Niche JRPGs

[uddar]

Hello,
What are some obscure (or rarely discussed) JRPGs I should try. I'm always on the lookout for something new to play, and really just willing to try anything.
(Also, it's my first post! It's a pleasure to join this community!)

[Acrux]

Skyrim!

[DemoGraph]

Septerra core
Rance

[WhiteShark]

Obscure is relative. Very few games past the PC-98 era are obscure if you've been on the internet for a while. It may be better to start by listing what you've already played.

[Tinky Winky]

Racing Lagoon, a racing JRPG on PS1, there's an english translation available but I'm not sure about how good it was.


The Uncharted Water 1&2 on Sega/Snes : Age of discovery simulator where you can trade glass beads to ******* for their gold, there are more than 2 games but I haven't tried any outside these 2 plus Gaiden on PS1. Not obscure though.

The Nushi Tsuri/River King series : Fishing JRPG made for kid, they are kid games which is still better than weeb gooner trash at least. The best ones (The two PS1 releases) are only available in Japanese so you'd have to play in the **** rune.

[Tweed]

How do you feel about kobolds? UwU

[Tweed]

Never played it, but The Black Onyx has a translation and it looks like it would be fun, but that's borderline traditional CRPG.
Nobody talks about Sword of Vermillion, ever and it's not a standard JRPG.
Esper Dream 1 and 2 (especially 2) are worth trying out.
Lagrange Point is worth looking into just for the sound mappers alone.
Zelda II is the only actual JRPG in the series and nobody talks about it because it wasn't popular.
Simon's Quest used to be the same deal for Castlevania.
Phantasy Star series seems to be forgotten these days except for Online.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Vantage Master

Vantage Master

It's a tactics game/SRPG where you play as a master who summons monsters (called Natials) and tries to slay the enemy master. The game looks aesthetically gorgeous.






After each battle, you loot a totem off of the enemy summoner that allows you to summon a new type of monster. There are some peculiar looking monster designs. For example, you can get a totem that is a ship-in-a-bottle, which is used to summon a winged fishbowl Natial. Cool designs.




You can be a wolfman who summons fishbowl monsters and cleaves wizards with his claymore!


The battles take place on a hex grid which allows for more interesting movement options. There is no stat or equipment micromanagement and no sidequests; the game is very focused on just getting you to the fun part of the battles. Battles are about 15-30 minutes long, so the game avoids the tedium and frustration that plagues other tactics games/SRPGs.

There are 30 battles and the game took me about 22 hours to complete it. Strangely, there is a world map but the entire game takes place on one of the four continents. The final battle takes place in a desert on a landbridge to the second continent. That being said, the game did not outstay its welcome.




The gameplay has a lot of depth to it. Natials can be one of four elements and there are type disadvantages. Water beats Fire. Fire beats Heaven. Heaven beats Earth. Earth beats Water. Earth elements tend to be slow but have high defenses and are good for digging in and entrenching a position. Heaven units can fly over terrain and are good for capturing distant positions like ley lines, or flanking. Water Natials usually move slowly over land but way faster over water. Your master can summon a magic spell that can raise or lower the water level, enabling your water units to travel further (or to landlock an enemy master's navy). There is also elevation, so you can have archer units that stand on top of hills and shoot further, while units down below can try to block line of sight by hiding behind pillars, and so on.

The game is quite hard. There is a so-called "easy mode" but it is still nonetheless quite hard. I would strongly recommend playing the game on easy.

Also had one of the most memorable challenges I've experienced in a game. Late in the story, there is a map where you start at the bottom of a hill with only one leyline to summon monsters, and you have to defeat the enemy master who starts on top of the hill (massive elevation advantage, his units have far more range going downhill while my units' range are halved by going uphill), and he has lots of leylines up there. At several points I thought I was doomed, but I persevered and managed to turn the tide and triumph. Was very satisfying.

After every 4 battles, there is a 40 second cutscene which I presume is the plot happening, but the cutscenes aren't translated (except for the last one), so don't play this for the story.

There is some fantastic music too!




The game is free to download from Falcom's website.

If you are open to having a lot of VN in your game, then Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword.

Runnerup would be Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword. I really liked the bitter, melancholic tone of the character being enslaved and forced to help conquer other countries and his late night reveries as he wonders about everything that went wrong in his life, the things he did, and is apprehensive about whether or not he has a future. It's paired with Aki Hata's soundtrack which is very memorable. I thought that the way the grand strategy elements were coupled to emphasize the story was really neat. However, the game is very, very hard (particularly the last stretch of chapter 3) and you need to savescum a lot. I actually dropped this game after 60 hours the first time I played it, but I am glad I came back to it a couple years later and started a new playthrough and finished it. I have the sequel installed, but apparently the creators of the first game were fired and went to found a different company (which also went under), so I haven't been eager to play it yet.

I am replaying Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword, which a VN/SRPG hybrid. It's pretty much all about party composition and shuffling your party members around to different positions from fight to fight. The game is very, very tough. I have thus far SS ranked every mission except for one (because trying to defend a base from a multi-pronged attack AND capture five enemy towns AND divert one of your four squads to kill a limited time optional superboss AND capture a mana crystal in a cave was too much, so I only achieved S rank there).




You control four squads, with each squad having up to three party members, and each squad has three positions that can be occupied by a party member: attacker in front, defender in middle, and supporter in the back. There are five types of party members:

• Blue spirits: deal good to high physical damage as an attacker, have middling def and magic resist as defender, can interrupt the enemy supporter's spells as a supporter.
• Green spirits: highest physical defense, low attack, abysmally low magic resist. Can sometimes heal as a supporter.
• Red spirits: good to high physical damage, lowest physical defense but highest magic resist, can deal high magical damage (usually AoE) as a supporter.
• Black spirits: low to medium damage (but can often target other enemies besides the enemy defender, such as going for the enemy attacker or supporter first), middling defense and magic resist, has a lot of utility spells as a supporter that cannot be interrupted by an enemy blue spirit supporter.
• Etrangers (humans isekaied from Earth to the fantasy world the game takes place in): very high physical damage, high defense and magic resist, can heal or buff in supporter spot. But on a first playthrough you only have Yuuto.

On my first playthrough, I just did the boring safe strategy of making squads with a blue attacker (high damage), a green defender (high HP and defense, can heal in supporter role), and a red supporter (deals magic damage). If I faced an enemy squad that had a red mage, then I would move the blue spirit into the supporter position to interrupt the enemy's magic spells until they were out, and then move the blue back into attack position and kill the enemy squad, but this was time consuming and I did not achieve high scores on missions. On my second playthrough, I've gotten a better grasp on what each type of spirit can do, so now I'm doing stuff like building squads without green spirit tanks or having a blue spirit that can interrupt enemy magic, instead using Yuuto's (Etranger) and Uruka's (Black spirit) ability to target attackers, and using the rare power of red spirit's magic attacks as supporters to kill enemy squad before they have a chance to attack me. So I'm progressing through chapters much more quickly.

There is also an elemental damage modifier mechanic (Blue > Red > Green > Black > Blue) but I am not advanced enough to take advantage of that mechanic yet. It's already a lot trying to juggle my party composition based off what enemy party members needed to be neutralized or kill first or attacks that need to be defended against, let alone minmaxxing damage dealt based off of modifiers. The elemental modifiers are usually slight (like +5% or 10%), not enough worth caring about, but there are certain spots on the map where the elemental modifiers shoot up to 60% blue elemental modifier and stuff, which I try to be aware of.


Elemental modifiers on this spot with two enemy squads I'm attacking. The modifiers are rarely this high.



Also, as rusty_shackleford mentioned, Guild Wars 1. You hit the level cap of 20 really early. You can't levelgrind or outgear the enemies in the missions, so you really need to have the right abilities equipped to deal with certain enemy mob groups or with boss mechanics. The Drought in Nightfall was the first mission I got stuck on for hours.

[Oyster Sauce]

[psychic_dream]

That one Jeanne d’Arc tactical rpg on the psp.

[Kalarion]

Legend of Legaia was pretty fun. I think it had American or Euro devs though?

Seventh Saga.

Eternal Ring and Evergrace.

[Tweed]

Seventh Saga.

Just remember to patch it.

[DDC]

Seventh Saga.

I always thought that game was the coolest as a kid, because getting to choose your protagonist was pretty unconventional in that era and then it was great how the ones you didn't pick still went on the same quest and you could ally with them or fight them, sometimes the ones you allied with would betray you, etc. I rented it a bunch of times and never beat it because you could get into situations where the enemy apprentices were just too strong to beat. Like you have all the best items, armor, weapons, etc. available at the time and use an optimal strategy, but still can't win, and then leveling further only makes them outscale you more. But the game was still awesome.

There is a game called Mystic Ark that has some of the same characters and common gameplay elements (although not the cool mode 7 battle transition), but I've never played it.