character.

The demons themselves are based off of figures from various mythologies and religions, the designs are varied and interesting enough that you feel compelled to recruit as many as you can. This is something that the series excels at, and this includes Persona 5, which inherited and improved upon the recruitment system here.

I just saw this post and felt like responding:



I know this feeling. Realising that many games I enjoyed as a kid were running 1/6 slower than full speed because of bad conversion, and even the better ones running at 1/6 fewer frames, was a kicker.



JUSSSSTINNNNN!

Grandia really is a great game, the cast is super charming and I loved that goofy voice acting too. The progression of the game was really satisfying, the stakes raise gradually until by the end, without spoiling anything, it's fully intense. The game had some cool themes about colonialism, militarism and propaganda that honestly worked really well while essentially being about some dumb kid who wants to explore the world and help his friends while being antagonised by people that don't want him to.



I found Persona 5 more difficult, to be honest. The dungeons were far more involved and I sucked at actually planning for them, getting the necessary provisions like coffee, just everything really. I died a bunch of bosses especially the Museum's final boss, and enough times to random encounters. P5 definitely has more in-depth social/dungeon interplay, there are greater benefits to doing well in the social part of the game, and that probably tripped me up the most.

i wish i had more patience to play then. you play other geners or only j-rpgs? my problem with it it that i hate grinding, is so boring. i liked playing chrono trigger some months ago because if has no grinding most of time. can you recomend me j-rpgs where i can play with no grinding or little grinding? this breath of fire 3, has any relationship with bof 1 and 2?

I loved The World Ends With You on the Nintendo DS. It had no real grinding and outside of mandatory battles all combat could be done when you want it to. There are some mobile ports of that game that have significantly different gameplay mechanics but touched up graphics that I haven't played. I think some other games they've done since on portable platforms have followed a similar design, like the Bravely Default series.

Breath of Fire III is in the same universe, but I think it's closest related to the first game. I can't think of any game off the top of my head that doesn't have a little grinding, but I'm weird in the sense that I like level grinding. I usually watch stuff on my laptop to keep my mind busy. Sorry it took a bit to reply- I've been so busy lately!

I loved JRPGs when I was a kid. These days I play mostly sandbox stuff, but still appreciate the story-telling capabilities of jrpgs.

A good, different kind of jrpg you could try is Seventh Saga. It's absurdly hard and doesn't hold your hand, and in some cases I hear it's nearly impossible to beat, but it did leave enough of an impression on me to remember it nearly a couple decades after first playing it.

And while not a typical JRPG, Final Fantasy Tactics is my all time favorite console game, next to Romance of the Three Kingdoms Series and Monster Rancher.

Weird, someone else mentioned that game in a different thread, not a week ago.

Hope you don't mind if I copy and paste my reply:

Here's a patch that changes the difficulty back to how the original Japanese version was: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/264/

Yeah, I think I mentioned it in a previous post I made a while back too. And someone (Maybe it was you) posted a link to a hak for the difficulty. Cool stuff.

I'd download the emulator/hak myself, but am a bit paranoid about the legality of that stuff these days.

You can't go wrong with Persona. I never actually played the main titles though. The only one I played was Persona Q for the 3DS. I have Persona 4 Golden for the Vita, but never found the time. Or rather, I know that if I started playing it, I wouldn't have time anymore. But if the main titles are as good as Persona Q, then goddamn, it's a really great series. And they're probably better, since well, they're the main titles.

As for the classics, my favorites are Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, though I never finished the latter.

Pokemon, you also can't go wrong with. Another one that I really liked was Dragon Quest IX for the DS. Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii is also incredible.

And while not a jRPG, Fire Emblem is amazing. The GBA ones are really good, especially FE7. Fire Emblem : Awakening for the 3DS is also one that is really good, and that I also didn't finish.

If you haven't got time for Persona - and I understand this entirely, Persona 5 took over 80 hours - then you should try playing mainline SMT! Nocturne (aka. SMT3) is less than half as long as a Persona game and essentially is an extended version of those mechanics where you recruit a party of demons (aka. personae) to fight with.

That said, Persona 5 is the first Persona game where they did a good job of incorporating the positives from the mainline games with the necessary restrictions of the Persona series. The introduction of the conversation system, but without any element of luck, is a massive improvement, as is the simple idea of making every enemy something that you can control yourself.

Oh gosh, yeah, maybe. If that was you, it was either a while ago, or my memory's getting much worse =)

I wouldn't be that paranoid, it's highly unlikely that any lawyers would come after you, but if it really bothers you, I know there are less illegal ways to get around it. I know there are certain SNES clones (Retron maybe?) that let you apply IPS patches to physical cartridges.

Being almost 35, and I've been playing PC games since I was about 8 or so. I could really spend hours upon hours talking about all the games I've played.

My favorite RPG has to be NeverWinter Nights, and Baldur's Gate. I didn't really care much for Baldur's Gate 2.

Diablo 1 & 2 were also my absolute favorites.

Dungeon Siege from 2003 was also one of my absolute favorites. I was sad to see this one go into obscurity. DS2 was "okay", not really a favorite.

Trying to work out what of the games you mentioned are JRPG...