What game are you playing?

[Roguey]

One mission I remember very vividly is from San Andreas, where you have to kill a corrupt cop or something. The mission requires you to damage his car until he bails.

I tried the mission once and failed it, but then had the idea to plant a bomb onto his car and blow it up when he gets into it, thus avoiding the need to chase him down, only to discover the game remove the bomb and I had to do the mission the only way the devs intended it to be completed.

Yeah I couldn't remember precisely when they started this. I know full-well you could exploit to your heart's content in III and I believe you could in Vice City as well

[AliciaDurge]

Right now Hogwart's Legacy, it has been a very immersive experience.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Chapter 3

The globalist agenda is back. Our very first sidequest is about aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. This quest has a head scratching ending.

► Show Spoiler

Perhaps they should get visas before moving to another country? Also, looks like this mass immigration of Easterners empowers the Chinese mob.




Maybe this wouldn't be happening if they weren't undocumented. Ever thought about your role in this Conrad?


Some more details.




The Free Cities were retconned into the setting in the last game and we know almost nothing about them. North Ambria however has been established since Trails in the Sky the 3rd. It was a kingdom to the North of the Erebonian Empire. 3 decades ago, a giant pillar/tower of salt suddenly appeared/materialized in the middle of the country and began raining down salt, which disentegrated anyone it touched.




1/3rd of the country perished overnight. Another 1/3rd fled to the Empire. The royal family also fled, but then tried to come back but got lynched. The Church used teleportation or pocket dimension magic to get rid of the Salt Pale (the Church's secret order of holy hitmen apparently have the Sale Pale in their possession and break off pieces of it to create crossbow bolts that disintegrates/permakills targets so there is no body that can be raised by necromancers), but the damage had been done and North Ambria was finished and had become an uninhabitable wasteland. It became the Somalia of the setting and the only thing it is now known for is being the home of the Northern Jaegers, a mercenary army that would go abroad to kill for hire and return home to feed their families. They were the defacto leadership/government of the country.

A few years ago, there was a civil war in Erebonia, and the Northern Jaegers fought for the Noble Alliance. During the war, the Northern Jaegers torched the town of Celdic (in CS2 this was depicted as a couple of mechs smashing market stalls and getting one guy killed, but then CS3 retcons it to a total razing of the town). After Chancellor Osborne defeated the Noble Alliance, he then turned his gaze north and demanded reparations for the razing. The Northern Jaegers refused to pay, so Osborne invaded and there was a battle at the capital city of Haliask in which most of the Northern Jaegers got killed. (The remnants got eliminated during CS3. IIRC only a very small handful are left now). Erebonia then annexed the country and Osborne later announced his Eight Metropolis Plan which would include pouring money into the new acquisitions of Haliask and Crossbell, so it seemed like this was the best thing to have happened to North Ambria in 30 years.

Unfortunately, Trails heroes are bootlickers to nice people and overthrow the government to install their friends into power, which coincided with world war 1. Out with the door with the great Osborne, in with the pushover Prince Olivier/Princess Alfin/Chancellor Carl Regnitz, who relinquished recent territorial gains without using them as bargaining chips, so Erebonia also had to pay reparations to Calvard and downsize their military too. So there goes North Ambria's life support. Curiously, earlier here in Kuro 2, an NPC talks about how North Ambria is now getting money poured into it, be we aren't told by who or why. Maybe that new Valis Investment Bank is investing into it and we are going to see a megacorp owning a country.


We go back to Old Town to ask our neighbors at the bath house/mahjong parlor.




We go to Riverside and talk to the car bodyshop and ask if they have heard anything from the big car manufacturers like Ingert, ETWS, or those smaller companies that make the aftermarket kits that Van used to turn his truck into an SUV to drive the whole party around.




Need to find a name.




Tracking the guy.












He drives out of the capital and meets up with a bus of migrants parked on the side of the road. They appear to be slave traders?











Wait, you are taking just the slavers? Not the illegal immigrants too?




Welp, back to the questgiver.




Now, the ending choice.



You are making it sound like deporting migrants illegal immigrants is a bad thing.


A-Rank Bracer and famous hero Elaine (who disowned her father in the last game because he was a Calvardian ethnic nationalist) shockingly suggests using the Bracer Guild to impede a sovereign government from deporting illegal immigrants. After the Bracer guild was a key player in overthrowing sovereign governments in the last three arcs, I guess this should not be unexpected, but it makes the series' prior claims that the Bracer guild cannot interfere with the sovereignty of nations laughable.

I get a choice whether or not to push the illegal immigrants to get help from the Bracer Guild or Conrad. It is frustrating that there is no option to do the LAWFUL thing - or to do what is in Van's best interest as a native Calvardian who are becoming a minority in their own land - and turn them in to the police. There was a prior sidequest in the first game where you had no lawful choice, but in that case you weren't doing anything actually wrong since you were just smuggling in a medical drug from Remiferia to save a dying man and the drug simply hadn't been legalized in Calvard yet.

It is also frustrating that the heroine Agnes - who is President Gramhardt's daughter - has no feelings here either. And Elaine is a self-hating Calvardian. Everybody else is a foreigner (Quatre born on Nemeth Island, Risette appears to be from Ored, Feri is from the Middle-East, Aaron is an Easterner born in Langport). Apparently the Erebonia arc days where almost all of the playable characters are natives of the country the game is about are over, though most of the playables in those games wound up becoming traitors and advancing the globalist agenda anyway.

I push the illegal immigrants to the Guild in the hopes that they will be documented and thus easier for Calvard's government to track, as opposed to empowering Conrad so he can move more off the record people around.




Towa sensei and Crow spout worrying rhetoric.




For aiding and abetting illegal immigrants, I gain two law points, enough to push me into tier 5 and acquire the Law holo core which for Van which makes him into a better tank, with the S-boost called "Lawkeeper".

We finally get an answer as to what is going on with Quatre's weirdness around Van.

► Show Spoiler

Sounds like more gnostic nonsense, which goes hand in hand with the soul transference stuff also going on in this chapter. How does being both male and female even work? I don't want to think about this. Can he marry a woman and have kids or not? Is he condemned to live a lonely life trying to cope with this "found family" nonsense?

The first 60% to 2/3rds of the Intermission chapter were great. After the fight with Cao, it starts losing steam as it becomes clear nobody is really after your head, and the tension dissipates.

I like how they are doing the CS2 thing again where the main menu screen changes depending on where you are in the story.

► Show Spoiler

The battles are a visual feast with the ability animations and cutscenes.

[Element]

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante.

Rusty was correct, the writing is very good. I dislike some of the skill locks that are foisted on the choices - at times they come across as character breaking. Otherwise I've no complaints, beyond it being a CYOA.

[rusty_shackleford]

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante.

Rusty was correct, the writing is very good. I dislike some of the skill locks that are foisted on the choices - at times they come across as character breaking. Otherwise I've no complaints, beyond it being a CYOA.

One of the few times I can think of where I felt completely engrossed in a game solely due to writing.

[Sword-of-Yakub]

I've been playing ATOM. It's nice and refreshing, I was kinda afraid of it being painfully brutal but I've been having fun with it so far and I love old Fallout so I'm happy to have more of the same. I'm thinking of playing a wargame on the side, like Field of Glory 2 or the Operational Art of War IV.

[1998]

I've been playing ATOM. It's nice and refreshing, I was kinda afraid of it being painfully brutal but I've been having fun with it so far and I love old Fallout so I'm happy to have more of the same. I'm thinking of playing a wargame on the side, like Field of Glory 2 or the Operational Art of War IV.

Don't miss voting for ATOM to secure your prestigious AG badge in March.

Also, change your ava.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Chapter 3

The Mishy subplot and sidequest was neat.

► Show Spoiler

Mishy's original appearance:





After the war, apparently this new Valis Investment Bank bought a lot of shares in Mishelam Wonderland theme park in Crossbell, and redesigned Mishy for import into Calvard. There is fandom war between the old Mishy fans and those who like his new design. You find out that the old fans are going to sabotage a nu Mishy event.












Guy handing out balloons put yellow paint in them and a device that will squirt lemon juice out into them, the acid dissolving the rubber and causing paint to fall onto the people below and ruin the event.








You control Fio and fly up to gather the balloons in time.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kuro no Kiseki 2/Trails Through Daybreak 2

Chapter 3 route E

This chapter is amazing

► Show Spoiler

We drive to rescue the President














These are brave policemen standing out there in the open with just handguns vs the coup army with machineguns and dogs.





They're bringing out the big boys.





Defeating Soldats on foot is where I draw the line. The characters in CS1's 5th chapter witnessed the military exercise featuring the new armor. They despaired and questioned why they were investing all of this time into training their swordsmanship skills when the future was that swordsmen would be sidelined in war or made irrelevant entirely. And then the ending of CS1 was the heroes' swords bouncing off of the Soldat's reactive armor, necessitating the need to escalate to using Soldats. Old Class VII - even when running around with Dominion Gaius - had to step aside whenever a giant mech adversary appeared, leaving them to New Class VII who could pilot Soldats to fight them. That's why Gaius, Laura, and Fie began learning how to pilot Soldats in Reverie. And Gramhardt touted the Zyklas as being superior to Erebonian soldats in all specifications. Did he neglect to say that it doesn't have reactive armor like Erebonian soldats have had since the very first generation five years ago?

There is no way the characters with their canon abilities could take these out. The Lost Arts make more sense, but ofcourse nobody uses those in lore just like with Tita's orbital satelite laser S-craft.







Meanwhile, back at the White House













Time to punch some tanks.





Typical Japanese Sengoku-period trauma here where you must either accept the status quo or enact a bloody revolution, with no in between.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kuro no Kiseki 2/Trails Through Daybreak 2

I am on the final chapter now, closing in towards the end.

► Show Spoiler

I like how Leon feels like more of a real person than the other playable characters. Most of the other characters feel like they are glued to Van 24/7, whereas Leon has twice politely and somewhat curtly told Van that while it was nice they had a couple adventures together, he is not here to be Van's party member at his beck and call. The other characters are very affable and avoid trying to upset Van or they apologetically ask questions, whereas Leon asks Van pointed questions and is willing to go behind his master's back and ask what the secret was about. Same with Bergard in the first game when he politely asks you to leave his room so he can read his motorcycle magazines.




How could anyone eat this much food?




Another cool looking Marchen Garden environment with the giant bonsai trees and the waterfalls. Again, would be neat if we saw more of this out in Zemuria.








And yet another cool Marchen Garden level with the pools of blood.




I like the slightly more nuanced presentation of Professor Cronkite. In the first game, he was somewhat presented as a villain for having a difference of opinions with his mentor, the good Professor Hamilton, and splitting off to go develop new weapons for the army (which are then unveiled by President Gramhardt and in a mildly threatening Revolution Festival speech). Here in Kuro 2, we see Cronkite helping us out during the adventure once, and then we see him spending the day with Quatre and Esmeray.




Sounds like somebody needs to be shot.




Should have slit his throat.






Quiz time





Managed to beat the final level of the hacking minigame with 3 seconds left.









Would you please just spit it out and get this over with? Don't spend the rest of your life thinking "I wonder if only I had told him..."





My handler's novel idea of relaxation is roleplaying going to school.









My buddy got dumped. Time to keep him company and jam.




It has been 7 years since Joshua and Estelle confessed their love in FC. How are they not married yet?




So the writers have just undone one of the few deaths in the series on the heroes' side, and so soon after another hero mech, Valimar, got brought back in Reverie. This AI being a copy/replica rather than the original Pater-Mater mech who melted in Crossbell lacks the impact. I think it might have been preferable for the dead to stay dead and the heroes found new AI companions. The spirit of Valimar coming back at the climax of Reverie was cool, but I can't help but wonder if Rean's new mech had a different personality.








Uh oh, our little bro is livestreaming as a girl v-tuber. Where did we go wrong with him?







Why Falcom why







Not a single mention of any traditional Calvardian activities at the school festival that celebrates the founders of the Calvardian revolution. It is all foreign or modern stuff.




Why can't I disembowel this guy and shut this vile engine down?

[Kowe]

Finished Super Mario Bros. Wonder 100 %.

Good:

• Smooth gameplay and responsive input.
• Gameplay variety with Wonder effects and new power-ups.
• All collectibles and getting a Wonderful on the flagpole serve a purpose.
• Difficulty in the last 5-10 % of the game. The Special World.
• Charming and different aesthetic.
• No glitches or bugs encountered. Not meaning Exploits here.

Neutral:

• Levels are designed well. Relatively speaking.

Bad:

• Badges are mostly underutilized except for the final level in the Special World, Badge Marathon.
• Easy for 90-95 % of its playthrough.
• No considerable difference in gameplay with the characters. Not considering invincibility on Yoshi or Nabbit.

Verdict: 3.5/5. It's okay. One of the better 2D Marios. Definitely not the best and not a masterpiece. Higher end of the middle in the Mario games library.

It has a modding scene. If it reaches the state of Super Mario World modding at some point, I will definitely come back to it.

[Cedric]

Banner Saga 2 now. Why are there so many women in this game? Also why is it so insanely choppy even if your upgrade the Adobe Air? Doesn't seem like it was made by competent people. Music's nice.

Before this I had done everything you can do in PoE 2 which was a fun diversion. Right now I'm thinking of replaying Prey and Wizardry 8. I feel like that one never seems to age for me. It looks just good enough. Nothing but hate for the level scaling, though.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Banner Saga 2 now

How are you liking the Ravens?

[Oyster Sauce]

Banner Saga 2 now

How are you liking the Ravens?

Bolverk had a really interesting gimmick. I wish there was more C&C for him.

[Cedric]

I'd love to tell you but I'm still stuck on the first fight trying to get through it without anyone getting injured. I'm pretty bad at this game and playing on Hard.

[Tadeusz]

Injuries are not that big of a deal, you still need to rest to restore morale anyway.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished Kuro 2's main story. However, it turns out that there is still some postgame content left, so I am not completely finished yet.

► Show Spoiler

It has been two years since the Elysium supercomputer and Babel tower were destroyed, and the Reverie Corridor shut down. How is an Elysium mech still operational? Lapis was the only Elysium creation that survived, and only because her AI got inserted into a different body. Rean and everyone else faded away. Or is this supposed to be a mech made by some other company but is reusing Elysium models?




More gorgeous Marchen Garden levels.





It is strange that the final dungeon music is lackluster compared to the penultimate dungeon's theme. The penultimate dungeon also had more urgency and felt more climatic as you were running to fight one of your party members and then fight the big bad who had been wrecking havoc all this time. Whereas here you get dropped into the dungeon and there isn't any real urgency and it seems like you are just running to go meet up with a friend, Ouroboros bad guys not relevant to the current plot show up to pad time, and then you get to the end, meet your friend and have a long chat and then he declares that he is obligated to fight you.


The final boss' 1st form has a cool design. Reminds me of Dragonoid from Bakugan. His basic Zolga-Grendel form is also cool too.




The final boss fight is pretty novel. During the first phase, I was caught offguard when the boss' turn came up and he used an ability that transistioned the game to action combat and I had to dodge his attack on short notice. Once enough time passes, you can go back to turn based. Pretty neat.






Next, once you get his HP down far enough, he then starts teleporting you to flashbacks of prior boss fights across Kuro 1 and 2, similar to the Garrosh fight at the end of Mists of Pandaria. Then you get spat back out and fight the boss again in the third phase. The third flashback fight with Melchior is pretty amusing, as Melchior can just summon shadow clones of himself over and over half a dozen times in a row before his AI picks a different action that delays him quite a bit. So you want to wait until he picks that different action and gets delayed, and then switch to Judith and pop your AoE S-craft to bewitch/confuse all of the shadow clones and make them fight each other (since Chaos Van can't one shot the Shadow Clones with a single S-craft. They have too much HP).






I liked how he could summon adds continously throughout the fight. The difficulty in Trails boss fights tends to be frontloaded if there are adds to deal with, and then once they are disposed of it becomes a simple tank and spank. CS3 introduced enhanced states to try to make bosses become more dangerous as boss battles went on but it didn't really amount to anything, and bosses in Kuro don't use S-boost just for the stats or the effects, only to pop an S-craft.




I got the boss down to 3k HP left, enough that my next basic attack would finish him off, when he popped an S-craft, but then it turned out to be an elaborate cutscene where Van ripostes the S-craft and kills the final boss. Novel.




This is the most elaborate Trails fight in the series, and the transitions between phases are seamless. Interesting to think that Falcom was able to whip this fight up in less than a year after releasing Kuro 1.

It is strange how the first phase theme sounded like the Erebonian Divine Knight/Great Power final boss themes with the latin chorus, when the lore of this boss has nothing to do with the DKs/Great Power. I did not like how the fight theme for the third phase was a bad anime opening theme song. Falcom did the same thing with Kuro 1's final boss' second phase two. I hope this will not going to continue in future installments...

It is sad that these two side characters are more endearing than most of the main playable characters.





I cannot believe that Rixia was allowed to get up on stage at a school festival in that outfit.




I wonder how much money Falcom spent on the dance scene. That wasn't just animations but also higher than average lighting placement and camera movement.



Seems like Falcom gave up on choices, or couldn't figure out to whip up something like Kuro 1's chapter 5 again in under a year. In the first Kuro game, you got some choices/branching paths in chapter 5 and were allowed to pick which organization you wanted to party with (hero Bracers, evil Chinese mafia, evil cool supervillains, or crazy cool ninjas), and the game gave you the meaningless choice of deciding whether or not to kill or spare the filler villains (though like Suikoden 1 the game tries to guilt you into sparing them). There was no such stuff like that in Kuro 2, the only choices being at the end of the sidequests like whether or not to put Lashkar into a public hospital or get him a back alley doctor, or to direct illegal immigrants to the Bracer guild to be protected from deportation or to go into hiding.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished the postgame and have completely finished Kuro no Kiseki 2: Crimson Sin/Trails Through Daybreak 2.

► Show Spoiler

More gorgeous Marchen Garden levels.













The postgame final boss is a let down. It's a copypaste of the last game's true final boss. Near identical model, moveset, and arena. The devs could have done something like what Blizzard does and reuse an old rig, but give them different models and utilize their preexisting animations in clever new ways for attacks/mechanics that work differently so that you can't immediately recognize it as something you have fought before.





Miscellaneous thoughts

I liked that they are making a little more of an effort to depict the passage of time in Edith. When you explore Edith in each chapter, you see that the food vendor stalls/foodtrucks move around to different places. Food vendors offer new items for sale as they come into season or because a new food has become trendy. You walk into the Riverside event venue place and there is a new group or singer up on stage every time (the idol duo, Jess playing the guitar, Nina playing the guitar), or you go to the Tirion Mall and there is Mishy on stage and then the Arab dancer duo. The Weston department store on Station Street and the Espirit Cinema on Tyrell Street close for a few weeks to remodel, though sadly they do not visually change like Nook's Cranny in Animal Crossing.

It is odd that Elaine - a serious and respectful woman who does not attempt jokes - calls Zin "Ji-san" (old man) during battle.

I did not like how I had to hold down the A button for five minutes waiting for Mare to consume tens of thousands of shard tokens. I would have liked an "open" all option that takes 10 seconds max.

Overall I prefer this game over Kuro 1.

The battles in Kuro 2 are actually threatening on nightmare difficulty throughout nearly the entire runtime, whereas in Kuro 1 I faced no difficulty whatsoever until the last 15 minutes of a 110 hour long game. I found the combat to be pretty enjoyable, and ofcourse the combat VFX and cutscenes are spectacular. However, I am still not quite keen on much time you have to spending mathing out your elemental locked quartz slots and sepith values trying to figure out if you can squeeze in a shard skill. That was tedium from Sky and Crossbell that did not need to be brought back and does not make for more satisfying character building experience than in the Cold Steel games. It is also frustrating that later on in the game as your party gains higher speed and Van is able to effectively catch aggro and face mobs away, you become starved for S-boosts and can no longer keep the whole party boosted, which makes it feel like you wasted a lot of time trying to pick which Master Quartz/Holo Core you want only for their effects to wind up not being used at all. I appreciate the design that went into the final boss fight, though I wish there were more involved fights and scenarios throughout the game. It feels odd that there are several sidequests and story moments where you are supposed to be defending or fighting alongside an NPC, but then they do not appear in battle as a guest or as someone you have to protect like in Sky or Crossbell.

The Marchen Garden is very beautiful. One of the highlights of the game. Hope to see this environment artistry carried forward into future Trails games.

The music is overall good with a lot of great songs. However, there are some cutscenes that have some odd or ineffective uses of music. The violin in the emotional scene at the end does not work. It is also strange how the penultimate story dungeon has a very exciting track, while the actual final dungeon is forgettable musically. And the tracks for the first and third phases of the final boss are inappropriate (one evokes connotations with a lore group that the final boss is unrelated to, the other is a bad and unimmersive anime insert song).

The game is heavily bogged down by there being too many city NPCs to talk to, who are updating too often. It is frustrating to sit down wanting to get to the next adventure segment, but whoops! An NPC update has happened, so now I have to spend 2 to 3 hours talking to everyone. Guess I'm not going to get into any cool battles until tomorrow's play session! This applies not just to Edith in which 75% of the game takes place in, but also in Langport which has four zones. I would have preferred that the Trails games do what Reverie did and limit how many city blocks are available at any given time, sharply cutting down on how much time is spent and improving the pacing of the game.

The game is very heavily centered in modern urban city environments. You do not get to walk out onto the roads at any point (though Kuro 1 barely had any). You do get to explore fantastical landscapes in the Marchen Garden, but that takes place in virtual reality and not in the actual setting of Zemuria.

The story was more engaging than Kuro 1. Kuro 1 was a 110 hour long game that was boring up until chapter 5, 70 hours in. It was punctuated by some funny skits, but overall I was tuned out of the plot and didn't care that the heroes were fruitlessly chasing these filler supervillains around and achieving nothing, and the villains were not properly built up for how seriously Falcom tried to present them. I didn't care that the white mafia were somehow super bad and worse than the Chinese mafia or Ouroboros (crimes include: causing earthquakes in Zeiss trying to kill people in their homes for fun. Massacring policemen in Grancel for fun. Killing 60+ people trying to hook them up to a mech. Shooting up a theater for fun. Trying to start a world war for fun. Siccing killer robots upon the World Trade Center stand-in for fun. Hijacking railway guns and bombarding a port city and massacring a castle's garrison for fun. And more). I was irked when the narrative kept insisting that both were the biggest deal ever and changed history. Kuro 2's adventure is less serious, so the repetitive pointless fights don't sting as much. The Kuro 2 villains are kind of whatever too but this time Falcom doesn't try to insist that they are important.

I have 100 hours on Steam listed, but my ingame save says 91 hours. I spent a lot of time alt+tabbed out browsing the web, as some of the chapters (and particularly the talking to hundreds of city NPCs segments) were boring.

This is the second Kuro game to have zero plot progression in any of the main storylines. We still do not know anything more about the Oct-Genesis or Mare after Kuro 1's prologue. We know that Gramhardt is building a space base but that was already revealed in Kuro 1, and we still don't know anything about the impending apocalypse he is trying to prevent that Rean tried to warn us about in Reverie before Lloyd told him to shut up (thanks hero!). And there has been no international conflict. At this point, a Trails player could probably skip from Reverie to the next Trails game after this and wouldn't have missed anything important.

I liked how the bad ends in Swin chapter 1 were used to make Zolga's minions feel threatening and raise the tension, seeing as how they surrounded the heroes, made them desperate, and killed them. Too often in Trails it feels like there is no tension, and the heroes will either just overpower everything or get bailed out by someone, or the bad guys will just waltz off. I also liked the absurdity of the intermission, and the intermission had some tension when you were being chased for the first couple of fights. Route E of the third chapter (the military coup) was entertaining with the stakes and lots of stuff happening.

The globalist and anti-white agenda in the first game - which was mainly relegated to newspapers, NPC dialogue, and sidequests - is now much more pronounced and in the main story. The Anti-Immigration League that was established in the Crossbell games finally debuts, but are treated as cartoon caricatures to be ignored and disposed of and their complaints are never taken seriously like their Erebonian counterparts were in the Cold Steel games. There is a sidequest where you must help protect illegal immigrants from being deported with no options to turn them over to the police. There is an undercurrent throughout the game that we see foreigner Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures celebrated, but not Calvard's traditional heritage. The globalist agenda continues as the theme of the game is that the ostensibly mighty Calvard (peer to the Empire) is incapable of taking care of itself, and must open itself up to foreign powers and NGOs intervening.

Two games and 200 hours into the Calvard arc, and it feels barely fleshed out compared to Erebonia after CS2. We still do not know of any Calvardian generals. No military installations have been named besides Baratier airbase that was mentioned in Reverie. We do not know of anything that happened in Calvard's history besides the revolution, which is barely fleshed out. We get to see more dojos of Easterner martial arts, but still know nothing about native Calvardian techniques. And so on.

I had no issues with the PC port. The stuttering I had during S-craft animations did not happen here.

The lolcowlization is noticeable. I tried out the English dub for a few minutes, but couldn't stand it and switched back to Japanese voices. Good thing too, because I would not have wanted to hear the lolcowlized lines voiced out loud by Californian voice actors. There are several dialogues in this game where it is obvious listening to the Japanese voice acting that the characters in the original are saying different things. There is is also a lot of trendy lines such as "sounds like a you problem" or "rizz" that will not age well like Final Fantasy or the older Trails games localized by XSEED. There is also a lot of swearing in this and taking God's name in vain, and for lines that are voiced. If you played this game with the English dub, you would not be able to keep your window open.

Overall a 7/10 game. Great aesthetics, fun combat, good music, pleasant characters, a sufficiently fun campaign that is bogged down by too many city NPCs being available to talk to, an undercooked setting, and the intrusion of current year death cult politics. I look forward to the next game, as I hear that there will finally be some plot progression, and it will feature the return of some of my favorite characters. I just hope I am not spending dozens of hours talking to hundreds of city NPCs yet again.

Recommended, but play Trails in the Sky FC and/or Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2 first, unless this game looks like it really appeals to you.

[Boontaker]

I have finished the postgame and have completely finished Kuro no Kiseki 2: Crimson Sin/Trails Through Daybreak 2.

► Show Spoiler

More gorgeous Marchen Garden levels.













The postgame final boss is a let down. It's a copypaste of the last game's true final boss. Near identical model, moveset, and arena. The devs could have done something like what Blizzard does and reuse an old rig, but give them different models and utilize their preexisting animations in clever new ways for attacks/mechanics that work differently so that you can't immediately recognize it as something you have fought before.





Miscellaneous thoughts

I liked that they are making a little more of an effort to depict the passage of time in Edith. When you explore Edith in each chapter, you see that the food vendor stalls/foodtrucks move around to different places. Food vendors offer new items for sale as they come into season or because a new food has become trendy. You walk into the Riverside event venue place and there is a new group or singer up on stage every time (the idol duo, Jess playing the guitar, Nina playing the guitar), or you go to the Tirion Mall and there is Mishy on stage and then the Arab dancer duo. The Weston department store on Station Street and the Espirit Cinema on Tyrell Street close for a few weeks to remodel, though sadly they do not visually change like Nook's Cranny in Animal Crossing.

It is odd that Elaine - a serious and respectful woman who does not attempt jokes - calls Zin "Ji-san" (old man) during battle.

I did not like how I had to hold down the A button for five minutes waiting for Mare to consume tens of thousands of shard tokens. I would have liked an "open" all option that takes 10 seconds max.

Overall I prefer this game over Kuro 1.

The battles in Kuro 2 are actually threatening on nightmare difficulty throughout nearly the entire runtime, whereas in Kuro 1 I faced no difficulty whatsoever until the last 15 minutes of a 110 hour long game. I found the combat to be pretty enjoyable, and ofcourse the combat VFX and cutscenes are spectacular. However, I am still not quite keen on much time you have to spending mathing out your elemental locked quartz slots and sepith values trying to figure out if you can squeeze in a shard skill. That was tedium from Sky and Crossbell that did not need to be brought back and does not make for more satisfying character building experience than in the Cold Steel games. It is also frustrating that later on in the game as your party gains higher speed and Van is able to effectively catch aggro and face mobs away, you become starved for S-boosts and can no longer keep the whole party boosted, which makes it feel like you wasted a lot of time trying to pick which Master Quartz/Holo Core you want only for their effects to wind up not being used at all. I appreciate the design that went into the final boss fight, though I wish there were more involved fights and scenarios throughout the game. It feels odd that there are several sidequests and story moments where you are supposed to be defending or fighting alongside an NPC, but then they do not appear in battle as a guest or as someone you have to protect like in Sky or Crossbell.

The Marchen Garden is very beautiful. One of the highlights of the game. Hope to see this environment artistry carried forward into future Trails games.

The music is overall good with a lot of great songs. However, there are some cutscenes that have some odd or ineffective uses of music. The violin in the emotional scene at the end does not work. It is also strange how the penultimate story dungeon has a very exciting track, while the actual final dungeon is forgettable musically. And the tracks for the first and third phases of the final boss are inappropriate (one evokes connotations with a lore group that the final boss is unrelated to, the other is a bad and unimmersive anime insert song).

The game is heavily bogged down by there being too many city NPCs to talk to, who are updating too often. It is frustrating to sit down wanting to get to the next adventure segment, but whoops! An NPC update has happened, so now I have to spend 2 to 3 hours talking to everyone. Guess I'm not going to get into any cool battles until tomorrow's play session! This applies not just to Edith in which 75% of the game takes place in, but also in Langport which has four zones. I would have preferred that the Trails games do what Reverie did and limit how many city blocks are available at any given time, sharply cutting down on how much time is spent and improving the pacing of the game.

The game is very heavily centered in modern urban city environments. You do not get to walk out onto the roads at any point (though Kuro 1 barely had any). You do get to explore fantastical landscapes in the Marchen Garden, but that takes place in virtual reality and not in the actual setting of Zemuria.

The story was more engaging than Kuro 1. Kuro 1 was a 110 hour long game that was boring up until chapter 5, 70 hours in. It was punctuated by some funny skits, but overall I was tuned out of the plot and didn't care that the heroes were fruitlessly chasing these filler supervillains around and achieving nothing, and the villains were not properly built up for how seriously Falcom tried to present them. I didn't care that the white mafia were somehow super bad and worse than the Chinese mafia or Ouroboros (crimes include: causing earthquakes in Zeiss trying to kill people in their homes for fun. Massacring policemen in Grancel for fun. Killing 60+ people trying to hook them up to a mech. Shooting up a theater for fun. Trying to start a world war for fun. Siccing killer robots upon the World Trade Center stand-in for fun. Hijacking railway guns and bombarding a port city and massacring a castle's garrison for fun. And more). I was irked when the narrative kept insisting that both were the biggest deal ever and changed history. Kuro 2's adventure is less serious, so the repetitive pointless fights don't sting as much. The Kuro 2 villains are kind of whatever too but this time Falcom doesn't try to insist that they are important.

I have 100 hours on Steam listed, but my ingame save says 91 hours. I spent a lot of time alt+tabbed out browsing the web, as some of the chapters (and particularly the talking to hundreds of city NPCs segments) were boring.

This is the second Kuro game to have zero plot progression in any of the main storylines. We still do not know anything more about the Oct-Genesis or Mare after Kuro 1's prologue. We know that Gramhardt is building a space base but that was already revealed in Kuro 1, and we still don't know anything about the impending apocalypse he is trying to prevent that Rean tried to warn us about in Reverie before Lloyd told him to shut up (thanks hero!). And there has been no international conflict. At this point, a Trails player could probably skip from Reverie to the next Trails game after this and wouldn't have missed anything important.

I liked how the bad ends in Swin chapter 1 were used to make Zolga's minions feel threatening and raise the tension, seeing as how they surrounded the heroes, made them desperate, and killed them. Too often in Trails it feels like there is no tension, and the heroes will either just overpower everything or get bailed out by someone, or the bad guys will just waltz off. I also liked the absurdity of the intermission, and the intermission had some tension when you were being chased for the first couple of fights. Route E of the third chapter (the military coup) was entertaining with the stakes and lots of stuff happening.

The globalist and anti-white agenda in the first game - which was mainly relegated to newspapers, NPC dialogue, and sidequests - is now much more pronounced and in the main story. The Anti-Immigration League that was established in the Crossbell games finally debuts, but are treated as cartoon caricatures to be ignored and disposed of and their complaints are never taken seriously like their Erebonian counterparts were in the Cold Steel games. There is a sidequest where you must help protect illegal immigrants from being deported with no options to turn them over to the police. There is an undercurrent throughout the game that we see foreigner Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures celebrated, but not Calvard's traditional heritage. The globalist agenda continues as the theme of the game is that the ostensibly mighty Calvard (peer to the Empire) is incapable of taking care of itself, and must open itself up to foreign powers and NGOs intervening.

Two games and 200 hours into the Calvard arc, and it feels barely fleshed out compared to Erebonia after CS2. We still do not know of any Calvardian generals. No military installations have been named besides Baratier airbase that was mentioned in Reverie. We do not know of anything that happened in Calvard's history besides the revolution, which is barely fleshed out. We get to see more dojos of Easterner martial arts, but still know nothing about native Calvardian techniques. And so on.

I had no issues with the PC port. The stuttering I had during S-craft animations did not happen here.

The lolcowlization is noticeable. I tried out the English dub for a few minutes, but couldn't stand it and switched back to Japanese voices. Good thing too, because I would not have wanted to hear the lolcowlized lines voiced out loud by Californian voice actors. There are several dialogues in this game where it is obvious listening to the Japanese voice acting that the characters in the original are saying different things. There is is also a lot of trendy lines such as "sounds like a you problem" or "rizz" that will not age well like Final Fantasy or the older Trails games localized by XSEED. There is also a lot of swearing in this and taking God's name in vain, and for lines that are voiced. If you played this game with the English dub, you would not be able to keep your window open.

Overall a 7/10 game. Great aesthetics, fun combat, good music, pleasant characters, a sufficiently fun campaign that is bogged down by too many city NPCs being available to talk to, an undercooked setting, and the intrusion of current year death cult politics. I look forward to the next game, as I hear that there will finally be some plot progression, and it will feature the return of some of my favorite characters. I just hope I am not spending dozens of hours talking to hundreds of city NPCs yet again.

Recommended, but play Trails in the Sky FC and/or Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2 first, unless this game looks like it really appeals to you.

Why are japanese studios so globalist? Are they fully funded by masons? Do the japanese actually hold thses values? Nearly every game I play from japan is globalist, gnostic, or both. Same with most anime. Are there no Christians in japan?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished the postgame and have completely finished Kuro no Kiseki 2: Crimson Sin/Trails Through Daybreak 2.

► Show Spoiler

More gorgeous Marchen Garden levels.













The postgame final boss is a let down. It's a copypaste of the last game's true final boss. Near identical model, moveset, and arena. The devs could have done something like what Blizzard does and reuse an old rig, but give them different models and utilize their preexisting animations in clever new ways for attacks/mechanics that work differently so that you can't immediately recognize it as something you have fought before.





Miscellaneous thoughts

I liked that they are making a little more of an effort to depict the passage of time in Edith. When you explore Edith in each chapter, you see that the food vendor stalls/foodtrucks move around to different places. Food vendors offer new items for sale as they come into season or because a new food has become trendy. You walk into the Riverside event venue place and there is a new group or singer up on stage every time (the idol duo, Jess playing the guitar, Nina playing the guitar), or you go to the Tirion Mall and there is Mishy on stage and then the Arab dancer duo. The Weston department store on Station Street and the Espirit Cinema on Tyrell Street close for a few weeks to remodel, though sadly they do not visually change like Nook's Cranny in Animal Crossing.

It is odd that Elaine - a serious and respectful woman who does not attempt jokes - calls Zin "Ji-san" (old man) during battle.

I did not like how I had to hold down the A button for five minutes waiting for Mare to consume tens of thousands of shard tokens. I would have liked an "open" all option that takes 10 seconds max.

Overall I prefer this game over Kuro 1.

The battles in Kuro 2 are actually threatening on nightmare difficulty throughout nearly the entire runtime, whereas in Kuro 1 I faced no difficulty whatsoever until the last 15 minutes of a 110 hour long game. I found the combat to be pretty enjoyable, and ofcourse the combat VFX and cutscenes are spectacular. However, I am still not quite keen on much time you have to spending mathing out your elemental locked quartz slots and sepith values trying to figure out if you can squeeze in a shard skill. That was tedium from Sky and Crossbell that did not need to be brought back and does not make for more satisfying character building experience than in the Cold Steel games. It is also frustrating that later on in the game as your party gains higher speed and Van is able to effectively catch aggro and face mobs away, you become starved for S-boosts and can no longer keep the whole party boosted, which makes it feel like you wasted a lot of time trying to pick which Master Quartz/Holo Core you want only for their effects to wind up not being used at all. I appreciate the design that went into the final boss fight, though I wish there were more involved fights and scenarios throughout the game. It feels odd that there are several sidequests and story moments where you are supposed to be defending or fighting alongside an NPC, but then they do not appear in battle as a guest or as someone you have to protect like in Sky or Crossbell.

The Marchen Garden is very beautiful. One of the highlights of the game. Hope to see this environment artistry carried forward into future Trails games.

The music is overall good with a lot of great songs. However, there are some cutscenes that have some odd or ineffective uses of music. The violin in the emotional scene at the end does not work. It is also strange how the penultimate story dungeon has a very exciting track, while the actual final dungeon is forgettable musically. And the tracks for the first and third phases of the final boss are inappropriate (one evokes connotations with a lore group that the final boss is unrelated to, the other is a bad and unimmersive anime insert song).

The game is heavily bogged down by there being too many city NPCs to talk to, who are updating too often. It is frustrating to sit down wanting to get to the next adventure segment, but whoops! An NPC update has happened, so now I have to spend 2 to 3 hours talking to everyone. Guess I'm not going to get into any cool battles until tomorrow's play session! This applies not just to Edith in which 75% of the game takes place in, but also in Langport which has four zones. I would have preferred that the Trails games do what Reverie did and limit how many city blocks are available at any given time, sharply cutting down on how much time is spent and improving the pacing of the game.

The game is very heavily centered in modern urban city environments. You do not get to walk out onto the roads at any point (though Kuro 1 barely had any). You do get to explore fantastical landscapes in the Marchen Garden, but that takes place in virtual reality and not in the actual setting of Zemuria.

The story was more engaging than Kuro 1. Kuro 1 was a 110 hour long game that was boring up until chapter 5, 70 hours in. It was punctuated by some funny skits, but overall I was tuned out of the plot and didn't care that the heroes were fruitlessly chasing these filler supervillains around and achieving nothing, and the villains were not properly built up for how seriously Falcom tried to present them. I didn't care that the white mafia were somehow super bad and worse than the Chinese mafia or Ouroboros (crimes include: causing earthquakes in Zeiss trying to kill people in their homes for fun. Massacring policemen in Grancel for fun. Killing 60+ people trying to hook them up to a mech. Shooting up a theater for fun. Trying to start a world war for fun. Siccing killer robots upon the World Trade Center stand-in for fun. Hijacking railway guns and bombarding a port city and massacring a castle's garrison for fun. And more). I was irked when the narrative kept insisting that both were the biggest deal ever and changed history. Kuro 2's adventure is less serious, so the repetitive pointless fights don't sting as much. The Kuro 2 villains are kind of whatever too but this time Falcom doesn't try to insist that they are important.

I have 100 hours on Steam listed, but my ingame save says 91 hours. I spent a lot of time alt+tabbed out browsing the web, as some of the chapters (and particularly the talking to hundreds of city NPCs segments) were boring.

This is the second Kuro game to have zero plot progression in any of the main storylines. We still do not know anything more about the Oct-Genesis or Mare after Kuro 1's prologue. We know that Gramhardt is building a space base but that was already revealed in Kuro 1, and we still don't know anything about the impending apocalypse he is trying to prevent that Rean tried to warn us about in Reverie before Lloyd told him to shut up (thanks hero!). And there has been no international conflict. At this point, a Trails player could probably skip from Reverie to the next Trails game after this and wouldn't have missed anything important.

I liked how the bad ends in Swin chapter 1 were used to make Zolga's minions feel threatening and raise the tension, seeing as how they surrounded the heroes, made them desperate, and killed them. Too often in Trails it feels like there is no tension, and the heroes will either just overpower everything or get bailed out by someone, or the bad guys will just waltz off. I also liked the absurdity of the intermission, and the intermission had some tension when you were being chased for the first couple of fights. Route E of the third chapter (the military coup) was entertaining with the stakes and lots of stuff happening.

The globalist and anti-white agenda in the first game - which was mainly relegated to newspapers, NPC dialogue, and sidequests - is now much more pronounced and in the main story. The Anti-Immigration League that was established in the Crossbell games finally debuts, but are treated as cartoon caricatures to be ignored and disposed of and their complaints are never taken seriously like their Erebonian counterparts were in the Cold Steel games. There is a sidequest where you must help protect illegal immigrants from being deported with no options to turn them over to the police. There is an undercurrent throughout the game that we see foreigner Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures celebrated, but not Calvard's traditional heritage. The globalist agenda continues as the theme of the game is that the ostensibly mighty Calvard (peer to the Empire) is incapable of taking care of itself, and must open itself up to foreign powers and NGOs intervening.

Two games and 200 hours into the Calvard arc, and it feels barely fleshed out compared to Erebonia after CS2. We still do not know of any Calvardian generals. No military installations have been named besides Baratier airbase that was mentioned in Reverie. We do not know of anything that happened in Calvard's history besides the revolution, which is barely fleshed out. We get to see more dojos of Easterner martial arts, but still know nothing about native Calvardian techniques. And so on.

I had no issues with the PC port. The stuttering I had during S-craft animations did not happen here.

The lolcowlization is noticeable. I tried out the English dub for a few minutes, but couldn't stand it and switched back to Japanese voices. Good thing too, because I would not have wanted to hear the lolcowlized lines voiced out loud by Californian voice actors. There are several dialogues in this game where it is obvious listening to the Japanese voice acting that the characters in the original are saying different things. There is is also a lot of trendy lines such as "sounds like a you problem" or "rizz" that will not age well like Final Fantasy or the older Trails games localized by XSEED. There is also a lot of swearing in this and taking God's name in vain, and for lines that are voiced. If you played this game with the English dub, you would not be able to keep your window open.

Overall a 7/10 game. Great aesthetics, fun combat, good music, pleasant characters, a sufficiently fun campaign that is bogged down by too many city NPCs being available to talk to, an undercooked setting, and the intrusion of current year death cult politics. I look forward to the next game, as I hear that there will finally be some plot progression, and it will feature the return of some of my favorite characters. I just hope I am not spending dozens of hours talking to hundreds of city NPCs yet again.

Recommended, but play Trails in the Sky FC and/or Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2 first, unless this game looks like it really appeals to you.

Why are japanese studios so globalist? Are they fully funded by masons? Do the japanese actually hold thses values? Nearly every game I play from japan is globalist, gnostic, or both. Same with most anime. Are there no Christians in japan?

I would not say "most anime". I have played and seen more JRPGs and anime that were free from utter degeneracy than those that were immersed in it. As for degeneracy before the 2010s Western lunacy happened, I think it is because the entertainment industry is an unstable career choice and is only good when the economy is thriving, which Japan's hasn't for coming up on four decades. Normal people with aspirations of having a family will make the cost benefit analysis and probably forgo becoming an entertainer and find more sustainable work that might feed a family and pay a mortgage. That means that means a lot of the people who still become these entertainers anyway might not share those same values. Ie, "otaku". The poopy humor in Yakuza likely does not have any sinister intent behind it, it's just odd humor by odd people.

What you are seeing in Metaphor ReFantazio, the new Trails game, and the latest FF14 expansion is that it appears that Western DEI has spread directly to the Japanese content creators. We all know how lolcowlizers brag about altering the work, and apparently no matter how much we protest, the Japanese creators are unaware of this and don't fire the lolcowlizers and demand a faithful translation (except for Evangelion). I think it is likely that the Japanese who are ignorant of what Western consumers are saying on Steam and reddit, and are taking what the lolcowlizers relay to them at face value. It is very obvious from following Naoki Yoshida of FF14 and FF16 fame that his lead localizer Kate is not passing Western criticisms on to him and he is blindsided when people have to confront him in person at conventions and tell it to him straight. But it is poasible he is onboard with this and is feigning ignorance, as he has made some progressive comments, defended a man dubbing the main heroine of the latest expansion, etc.

As for Trails, from what we know about the story behind the creation of Crossbell, it seems that there just wasn't anyone on Falcom's creative team that had a strong vision for what Calvard should be (or was unable to persuade the rest of Falcom to get on board with it), so they just defaulted to transplanting the modern America they see into Trails. It is obvious that there was not passion to flesh out and build Calvard as a fully realized fantasy nation like Erebonia. And it was exposed when Musk bought twitter that twitter was altering what people saw in their search results to try to push their agenda, so Falcom could have been seeing DEIed America. And ofcourse, the lolcowlizers could have been whispering in their ears.

[Wretch]

@Val the Moofia Boss what are some of the best jrpgs to look into playing?

[rusty_shackleford]

@Val the Moofia Boss what are some of the best jrpgs to look into playing?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6680/luf ... inistrals/

[SpellSword]

@Val the Moofia Boss what are some of the best jrpgs to look into playing?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6680/luf ... inistrals/

Lufia 2.gif

Lufia 2.gif

I remember that one being pretty good, and that it had an excellent soundtrack:

[Val the Moofia Boss]

@Val the Moofia Boss what are some of the best jrpgs to look into playing?

Trails in the Sky First Chapter: is set in a fantasy late 19th/early 20th century esque setting, with mechs and airships. The story takes place in a small country in the aftermath of a war with the Erebonian empire, with orphans and widows and reconstruction going on. The protagonist's father gets a letter warning him that there is trouble afoot internationally, and with the rise of airships and modernizing technology, people start becoming afraid that a new war might happen and it might be far more catastrophic. The story is extremely immersive with its verisimilitude and everyone feels like a real person. Characters constantly come and leave the party when it suits their motives. The Trails fandom unfortunately tends to overhype Trails as the end all be all, but I have never played any other game series where the world and its people felt this "real". The final two chapters were gripping. However, the first 20 hours of the story can feel boring at times. The biggest weakness is the battle system, which is unrefined. You cannot use crafts (cool martial arts abilities unique that the character) because CP generation is too slow and they usually have small radiuses, so you are incentivized to turn everyone into a mage and spam the same AoE spells Has a good soundtrack.




Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2: is set in the Erebonian Empire, which is experiencing domestic upheaval due to modernization, and an escalating cold war with the Republic of Calvard brewing in the background. Has a very appealing setting, with trains steaming through rolling hills, cool airships flying over grandiose castles, noble swordsmen wearing trenchcoats and cravats practicing cool anime techniques in their dojos, climatic mech duels, etc. The story had me very engaged, on the edge of my seat eager to find out what happens next. The second game has an unusual and memorable ending. Everyone feels like a real person. The game is sufficiently challenging on hard difficulty, and you can effectively use crafts. I wound replaying both games 3 or 4 times each. The game has a fantastic soundtrack. The English dub and localization of the first two games is very good. CS1 and 2 are my personal most favorite JRPGs along with Aselia.




Final Fantasy IX. The story up through the first few hours of disc 3 is fantastic. You have very likeable characters being swept on an urgent adventure through a charming world with gorgeous backdrops. You are constantly discovering new towns. The story is exciting as there is an unfolding war and cities are being wiped off the face of the earth, dramatic sacrifices as people weigh how much their loyalty is worth sacrificing their honor, etc. The fun plummets once you return to Lindblum a few hours into disc 3 and the story becomes about the hunt for Kuja. You don't get to explore new kingdoms anymore and instead have to slog through several dungeons, and the story becomes boring. It as that point you realize that the combat is very easy and shallow, and there is nothing to explore in the overworld. The game is still worth finishing due to the crazy visuals in the last two dungeons. It has good music as Uematsu at this time stopped trying to emulate movie orchestras and began to embrace the synth. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter as the developers intended, or play the PC port with the Moguri mod that adds in widescreen backgrounds.




Final Fantasy X. This game has an extremely tight story, and it is presented with sincerity and feels very "real". Lots of introspection. The characters are likeable. I really like the tone of FF10. The English voice acting remains better than most JRPG dubs today. The game has an unusual ending that I quite liked. Unfortunately, plot wise the game sags in the middle around the ice temple. Aesthetically the game is very beautiful with fantastic art direction, creature designs, and spell VFX, though some of the NPC outfits are skimpy and feel ridiculous. Musically very memorable, with most of the good tracks by Uematsu. The turn based battle system introduces speed and turn orders, which became the foundation for the Trails series' battle system (which would layer onto it positioning, and more turn order manipulation). There is some depth to the combat as you need to swap in and out of characters during battle to accomplish different things, ie Tidus being fast enough to land a hit on wolves, Auron shattering armored opponents, using Wakka to hit flying enemies, using Yuna's summons to soak a boss' hard hitting attacks for the party, etc. Emulate the original PS2 version, as the so-called "remaster" botches the character models and facial animations.




Final Fantasy XII: like FF10, this game has a "serious" tone. Unfortunately, unlike FF10, this game's main cast are very boring. I found the side characters like Larsa and the two Cids to be more lively and wish that had been my party members instead. The game has a refreshingly nuanced take on "the empire", where they are presented as people being propelled by the circumstances of an escalating cold war with a rival superpower rather than as cartoon villains. FF12 has fantastic cutscene direction. The English localization and dub is very good, with English accented theater actors voicing the characters. The plot however has three very long boring stretches where you have to run through huge MMO zones, fighting or running past lots of mobs with nothing interesting happening story wise (the hike to Raithwall's Tomb, the hike to Mount Bur Omisce, and then the hike to Archades and the Great Crystal). The weakness is the RTWP combat where you watch three party members stand around and do boring MMO autoattacks. The cool presentation you normally see in JRPGs with cool ability animations and VFX, dramatic camera framing and character posing, etc, is absent. Unfortunately, the music by Hitoshi Sakimoto can be ear grating and "noisy". I would recommend emulating the original PS2 version, as for the so-called "remaster" Square threw the textures into an AI upscaler which washed out the colors and the details.




Final Fantasy XIV: the story of the base game and the first two expansions feels very "real", as it is about grounded geopolitical conflict. It feels like you are playing through a novel, rather than playing a "game". The latter expansions have some cool moments, but suffer from bloat and lose the realism and tone of the early game, becoming more stock light vs dark video game storylines. The game has good art direction, character and monster designs, VFX, etc. The English dub of the base game is lackluster, but becomes above average in the expansions after the voice studio was moved to London and almost everyone was recast. The soundtrack is grossly overrated but still overall very good. I have bought all 10 blu-ray OST albums and have 200 FF14 tracks being on my favorite's list. The gameplay, however, leaves much to be desired. The main story is 400+ hours long, but 200 hours of it are spent watching cutscenes, and another 100 hours is spent walking to NPCs to talk to them and read dialogue boxes. Little of your total playtime is spent in combat, and the story battles have been repeatedly nerfed and redesigned to the point that there is zero challenge. The classes are overall boring to play.




Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword: a visual novel/SRPG hybrid with a more "mature" tone than most JRPGs and VNs. The protagonist and his little sister get isekaied into a fantasy world, where they are promptly captured by people they do not share the same language with. The MC is then blackmailed by the kingdom holding his sister hostage into becoming a slave warrior for them and helping conquer other countries. The story has a lot of introspection and a bittersweet feel. It has an atmospheric track by Aki Hata. If you want to S rank each mission and beat all of the timed side objectives, then the gameplay is very difficult and you will want to constantly create saves and savescum a lot. It took me two weeks of reloading to get through chapter 3 and complete all of the side objectives and capture the city in time. If you don't care about coming in last place and leisurely going through the missions at your own pace, then the game is easy. You may need to use a program like Magpie to blow up the game to fullscreen on modern landscape monitors.




Suikoden 1: a 15 hour long heavy war story with lots of major character deaths. Has a bitter feel. You can have a six man party, and there are dozens of party members to acquire, so chances are you will be able to fill up a full party of your favorite characters. The weakness is that you have to do some tedious inventory micromanagement. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter.




Suikoden 2: grossly overrated but still good. It is a 40 hour long war story, but only a handful of characters of die, and the plot sags at times. Nonetheless, the game's scope is grounded in a local war, has some cool/funny moments, and the characters are likeable. The game visually looks better than S1. There are some good tracks by Miki Higashino. The tedious inventory micromanagement of S1 is gone. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter.

Suikogaiden volumes 1 & 2. Visual novels set in between S2 and S3. Gives some resolution to S2 subplots, gives you a glimpse of what future Suikoden games might have been about had the series creator Murayama not left or had been ousted from Konami.




Valkyria Chronicles 1: is a SRPG/third person shooter hybrid set in an alternate fantasy WW1/WW2. It is about one campaign in one small country in the midst of a larger world war going on. It has a more "serious" and "mature" feel. The aesthetics are very good. Unfortunately, it has a soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto, which can sound noisy and ear grating, but there are a few memorable tunes.




Valkyria Chronicles 4: is about a different operation in the same world war. The main cast of heroes are overall younger and less varied than VC1's, and there are some juvenile antics in the first few hours that might be offputting the usual people who dislike anime and JRPGs. However, once the snow starts falling a few missions in, the story became very gripping to me and never let up, and the final act is very good. Everybody feels like a real person. The gameplay is more challenging than VC1 with more difficult mission design earlier on, and introduces mortars that can shoot without direct line of sight.




Xenoblade Chronicles 1 for the New 3DS. The first half of the story is very engaging, as the protagonist embarks on a personal quest to kill a mass murderer. There is tension and it feels like there is danger. Story gripped me and had me on the edge of my seat wanting to find out what happens next. After Prison Island, the tension evaporates and the story becomes about fighting a god monster for the fate of the universe. You get to run through good looking fantasy environments, and there is memorable music. The English dub was voiced by Britons and is above average. Unfortunately, the game has boring MMO combat without the usual presentation and flair of JRPG battles. The sidequests are also mediocre. I prefer the 3DS version with the more painterly character models as opposed to the Switch rerelease's more generic and plasticky looking moeblobs, and the 3DS version has some immersive VFX like the trees swaying in the wind that is not present in the Switch version.




Sakura Wars V: made by the same team that would later go on to make Valkyria Chronicles, featuring a lot of the same design principles in its gameplay and level design. Set in 1920 New York, you play as the Japanese captain of an American steampunk mech squad that fights supervillains and their giant demon possessed steampunk mechs. The designs are cool, and the boss fights at the end of each chapter are pretty cool too. The visual novel segments are more engaging as there are timed dialogue boxes, and sometimes letting the timer run out and remaining silent is the best answer. Aesthetically, I prefer the first Sakura Wars game set in Taisho era Tokyo, and that game had more appealing love interests, but SW5 has better gameplay and a more proactive protagonist. The English dub was okay.




Pokemon Ruby & Saphhire for the GBA. This was my first handheld Pokemon game (before that I had played the N64 games). I have played this game multiple times. It conveys the feeling of hiking across a world, visiting towns and cities but also bushwhacking your way through rainforests and sailing across the ocean trying to find the correct island or cave, all while trying to conserve your resources. The 3DS remake gives you access to a far larger roster of Pokemon that might appeal to you, but eliminates the challenge of having to conserve resources, and gives you exp share which makes most battles easy, and aesthetically looks washed out and too bright. It has some memorable music.




Pokemon Black & White: has the tightest story of the mainline games, without constantly interdicting the player in long unskippable cutscenes. The main story can be a little difficult to get through. It has some memorable music.




Shadow of the Colossus: one of my favorite games, though unfortunately it was held up by gaming journalists as a kneejerk reaction to Roger Ebert's "games are not art" opinion and has become the center contrarianism. You play as a young man on a quest to resurrect his love, who must traverse a vast desolate wasteland to kill 16 colossi. The game has a melancholic feel as you are riding across the wasteland. The colossi feel menacing, and figuring out to beat them is satisfying. The game has an unusual and memorable ending.

There are more JRPGs that I liked such as the Utawarerumono trilogy or the Last Remnant, but they are holistically not as great.

[rusty_shackleford]

Lufia 2 is the best jrpg for people who are repulsed by animu artstyle(no offense to Val & co)
got largely overlooked because it released so late into the SNES's lifecycle

I also recall enjoying SaGa Frontier 2 for the PS1.

[Wretch]

@Val the Moofia Boss what are some of the best jrpgs to look into playing?

Trails in the Sky First Chapter: is set in a fantasy late 19th/early 20th century esque setting, with mechs and airships. The story takes place in a small country in the aftermath of a war with the Erebonian empire, with orphans and widows and reconstruction going on. The protagonist's father gets a letter warning him that there is trouble afoot internationally, and with the rise of airships and modernizing technology, people start becoming afraid that a new war might happen and it might be far more catastrophic. The story is extremely immersive with its verisimilitude and everyone feels like a real person. Characters constantly come and leave the party when it suits their motives. The Trails fandom unfortunately tends to overhype Trails as the end all be all, but I have never played any other game series where the world and its people felt this "real". The final two chapters were gripping. However, the first 20 hours of the story can feel boring at times. The biggest weakness is the battle system, which is unrefined. You cannot use crafts (cool martial arts abilities unique that the character) because CP generation is too slow and they usually have small radiuses, so you are incentivized to turn everyone into a mage and spam the same AoE spells Has a good soundtrack.




Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2: is set in the Erebonian Empire, which is experiencing domestic upheaval due to modernization, and an escalating cold war with the Republic of Calvard brewing in the background. Has a very appealing setting, with trains steaming through rolling hills, cool airships flying over grandiose castles, noble swordsmen wearing trenchcoats and cravats practicing cool anime techniques in their dojos, climatic mech duels, etc. The story had me very engaged, on the edge of my seat eager to find out what happens next. The second game has an unusual and memorable ending. Everyone feels like a real person. The game is sufficiently challenging on hard difficulty, and you can effectively use crafts. I wound replaying both games 3 or 4 times each. The game has a fantastic soundtrack. The English dub and localization of the first two games is very good. CS1 and 2 are my personal most favorite JRPGs along with Aselia.




Final Fantasy IX. The story up through the first few hours of disc 3 is fantastic. You have very likeable characters being swept on an urgent adventure through a charming world with gorgeous backdrops. You are constantly discovering new towns. The story is exciting as there is an unfolding war and cities are being wiped off the face of the earth, dramatic sacrifices as people weigh how much their loyalty is worth sacrificing their honor, etc. The fun plummets once you return to Lindblum a few hours into disc 3 and the story becomes about the hunt for Kuja. You don't get to explore new kingdoms anymore and instead have to slog through several dungeons, and the story becomes boring. It as that point you realize that the combat is very easy and shallow, and there is nothing to explore in the overworld. The game is still worth finishing due to the crazy visuals in the last two dungeons. It has good music as Uematsu at this time stopped trying to emulate movie orchestras and began to embrace the synth. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter as the developers intended, or play the PC port with the Moguri mod that adds in widescreen backgrounds.




Final Fantasy X. This game has an extremely tight story, and it is presented with sincerity and feels very "real". Lots of introspection. The characters are likeable. I really like the tone of FF10. The English voice acting remains better than most JRPG dubs today. The game has an unusual ending that I quite liked. Unfortunately, plot wise the game sags in the middle around the ice temple. Aesthetically the game is very beautiful with fantastic art direction, creature designs, and spell VFX, though some of the NPC outfits are skimpy and feel ridiculous. Musically very memorable, with most of the good tracks by Uematsu. The turn based battle system introduces speed and turn orders, which became the foundation for the Trails series' battle system (which would layer onto it positioning, and more turn order manipulation). There is some depth to the combat as you need to swap in and out of characters during battle to accomplish different things, ie Tidus being fast enough to land a hit on wolves, Auron shattering armored opponents, using Wakka to hit flying enemies, using Yuna's summons to soak a boss' hard hitting attacks for the party, etc. Emulate the original PS2 version, as the so-called "remaster" botches the character models and facial animations.




Final Fantasy XII: like FF10, this game has a "serious" tone. Unfortunately, unlike FF10, this game's main cast are very boring. I found the side characters like Larsa and the two Cids to be more lively and wish that had been my party members instead. The game has a refreshingly nuanced take on "the empire", where they are presented as people being propelled by the circumstances of an escalating cold war with a rival superpower rather than as cartoon villains. FF12 has fantastic cutscene direction. The English localization and dub is very good, with English accented theater actors voicing the characters. The plot however has three very long boring stretches where you have to run through huge MMO zones, fighting or running past lots of mobs with nothing interesting happening story wise (the hike to Raithwall's Tomb, the hike to Mount Bur Omisce, and then the hike to Archades and the Great Crystal). The weakness is the RTWP combat where you watch three party members stand around and do boring MMO autoattacks. The cool presentation you normally see in JRPGs with cool ability animations and VFX, dramatic camera framing and character posing, etc, is absent. Unfortunately, the music by Hitoshi Sakimoto can be ear grating and "noisy". I would recommend emulating the original PS2 version, as for the so-called "remaster" Square threw the textures into an AI upscaler which washed out the colors and the details.




Final Fantasy XIV: the story of the base game and the first two expansions feels very "real", as it is about grounded geopolitical conflict. It feels like you are playing through a novel, rather than playing a "game". The latter expansions have some cool moments, but suffer from bloat and lose the realism and tone of the early game, becoming more stock light vs dark video game storylines. The game has good art direction, character and monster designs, VFX, etc. The English dub of the base game is lackluster, but becomes above average in the expansions after the voice studio was moved to London and almost everyone was recast. The soundtrack is grossly overrated but still overall very good. I have bought all 10 blu-ray OST albums and have 200 FF14 tracks being on my favorite's list. The gameplay, however, leaves much to be desired. The main story is 400+ hours long, but 200 hours of it are spent watching cutscenes, and another 100 hours is spent walking to NPCs to talk to them and read dialogue boxes. Little of your total playtime is spent in combat, and the story battles have been repeatedly nerfed and redesigned to the point that there is zero challenge. The classes are overall boring to play.




Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword: a visual novel/SRPG hybrid with a more "mature" tone than most JRPGs and VNs. The protagonist and his little sister get isekaied into a fantasy world, where they are promptly captured by people they do not share the same language with. The MC is then blackmailed by the kingdom holding his sister hostage into becoming a slave warrior for them and helping conquer other countries. The story has a lot of introspection and a bittersweet feel. It has an atmospheric track by Aki Hata. If you want to S rank each mission and beat all of the timed side objectives, then the gameplay is very difficult and you will want to constantly create saves and savescum a lot. It took me two weeks of reloading to get through chapter 3 and complete all of the side objectives and capture the city in time. If you don't care about coming in last place and leisurely going through the missions at your own pace, then the game is easy. You may need to use a program like Magpie to blow up the game to fullscreen on modern landscape monitors.




Suikoden 1: a 15 hour long heavy war story with lots of major character deaths. Has a bitter feel. You can have a six man party, and there are dozens of party members to acquire, so chances are you will be able to fill up a full party of your favorite characters. The weakness is that you have to do some tedious inventory micromanagement. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter.




Suikoden 2: grossly overrated but still good. It is a 40 hour long war story, but only a handful of characters of die, and the plot sags at times. Nonetheless, the game's scope is grounded in a local war, has some cool/funny moments, and the characters are likeable. The game visually looks better than S1. There are some good tracks by Miki Higashino. The tedious inventory micromanagement of S1 is gone. Emulate the PS1 version with a CRT filter.

Suikogaiden volumes 1 & 2. Visual novels set in between S2 and S3. Gives some resolution to S2 subplots, gives you a glimpse of what future Suikoden games might have been about had the series creator Murayama not left or had been ousted from Konami.




Valkyria Chronicles 1: is a SRPG/third person shooter hybrid set in an alternate fantasy WW1/WW2. It is about one campaign in one small country in the midst of a larger world war going on. It has a more "serious" and "mature" feel. The aesthetics are very good. Unfortunately, it has a soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto, which can sound noisy and ear grating, but there are a few memorable tunes.




Valkyria Chronicles 4: is about a different operation in the same world war. The main cast of heroes are overall younger and less varied than VC1's, and there are some juvenile antics in the first few hours that might be offputting the usual people who dislike anime and JRPGs. However, once the snow starts falling a few missions in, the story became very gripping to me and never let up, and the final act is very good. Everybody feels like a real person. The gameplay is more challenging than VC1 with more difficult mission design earlier on, and introduces mortars that can shoot without direct line of sight.




Xenoblade Chronicles 1 for the New 3DS. The first half of the story is very engaging, as the protagonist embarks on a personal quest to kill a mass murderer. There is tension and it feels like there is danger. Story gripped me and had me on the edge of my seat wanting to find out what happens next. After Prison Island, the tension evaporates and the story becomes about fighting a god monster for the fate of the universe. You get to run through good looking fantasy environments, and there is memorable music. The English dub was voiced by Britons and is above average. Unfortunately, the game has boring MMO combat without the usual presentation and flair of JRPG battles. The sidequests are also mediocre. I prefer the 3DS version with the more painterly character models as opposed to the Switch rerelease's more generic and plasticky looking moeblobs, and the 3DS version has some immersive VFX like the trees swaying in the wind that is not present in the Switch version.




Sakura Wars V: made by the same team that would later go on to make Valkyria Chronicles, featuring a lot of the same design principles in its gameplay and level design. Set in 1920 New York, you play as the Japanese captain of an American steampunk mech squad that fights supervillains and their giant demon possessed steampunk mechs. The designs are cool, and the boss fights at the end of each chapter are pretty cool too. The visual novel segments are more engaging as there are timed dialogue boxes, and sometimes letting the timer run out and remaining silent is the best answer. Aesthetically, I prefer the first Sakura Wars game set in Taisho era Tokyo, and that game had more appealing love interests, but SW5 has better gameplay and a more proactive protagonist. The English dub was okay.




Pokemon Ruby & Saphhire for the GBA. This was my first handheld Pokemon game (before that I had played the N64 games). I have played this game multiple times. It conveys the feeling of hiking across a world, visiting towns and cities but also bushwhacking your way through rainforests and sailing across the ocean trying to find the correct island or cave, all while trying to conserve your resources. The 3DS remake gives you access to a far larger roster of Pokemon that might appeal to you, but eliminates the challenge of having to conserve resources, and gives you exp share which makes most battles easy, and aesthetically looks washed out and too bright. It has some memorable music.




Pokemon Black & White: has the tightest story of the mainline games, without constantly interdicting the player in long unskippable cutscenes. The main story can be a little difficult to get through. It has some memorable music.




Shadow of the Colossus: one of my favorite games, though unfortunately it was held up by gaming journalists as a kneejerk reaction to Roger Ebert's "games are not art" opinion and has become the center contrarianism. You play as a young man on a quest to resurrect his love, who must traverse a vast desolate wasteland to kill 16 colossi. The game has a melancholic feel as you are riding across the wasteland. The colossi feel menacing, and figuring out to beat them is satisfying. The game has an unusual and memorable ending.

There are more JRPGs that I liked such as the Utawarerumono trilogy or the Last Remnant, but they are holistically not as great.

Thanks fren. Ruby and sapphire are my favorite the pokemon games. I’m in a mech/airship kinda mood so i think i’ll try trails or xenoblade. Valkyria looks good too.

Have you played the yakuza games? Or sleeping dogs for that matter?

[1998]

Lufia 2 is the best jrpg for people who are repulsed by animu artstyle(no offense to Val & co)
got largely overlooked because it released so late into the SNES's lifecycle

I also recall enjoying SaGa Frontier 2 for the PS1.

Anachronox is also pretty good

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Have you played the yakuza games?

I played Yakuza 0. It reinforced my opinion that I do not like fast paced action games or fighters where I have to memorize combos. I don't have the reflexes for it. Getting beaten up and knocked down a lot doesn't feel very heroic. I was not keen on the crude humor. I did like the main story about how people are committing murder trying to get the last deed they need to sell off the neighborhood as a package for a redevelopment plan. There were some neat moments like when you play as Majima and go to a bar and get into a fight, and there is a QTE where the bartender tries to throw your enemy a potion but you can grab it and drink it and heal to full. The VFX on the heat actions with the colorful auras looked cool. It was neat how they were several things to do in town like batting cages or mahjong. I don't remember much about the music. I might get Yakuza 7 because it is turn based, but it does not seem to be serious.

[maidenhaver]

Crazy Taxi 2.

[Finarfin]

ATOM RPG, BYLAAAAAT