Rumors are going rampit and in all directions for Wednesday's Nintendo Direct. One stood out, Capcom is planning to reveal a new entry for a forgotten Capcom franchise. I'm hoping it's Breath of Fire... the series needs a revival.

For those who haven't played any of them, both 1 and 2 are currently available on NSO, and the popular 3 and 4 are in LIMBO waiting to be ported. Breath of Fire 4 is a personal favorite, released on the PS1, this beautiful isometric jrpg is in many regards is a 'Hidden Gem.' And then there's the 5th entry in which we don't talk about...

So here's hoping they announce Breth of Fire on the upcoming Direct.

First of all, if such a topic like this one was done here before, then I apologize because lately I have become fascinated at JRPGs with a disjointed structure.

To help clarify better why I specifically chose Fire Emblem: Fates in my picture, well it’s because the game is quite infamous for how it was handled when it first came in the USA as fans of Fire Emblem: Awakening said that Fates had a very dodgy translation, and was initially split into multiple parts, kind of like Pokemon.

I have been interested in seeing which version to get that all the routes included, but also I want to see if there are any fan hacks that fix the aforementioned dodgy translation issues since I hear some support conversations were completely changed in the English language version.

But the other thing I would like to add is that I wonder what other big name RPGs have had a similar effect to them where a game wants to deliver a compelling narrative, but certain factors suddenly get In the way as again I have a fascination with RPGs that have a disjointed structure to them.

Game's releasing September 17th, I personally haven't been this excited for a game in a long while.

Masato Kato, scenario writer for Chrono trigger wrote and developed this project, and it also features tracks from Mitsuda. It's got a customizable party of almost 20 members to choose from and build. I'm absolutely stoked.

Good RPGs can be tricky.

A solid story can always be ruined by a prolonged second act that introduces that the last stretch of the game is actually way past the Finish line.

The game can be great but still have a silly prolonged middle.

While I would throw E33 under the bus here. I simply can't because the game is so solid even in this last act.

Or tales of arise second act as a whole.

HOWEVER Vision of mana Is my pick for this.

The game is for the most time great. And if you do all the side quests which I would encourage NO ONE to do. You could easily clock in at 50-60h.

However once the bad guy gets solidifying you are forced to revisit the old location for the new boss fights to reach the bad guy.

These part felt so.... 90s? In design and easily added another 10h.

Issue I thought this was an issue wasnt that the battles were bad. They truly weren't. But they were really poorly implemented to the story and felt like a side quest at best for me.

Any game that you have that comes to mind that overstayed it's welcome?

Hello,

This is Baito Fight!! developed by Kansai Connection, a team based in Osaka Japan, and published by KINGOFSHIBUYA Ltd.

It's a daily life sim JRPG for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Playdate handheld console. 
You play as Anansi, an ex-baseball player who's recently moved into a new apartment building, only to find that trouble has followed him there.

Baito is Japanese slang for part-time job, and so this is a part-time game about having a part-time job fighting devils that conveniently infest your apartment building.

By part-time game, I mean that you play it daily, talking to neighbor NPCs in a Japanese apartment complex, engaging in baseball-themed RPG battles, and every day you play it the story and battle content changes.

Most days you can play as little as 15 minutes and still get a good amount of content.

Influences are Animal Crossing and Majora’s Mask, with a bit of Dragon Quest 1.

You can find it on Steam, Epic, Itch, and Stove.
$7.99 USD in most regions.
¥1000 in Japan.

For the Playdate version, it's on the Itch store, but also available natively on Catalog if you prefer that storefront.

Paper Mario for the N64 is a game that streamlines the JRPG formula, but also does a few unique things that I wish other games did. HP, MP, and inventory are shrunk down significantly and that makes the game more immediate and engaging.

Your attacks and the enemy's attacks do the same amount of damage every time (and add and reduce the same amount with timed attacks/blocks) to eliminate guess work, being limited to only 10 items made me use them a lot more than if I had an unlimited inventory, your limited to one out of your eight partners at a time but you can swap out at any time at the cost of one turn unless you use a certain badge.

And this is where I get into the badge system, which I think is a work of genius. Each of these badges take up a certain amount of Badge a points (BP), and you gain more BP when you level up if you so choose. Some of the badges add new moves, add health/fp, more attack, or even add new properties to existing mechanics like allowing you to swap partners without wasting a turn (which is incredibly useful). Finding new badges and mixing and matching them is really fun and I wish more games had a system like this.

With all that being said the game is quite easy, and you don't really have an incentive to take advantage of the badge system. It would have been nice if they had harder difficulties

I’m playing Elnard right now or the Japanese version of The 7th Saga, and it’s brought back a very specific memory from playing JRPGs as a kid.

For most of Elnard, the balance has actually been pretty reasonable. It’s definitely not like The 7th Saga, where the North American version is notorious for making you grind throughout the game. I've never actually played it but this is what I've researched about the game as I am playing Elnard. I’ve been able to play normally, fight the enemies I run into, level up naturally, and make steady progress. Hardly any grinding.

But now I’m about 23 hours in, close to the end, and suddenly I’ve hit that wall. You spend the whole game progressing normally, and then you reach the final dungeon or one of the last bosses and the game basically spikes in difficulty and you just got to get stronger.

I’m around level 33 right now and I’m starting to wonder if I need to push myself to 35, or maybe even closer to 40, just to comfortably get through this last stretch. The dungeons aren't even all that long.

But man, it brought back memories of playing SNES RPGs as a kid. I remember this happening in older games where everything would be going fine, and then suddenly near the end you’d just have to stop progressing and grind for a few hours.

What makes it more annoying is that I was really hoping to finish Elnard today. I’ve already been playing it all morning since I woke up at 5am and it’s afternoon now, and I’m just done. I don’t want to spend the rest of the day running around fighting the same enemies just to raise some numbers.

So instead of finishing it today, it’ll probably take me another couple of days simply because I don’t feel like sitting there grinding for several hours straight.

And thinking about it, I really can’t remember the last modern JRPG I played that made me do this. Even when I think back to a lot of PlayStation era RPGs, I don’t remember getting near the end and suddenly feeling like I had to stop everything and grind levels. Usually just playing the game normally seemed to be enough.

Maybe I’m forgetting some obvious examples, though.

I played this game in 2023 and completely forgot the title and what is it about but now I really want to play it again!!

This might not be accurate since I dont remember much about the game but I will try my best,

the game is about a women who wake up in a train and find herself in a room full of weirdo, they all turn out to be a witch(?) including the women herself. But she did not knew it. They all did not remember what had happen to them (?)
They all got into a pair (1female1male) And as they leave the train, they found themself in a train station that had been broke down. There are also corpse, they then decided to find a way out when suddenly one of them is getting murder. Then they had another problem because now they need to find out who is the murder.
Thats all what I seems to remember... Also the game is not complete and only had 1/2 chapter? Is underrated. The art is very pretty tho. I REALLY hope you guys can help me find this game despite how little the information I gave....!!!!

Currently starting my first playthrough of lunar 1 and 2. I saw them on the Nintendo switch eshop on sale but can't get it rn. It gave me a reason to bust out this little guy, it's an anbernic rg 353v. I've got some fantastic games on here to play like jade cocoon, skies of Arcadia, brave fencer musashi. I also decided to get the psp version of lunar 1 as I heard it was slightly different. I read there are some MAJOR differences between the 2 versions. Is the psp version better? Are there any things that are a bit quirky about this game that I should know in advance?

Hey everyone, I’ve never really played Japanese RPGs before, so I’m kinda trying to get into the genre.
I’ve been looking at the Persona series because the themes, characters, and overall style really caught my attention. I’m especially interested in Persona 3, 4, and 5, but I have absolutely no idea where I should start 😭
Are these games beginner-friendly if you’ve never played a JRPG before? And which Persona game would you recommend starting with?
Also, is there anything else outside of Persona that you’d recommend for someone trying to get into JRPGs? Any console is fine.
Thanks 🙏🏻

So I love hard games. I beat Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Geometry Dash, Ninja Gaiden on NES... I love the frustration, it gives me like a masochistic kick.

But what I absolutely HATE and DON'T WANT is when it's cheap difficulty:

1. It brings you all the way back so you have to redo a 30 minute long section.

2. The enemies have tons of health and damage and you have none.

3. The game is just plain unfair in some way, etc.

Are there any games where the difficulty is actually fun, and satisfying to grind through and beat instead of just "oh yeah here's just a bunch of stupid, artifcial, low-effort difficulty nonsense." Of course I don't expect the game to be perfect, but at least not absurdly egregious.

(Any console is fine. I only played FF6 and FF13 so far, but I'd like to get into the deep end now.)

So I just finished like my 5th Xenoblade 2 playthrough including NG+ and I'm just finishing up the Trials of Mana remake. Looking for something with a really meaty story that I can really sink my teeth into. After XC2, the story I'm Trials of Mana just wasn't doing it for me (great game overall tho).

I'm looking at Grandia HD Collection or Suikoden Collection on switch. Two games for one sounds really good. I'm really digging Grandia's aesthetic but I'm intrigued by Suikoden's like bazillion playable characters. How much playtime would I get out of either collection and which do you think has stronger story?

Rammy's Great Adventure 1 & 2 Remake (ラミィの大冒険 1&2 リメイク) are mystery-dungeon games (i.e. like Shiren) for Steam and Switch packed as one product. I noticed all reviews so far at Steam are in Japanese (except one in Chinese), so they are completely unknown outside Japan. Don't worry, they support (only) English.

The OGs came out in 00s as giveaways bundled with Japanese PC brand "FMV" (Japaneese Wikipedia). The first game came out in 2004 or earlier [1] and the 2nd in about 2007 [2].

The story behind these remakes are remarkable. The core business of the developer company Datt Japan (ダットジャパン) is B2B software development, and they stopped creating games long ago. Recently an employee noticed his company developed Rammy he loved as a kid, and try to revive Datt Japan's games.

However the source code was lost. What did they do? By reverse engineering the game by playing a lot! Source (in Japanese). However that was not enough, and they noticed fan-made guides contain much information.

They tried to reproduce the core gameplay as faithful as possible, but the QoL is modernized.

At Steam 91% reviews of total 24 are positive. (Notice most bought them for nostalgia though. Still this figure is not bad.) I haven't played it so don't ask me any.

Hope this helps.

I cross-posted this article at my blog. Search for the same title.

I played the first one a good deal in release, I have Cladun X2 on PC but I haven't started it. I see that Cladun X3 is out, but I'm not sure I want to spend the money just yet. Is X3 enough of an upgrade from X2 to justify skipping X2 altogether? I know Cladun Returns is also available, and not as new so I could get it cheaper. Same question, would that also be worth skipping X2 entirely for?

I finished CH1 of every character then went around every town which took like 40 minutes to get as much loot to steal/bargain or scrutinze and inquire and this feels like a chore is there a game plan here?

Also i heard someone say you don’t need the active “Cyres for example” character in your party to use steal/scrutize but i can’t?

If you strip away the Mario skin, the core plot is basically a Kingdom Hearts game:

The Plot: You’re not saving Peach from Bowser. You’re stopping a giant black hole in the sky (The Void) from erasing the entire multiverse into literal nothingness.

The Lore: Everything revolves around ancient prophecies (Dark & Light Prognosticus) and collecting Pure Hearts powered by love to fight the darkness.

Mr. L: Luigi gets brainwashed, put in a black suit with a mask, acts edgy, and gets his own giant mech. He looks like he got rejected from Organization XIII.

The Tone Shift: Going from fighting an Nerd Chameleon in one chapter to literally visiting the Mario version of the Afterlife (The Underwhere) right after.

I would personally say my biggest letdown was Final Fantasy 16, the advertising for the game did wonders, it made it feel like they were tapping into their roots and going back to what made them the giant they are today only to be presented with a game that is a mix of everything and a master of none.

Combining mechanics from both DMC and God of War and Western RPG's only to do all of it poorly, (the combat was okay) with semi-open world sections that are filled with absolutely nothing, you can't even find weapons really in the world other than maybe like 1 or 2? Majority you have to go to a blacksmith to upgrade your equipment periodically, like God of War.

If not FF16 than I would say that its taken 20 years to receive a new Suikoden title.

What are your biggest letdowns in the last 20 years?

basically i watched a trailer for this game on youtube years ago and i really wanted to play/watch a gameplay. the story consisted of highschoolers in either a zombie or alien apocalypse. the game was pixelated, the characters were like chibi, you could choose through a set of main characters to play, i think it was available on pc, and if i remember correctly it had a strategic campaign fighting style. it had an interesting story this and this is all i can remember right now. please i need help and ask questions!!

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