RPG Community |OT| Take the Epoch to a New Era

[erd]

Deciding on the games I'd be interested for the blitz has turned out to be a bit trickier than I thought. Currently, I have:

Banner of the Maid - This recently came out but I've been interested in trying it out since it was announced. It seems like an interesting indie SRPG that probably won't get much attention from people (primarily since it's not in English) so it seems like a good pick for something like this.

Sekiro - I've played a bunch of this a while back than dropped it for no real reason and haven't really had the chance/desire to go back to it. It's a great game that I really should get around to finishing, so this sounds like a perfect opportunity. Assuming I'm reading the rules right and picking games you've shelved half way through is ok.

Yakuza 0 - I liked Yakuza 4 so I started playing 0 pretty much immediately afterwards but quit after about 10 minutes since it just felt much too similar. It's now
been long enough that this should no longer be a problem so I'd like to play it at some point. Plus it's on the favorites list, so it doesn't take a slot away from
anything else. Though if it's anything like Yakuza 4, I'll likely spend way too much time on the minigames which is problematic for something where the goal is to actually finish games in your backlog.

Those three are set in stone, but apart from that I also have:

Ys VII - I've been meaning to play this for a while now and even though there's been multiple Ys releases since then I think I'd prefer going back to it instead of playing Celceta/VIII, though VIII might also be a good option.

Fire Emblem Conquest - Pretty much the same thing as with Yakuza 0. I wanted to play it after Birthright, but it was too similar. I love Fire Emblem and this is supposed to be good from a gameplay/map design perspective.

Atelier Rorona DX - This one is a bit weird. I loved Sophie, liked Firis and really disliked Escha & Logy, so I don't really know how to feel about the franchise. A
lot of long-time fans seem to adore the original trilogy, so I've been wanting to give it a shot. I've started it about a week ago though, so I don't know if it counts.
It's also been bizarrely easy so far, to the point where most of it's gameplay elements are completely pointless. Might just go for the sequel instead.

Raidou 1 - Raidou 2 was dope and while the first one was supposed to not be as good it should still be a good time. I know playing the sequel first doesn't really make a lot of sense but eh.

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition - Basically the same as Atelier. I have mixed feelings on the franchise so I want to try out the one that long-time fans
like the most. Though I loved Xilia/Zestiria and hated Berseria so I clearly have the opposite opinion on these games than most fans do.

Utawarerumono - Dunno. A lot of people seem to love it, but it really just seems to be a generic VN with some basic SRPG elements so I'm quite interested in what makes it so special. Probably not interested enough to buy a game I'll likely dislike though (also, does it count as a backlog if it's a game you've been wanting to play but haven't bought yet? It does in my mind.).

Slay the Spire - Another highly praised game that I've been interested in and a roguelike deck-builder sounds like a good change of pace from other games on the list.

And I'll probably think of some more later. Leaning towards Vesperia/Atelier/Conquest right now, but I'm not 100% sure. Though I guess the rules do say you can swap one game per month, so it shouldn't matter all that much in the end.

Can I fill half the list now and the other half until the 10th?

 

[Deleted member 419]

Eridani I'm a fan of variety when it comes to blitz selections so I would do Slay the Spire and Atelier for two "and now for something completely different" type of games, to complement the three you've already chosen.

My variety approach has worked well and I've completed all of my blitz games each season in a timely manner as anyone from RPG Era can attest to.

I haven't posted in here much recently because there have been a series of occurrences on Era that have really soured me on the forum in general, and when I'm just skimming the front page for news and not engaging with the community at all, it's hard to get back into that effort-posting mentality. I had a massive thread I was working on cataloguing every Squaresoft-developed RPG that I probably won't even post now despite having put a lot of time into it already. It just is what it is. That being said I have a few completed playthroughs coming up soon with any luck and I'll post thoughts on the games in question once I cross the finish line.

 

[Bloodarmz]

Yeah, I'd like more participation in the thread. Reading through the more in depth impressions gets me through downtime at work.

That said, I'll need to see what favorite catches my interest. Maybe it's time I give Baten Kaitos a shot as I'm no longer averse to card battle systems.

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Baten Kaitos is a game that I remember playing but can't recall much about it apart from a certain important plot point and that there was a song I really liked in there. I decided to actually find the song rather than think about it and listened to it for the first time since 2005 (!) and it is still good.

 

[Stronginthearm]

I've decided on my five rpg blitz games, Pokemon FireRed, World of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest VIII, Bravely Default and Ys Seven (all games I've started). First up: Bravely Default! Mainly just punching things as monks at the moment.

 

[iceblade]

I've decided on my five rpg blitz games, Pokemon FireRed, World of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest VIII, Bravely Default and Ys Seven (all games I've started). First up: Bravely Default! Mainly just punching things as monks at the moment.

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You're in for a real treat. Hope you enjoy it - despite its flaws the game is really something special. Also, obligatory OST plug:

 

[Deleted member 419]

I've decided on my five rpg blitz games, Pokemon FireRed, World of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest VIII, Bravely Default and Ys Seven (all games I've started). First up: Bravely Default! Mainly just punching things as monks at the moment.

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Nice I really need to play Bravely as well after enjoying Octopath so much. I probably would've played it by now but I keep holding out for a Switch remaster of the both of them.

 

[ara]

I have a very diverse Blitz lineup that consists of Judgment and four Trails games (Zero, Ao, CS1 and 2). I've already finished CS1 once before though, so maybe I'll drop it. Doubt I'll actually manage to do all five in three months, anyway.

 

[Luminaire]

Banner of the Maid

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- This recently came out but I've been interested in trying it out since it was announced. It seems like an interesting indie SRPG that probably won't get much attention from people (primarily since it's not in English) so it seems like a good pick for something like this.

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I've heard good things about this. I believe its on my wishlist but it not being in English is whats stopping me as my Manadarin is quite bad.

Sekiro

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- I've played a bunch of this a while back than dropped it for no real reason and haven't really had the chance/desire to go back to it. It's a great game that I really should get around to finishing, so this sounds like a perfect opportunity. Assuming I'm reading the rules right and picking games you've shelved half way through is ok.

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Yup, people finish up a number of shelved games or even start them early and finish them within the 3-month blitz window.

Yakuza 0

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- I liked Yakuza 4 so I started playing 0 pretty much immediately afterwards but quit after about 10 minutes since it just felt much too similar. It's now
been long enough that this should no longer be a problem so I'd like to play it at some point. Plus it's on the favorites list, so it doesn't take a slot away from
anything else. Though if it's anything like Yakuza 4, I'll likely spend way too much time on the minigames which is problematic for something where the goal is to actually finish games in your backlog.

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This game was wonderful. I'd only really played 3 and a bit of 4 prior. Yakuza 0 scratches an itch and for some inexplicable reason makes me want to kick down doors and start throwing people through windows. Wonder what it could be..

Atelier Rorona DX

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- This one is a bit weird. I loved Sophie, liked Firis and really disliked Escha & Logy, so I don't really know how to feel about the franchise. A lot of long-time fans seem to adore the original trilogy, so I've been wanting to give it a shot. I've started it about a week ago though, so I don't know if it counts. It's also been bizarrely easy so far, to the point where most of it's gameplay elements are completely pointless. Might just go for the sequel instead.

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I love Atelier games and Rorona is one of my favorites. However, I haven't played it since the first one launched. People do enjoy Totori better, as its the best one of the Arland Trilogy.

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition

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- Basically the same as Atelier. I have mixed feelings on the franchise so I want to try out the one that long-time fans
like the most. Though I loved Xilia/Zestiria and hated Berseria so I clearly have the opposite opinion on these games than most fans do.

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You might end up feeling the same way on Vesperia. Berseria is the best one since Vesperia in my opinion given how dark it is. What didn't you like about Berseria? Have you considered Graces F?[/quote]

Utawarerumono

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- Dunno. A lot of people seem to love it, but it really just seems to be a generic VN with some basic SRPG elements so I'm quite interested in what makes it so special. Probably not interested enough to buy a game I'll likely dislike though (also, does it count as a backlog if it's a game you've been wanting to play but haven't bought yet? It does in my mind.).

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I've yet to play my copies yet but everything I've heard about Uta is that they're very character driven. If you liked Tears to Tiara 2, you'll likely enjoy it given its probably 60/40 or even 70/30 VN/RPG. They're quite long I'm told.

And I'll probably think of some more later. Leaning towards Vesperia/Atelier/Conquest right now, but I'm not 100% sure. Though I guess the rules do say you can swap one game per month, so it shouldn't matter all that much in the end.

Can I fill half the list now and the other half until the 10th?

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Yeah, or you can fill in blanks later on through the blitz. The purpose of listing them is to help with choice paralysis. Staring at a wall/library of hundreds of unfinished games can be a bit daunting, but seeing other peoples choices or opinions can help push you towards locking down a game in your quest to finish it.

Baten Kaitos is a game that I remember playing but can't recall much about it apart from a certain important plot point and that there was a song I really liked in there. I decided to actually find the song rather than think about it and listened to it for the first time since 2005 (!) and it is still good.

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I skipped it and pretty much any other card combat game due to some weird aversion to said battle systems. I'm not sure why I hated them back then, I can't even think of one I played at the time to turn me off them. Maybe it was disappointment due to PSO Episode 3 C.A.R.D. not being more of the same, but I never played it. Alas, the reason is petty and unfair so I may try to do some kind of RPG justice and slip it into my bonus. Hm...we'll see!

 

[MoonFrog]

I can vouch for Five's nigh perfect blitz record (of some kind).

 

[Deleted member 419]

I can vouch for Five's nigh perfect blitz record (of some kind).

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Yes it is nearly perfect in a certain way indeed...haha

 

[Deleted member 15457]

Playing through Dungeon Master as part of the blitz and wow, this is the embodiment of late 80s PC RPGs.

It's a Wizardry/Etrian Odyssey styled first-person dungeon crawler where you create a party then head into the maze.
This one's a little creative with the character creation process though: on the first floor, you walk around a hall of paintings as a featureless entity choosing four heroes to bring to life and conquer the game with! Interestingly enough, Dungeon master is real time without pause, meaning your attack speed is determined by a combination of your ability to click through menus + skill cooldowns.

However, this is an old school experience:

• You have to personally draw the floor maps yourself outside the game if you don't want to get lost.
• As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell ingame what stats your equipment have other then comparing character stats with equipment vs stats without. And this just for passive armor, absolutely nothing for offensive weapons.
• Instead of selecting spells from a list, mages are given up to four rows of 6 symbols to input a code needed to cast spells, and both the instruction manual and trial and error are needed to figure out the basic rules. Thankfully, found throughout the dungeon are scrolls which directly tell you how to cast some spells. A newer game would probably require you to have found the right scroll before letting you cast the corresponding spell, but this one lets you attempt to cast any spell in the game so long as you know the code. I do wish there was an ability to write macros though.
• Elder scrolls styled skill progression, and Morrowind-styled rolls for successful spell casts (failed casts still consume MP, which means you'll probably want to grind you your wizard's skills so you don't fail to cast fireball on a group of four purple worm things eating your team's faces off.)
• Cryptic puzzles like fake walls and camouflaged grey keys on grey floors galore!
• All of the floors so far (4) look the same.

I mean, I don't want to rag on it too much as it's a old classic that codified much of the genre + grandfather clause, but if you attempt to play through it, I would highly suggest consulting guides/wikis/let's plays and not going in blind.

 

[Iva Demilcol]

Since the Blitz is starting and to contribute something relevant to this thread I'm going to talk a little bit about the games I'm playing this time:

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
Pokémon Ultramoon
Mother 3
Lagrange Point

From KH3D I've read a lot of things (mainly bad impressions about it). I want to play it because I've invested so much time with the series already so it's better to play it instead of just watching cutscenes at this point. Maybe I'll hate it. I don't know. I'll start it after writing this post.

Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter. I don't know much about this game but I know the game is divisive even though in the Discord server the opinions about it are quite favorable. I'm looking forward to playing this but since it's been ages since the last time I used my ps2 I hope that my memory cards aren't broken.

Pokémon Ultramoon. Played a few hours last week but I haven't progressed that much. So far it looks like Pokémon with more things added to the mix. I'm planning to alternate this game with the rest of my Blitz games to not get burned out because the last time I attempted to focus on a Pokémon game I ended up dropping it. So far it looks as charming as I remembered other Pokémon games were.

Mother 3. This one will be a rollercoaster, won't it? I have my tissues ready.

Lagrange Point. This game was one of the options available that people voted for back when we started the RPG Club. It didn't win but its premise seemed pretty interesting and kind of experimental too.

The bonus game? I'm not sure what to choose. I don't own most of the stuff recommended by our members and the few that I do don't feel like a "bonus" to me. Maybe Pyre since it's the shortest of those?

In any case, it's time to start.

 

[Thores]

From KH3D I've read a lot of things (mainly bad impressions about it). I want to play it because I've invested so much time with the series already so it's better to play it instead of just watching cutscenes at this point. Maybe I'll hate it. I don't know. I'll start it after writing this post.

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DDD is definitely worse than several other KH games you've already played, but I didn't completely hate my playthrough. I do think that playing it firsthand is a solid call.

The bonus game? I'm not sure what to choose. I don't own most of the stuff recommended by our members and the few that I do don't feel like a "bonus" to me. Maybe Pyre since it's the shortest of those?

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I know someone that'll be very happy if you pick Pyre.

Spoiler

It's me!!!!

 

[Aine]

I'm hearing about this blitz thing, and I am awfully curious. o.o

 

[Iva Demilcol]

Well, you can check the details in the previous page.

:D

DDD is definitely worse than several other KH games you've already played, but I didn't completely hate my playthrough. I do think that playing it firsthand is a solid call.


I know someone that'll be very happy if you pick Pyre.

Spoiler

It's me!!!!

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Well, so far it feels like a mess of a game. It's obvious this is a 3DS game trying to adapt actions you can only do on a touchscreen to a traditional console... and it's doing so poorly. An according to Opa using an actual touchscreen wasn't that great either...

Still, I'm enjoying exploring a bigger Traverse Town.

 

[Deleted member 11413]

Deciding on the games I'd be interested for the blitz has turned out to be a bit trickier than I thought. Currently, I have:

Banner of the Maid - This recently came out but I've been interested in trying it out since it was announced. It seems like an interesting indie SRPG that probably won't get much attention from people (primarily since it's not in English) so it seems like a good pick for something like this.

Sekiro - I've played a bunch of this a while back than dropped it for no real reason and haven't really had the chance/desire to go back to it. It's a great game that I really should get around to finishing, so this sounds like a perfect opportunity. Assuming I'm reading the rules right and picking games you've shelved half way through is ok.

Yakuza 0 - I liked Yakuza 4 so I started playing 0 pretty much immediately afterwards but quit after about 10 minutes since it just felt much too similar. It's now
been long enough that this should no longer be a problem so I'd like to play it at some point. Plus it's on the favorites list, so it doesn't take a slot away from
anything else. Though if it's anything like Yakuza 4, I'll likely spend way too much time on the minigames which is problematic for something where the goal is to actually finish games in your backlog.

Those three are set in stone, but apart from that I also have:

Ys VII - I've been meaning to play this for a while now and even though there's been multiple Ys releases since then I think I'd prefer going back to it instead of playing Celceta/VIII, though VIII might also be a good option.

Fire Emblem Conquest - Pretty much the same thing as with Yakuza 0. I wanted to play it after Birthright, but it was too similar. I love Fire Emblem and this is supposed to be good from a gameplay/map design perspective.

Atelier Rorona DX - This one is a bit weird. I loved Sophie, liked Firis and really disliked Escha & Logy, so I don't really know how to feel about the franchise. A
lot of long-time fans seem to adore the original trilogy, so I've been wanting to give it a shot. I've started it about a week ago though, so I don't know if it counts.
It's also been bizarrely easy so far, to the point where most of it's gameplay elements are completely pointless. Might just go for the sequel instead.

Raidou 1 - Raidou 2 was dope and while the first one was supposed to not be as good it should still be a good time. I know playing the sequel first doesn't really make a lot of sense but eh.

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition - Basically the same as Atelier. I have mixed feelings on the franchise so I want to try out the one that long-time fans
like the most. Though I loved Xilia/Zestiria and hated Berseria so I clearly have the opposite opinion on these games than most fans do.

Utawarerumono - Dunno. A lot of people seem to love it, but it really just seems to be a generic VN with some basic SRPG elements so I'm quite interested in what makes it so special. Probably not interested enough to buy a game I'll likely dislike though (also, does it count as a backlog if it's a game you've been wanting to play but haven't bought yet? It does in my mind.).

Slay the Spire - Another highly praised game that I've been interested in and a roguelike deck-builder sounds like a good change of pace from other games on the list.

And I'll probably think of some more later. Leaning towards Vesperia/Atelier/Conquest right now, but I'm not 100% sure. Though I guess the rules do say you can swap one game per month, so it shouldn't matter all that much in the end.

Can I fill half the list now and the other half until the 10th?

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Do yourself a favor and skip all the story scenes in Conquest. The story is a trashfire and ignoring it will only improve your experience with the game. It has some of the best map design in the series though, so you should enjoy the gameplay just fine.

 

[erd]

You might end up feeling the same way on Vesperia. Berseria is the best one since Vesperia in my opinion given how dark it is. What didn't you like about Berseria? Have you considered Graces F?

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For Berseria, the main issue was that I didn't enjoy the combat at all. The fact that the main character was incredibly overpowered meant most non-boss encounters just came down to button mashing while being completely invulnerable and the bosses weren't much better. I also didn't enjoy the cast nearly as much as I did in other Tales games. Velvet in particular since she seemed to be defined only by her desire for revenge and just came across as a terrible person a lot of times. The rest of the cast wasn't much better. I've tried Graces F for a few hours and while the combat was great it wasn't nearly enough to make up for everything else.

Thanks for the opinions on the other games too.

Do yourself a favor and skip all the story scenes in Conquest. The story is a trashfire and ignoring it will only improve your experience with the game. It has some of the best map design in the series though, so you should enjoy the gameplay just fine.

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I'm aware of the fact that Conquest's story is supposed to be terrible. The reason I love Fire Emblem is the gameplay though, so I'm more than fine with a terrible story if the gameplay is good, which people seem to agree that it is.

 

[Thuddert]

Yes it is nearly perfect in a certain way indeed...haha

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Perfectly empty blitz.

 

[Taborcarn]

Blitz is in full swing, let's goo!

 

[penguindrum]

I've lurked this thread for a while, and I think I'm gonna join the current Blitz! It looks really fun and I have some free time. I just have to decide on the games. Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X are a given. I just have to think about the others.

 

[Luminaire]

I've lurked this thread for a while, and I think I'm gonna join the current Blitz! It looks really fun and I have some free time. I just have to decide on the games. Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X are a given. I just have to think about the others.

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Welcome! Thanks for joining us!

XC and XCX are both quite long to my knowledge. I'd recommend some shorter games for the others.

I try to spread out my selection across types, series, and length. I've learned the hard way to take into account how side quest heavy games are too. I played Trails in the Sky FC and Resonance of Fate back to back and it was quest board hell, haha.

 

[iceblade]

I played Trails in the Sky FC and Resonance of Fate back to back and it was quest board hell, haha.

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On that note, if you've started with Trails of Cold Steel, is it OK to go back to Trails in the Sky or will you have ruined the experience?

 

[Luminaire]

On that note, if you've started with Trails of Cold Steel, is it OK to go back to Trails in the Sky or will you have ruined the experience?

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I'll defer to Ratchetdude231 as he's played them all. I've only play Sky FC so far. I doubt it'd ruin things but would likely give you more context to things that happened.

 

[Deleted member 30681]

You started at the beginning of an arc so you should be fine though it's more ideal to start with Sky. Depending on how far into cold steel you are I'd recommend finishing CS1, moving onto CS2 and then going back to sky.

The two key things are I'd recommend you to not jump inbetween arcs, and you definitely want to have played everything before CS3 if you intend on playing that. Crossbell included.

 

[iceblade]

You started at the beginning of an arc so you should be fine though it's more ideal to start with Sky. Depending on how far into cold steel you are I'd recommend finishing CS1, moving onto CS2 and then going back to sky.

The two key things are I'd recommend you to not jump inbetween arcs, and you definitely want to have played everything before CS3 if you intend on playing that. Crossbell included.

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Thanks a lot! I'm still at... *checks* August 22 in ToCS 1. I My plan had been to do Trails of Cold Steel 2 after, and then go into Trails of Cold Steel 3 when that releases but I'm now wondering if I shouldn't just try going backwards.

When you say "Crossbell" what do you mean? And also, is it difficult to go back to the Trails in the Sky titles or? In terms of UI, mechanics, presentation, etc.

 

[Deleted member 30681]

Thanks a lot! I'm still at... *checks* August 22 in ToCS 1. I My plan had been to do Trails of Cold Steel 2 after, and then go into Trails of Cold Steel 3 when that releases but I'm now wondering if I shouldn't just try going backwards.

When you say "Crossbell" what do you mean? And also, is it difficult to go back to the Trails in the Sky titles or? In terms of UI, mechanics, presentation, etc.

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Crossbell is trails of zero and trails of azure. They're two trails games that unfortunately never got localized but have English translations.

I played them recently and unfortunately the current translation for Zero is very rough. The good news is that a new translation is coming but it likely won't be out before CS3. The current translation for trails of azure is fine, but that might be because Zero's translation was so bad that azure felt like a substantial improvement. To be completely transparent I haven't played CS3 and 4 but everyone I know who has played the jp releases says sky and crossbell are basically mandatory as CS4 answers questions from all 3 arcs.

As for the difficulty in going back to sky, I don't think it's really difficult at all. The PC versions of the game's are wonderful and a lot of combat stuff is similar with the only real difference being that there is no master quartz. Master quartz are actually introduced in Azure and continue in CS1 and 2.

 

[iceblade]

Crossbell is trails of zero and trails of azure. They're two trails games that unfortunately never got localized but have English translations.

I played them recently and unfortunately the current translation for Zero is very rough. The good news is that a new translation is coming but it likely won't be out before CS3. The current translation for trails of azure is fine, but that might be because Zero's translation was so bad that azure felt like a substantial improvement. To be completely transparent I haven't played CS3 and 4 but everyone I know who has played the jp releases says sky and crossbell are basically mandatory as CS4 answers questions from all 3 arcs.

As for the difficulty in going back to sky, I don't think it's really difficult at all. The PC versions of the game's are wonderful and a lot of combat stuff is similar with the only real difference being that there is no master quartz. Master quartz are actually introduced in Azure and continue in CS1 and 2.

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Again, thanks a lot :D. Will just stop after finishing ToCS 2 and then go to Trails in the Sky and [re]start from there. I really appreciate the help :D.

 

[penguindrum]

XC and XCX are both quite long to my knowledge. I'd recommend some shorter games for the others.

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Good point. I was thinking the same thing. I would get burned out too easily. Though in all honesty I doubt I'd be able to finish even 3 RPGs in the three month period, regardless of their length!

 

[Gevin]

Always cool to see Penguindrum fans

 

[Thuddert]

Thanks a lot! I'm still at... *checks* August 22 in ToCS 1. I My plan had been to do Trails of Cold Steel 2 after, and then go into Trails of Cold Steel 3 when that releases but I'm now wondering if I shouldn't just try going backwards.

When you say "Crossbell" what do you mean? And also, is it difficult to go back to the Trails in the Sky titles or? In terms of UI, mechanics, presentation, etc.

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Did you play the Trails in the Sky games yet? It comes up there first as the Crossbell problem.

Crossbell is a state between Erebonia (where Cold Steel takes place) and Calvard (future games will cover this). Both countries have fought over this state for years and years, where it would fall under imperial rule (Erebonia) and then under republican rule (Calvard). They have a cease fire in place, so Crossbell gained a sense of security with both countries having influence on the state (until they figure out the proper way to deal with). So both sides back Crossbell and it got super rich out of it, but also kinda corrupt.

That's the setting of Zero and its sequel Azure. Cold Steel games will mention it quite a few times as events that happen in Azure also happen in Cold Steel I&II. You will get a different point of view from when playing them.

Cold Steel III&IV assume you basically played through all the previous games as it continues where things left off. You could see it as an infinity war/endgame type of situation.

 

[erd]

I played a bunch of my first blitz game: Banner of the Maid. I'll write up some impressions later but I feel the way I'm going about playing the game is interesting enough for it's own post.

Specifically, because the game is only available in Mandarin Chinese right now, which I can't understand. I wouldn't usually play a game in a language I don't understand, but I was bored just before the blitz thing started (which put me in an RPG mood) and this was a game I've wanted to play for while now. Since I had nothing better to do, I figured I'd try to see if the game is playable with OCR and machine translation. Both technologies are quite good these days, after all, and trying it on the Steam screenshots seemed to work reasonably well.

I figured it would be an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours and then I'd shelve it until the English localization comes out (which the developers have said will be coming out eventually) because surely playing the game like this couldn't be very fun. But then I played it for a bit and realized I'm actually quite enjoying it, so I picked it as one of my blitz games and after now playing for around 10 hours it turns out that I really like the game.

It turns out that the automatic translation actually works quite well (for machine translation working off OCRed text, of course - you can't expect miracles there). It's definitely not great and playing any game that's heavily based around it's story and writing would be a miserable experience but for an SRPG with reasonably short story segments in between missions, it works surprisingly well:

The above picture shows what you get around 50-60ish percent of the time. It's stilted, too literal and not really grammatically correct, but it's also fully understandable ("the incident" part makes sense in context). Pretty crazy considering it's only working off an image of the text, especially since it's dealing with Chinese text, which is presumably much more difficult to recognize than Latin script.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that well. The OCR software in particular (based of Google's Tesseract, which I believe is supposed to be top-of-the-line) often recognizes characters wrongly, which means there's often words that are completely wrong:

But cases like this are pretty easy to recognize and the overall meaning is still pretty easy to discern (ask for instead of fight for, in this case). Quite often it gets even worse, with multiple wrong words or the thing just failing entirely (though this can be resolved by just retrying the OCR with a different bounding box most of the time) but it's still good enough that I can follow the story perfectly fine so far, though some finer character details might be lost on me. There's also some silly stuff like translating Eugenie as Ou Jenny, or translating "this country" as China instead of France, but those are easy enough to understand. The biggest issue is that it takes a lot of extra time for the translation to finish which makes reading through text much longer than it otherwise would.

More importantly, it does work fine for all the gameplay-related stuff (skills, items, stats, objectives), though it does help that the game is basically Fire Emblem so I already have a rough idea what most stuff is. The gameplay-related translations are clunky, but understandable with some effort. The only issue I've ran into so far is that I can't translate item info in the shop screen since it disappears when you're not mousing over it, which means you can't select the text to OCR, but there's only a small amount of those so it's not much trouble to do it with the Google Translate app's photo translation feature.

The actual setup is actually quite simple to get running. All it takes is installing Capture2Text, downloading the Chinese language files (instructions are on the same page) and changing some settings (mainly the auto-line detect, which needs to be changed from vertical to horizontal). The tool has translation built in but it really likes randomly breaking so I'm also using QTranslate, which translates selected text with a single shortcut.

I don't think I'd ever recommend this approach to other people, but for me it seems to work surprisingly well at the moment. It makes me wonder if there are any other non-English games that don't have a ton of text that I could play like this. It also seems like it could be useful for people learning the language who want to improve their vocabulary - QTranslate even lets you bring up a dictionary and lets you listen to the pronunciation of words (in a robotic voice, but still). The developers have said on the Steam forums that the UI translation will be coming soon and that they will look into an outsourced partner for the story text so I think most people will prefer to wait for that but I'm really digging the game right now so I want to keep going.

This post is already super long so I'll write up the early impressions in another one later. The short of it is that the game is essentially Fire Emblem with some neat and interesting changes that end up improving the core formula.

 

[Novel Mike]

So since I'm playing quite a bit of DQVI I thought it might be fun to record some of my random thoughts as I'm playing for people to read here. These aren't going to be super in depth but just various thoughts I've had at different moments in the game.

Spoilers up through Madame Luca's and the stuff in town afterwords.

Spoiler

• MC's sister and your friend are in love. Friend wants to get married but your sister just isn't sure. Hell of a lot of setup and depth here early on.
  
• First town you visit has this haggling system where you can sell some goods for a higher price and get something rather rare like the thief's key for super cheap. Fun to mess with, hope other things are available later on here.
  
• After the first town you go to save a man who has gone missing and this leads you to saving him from falling down a huge pit but you fall down while saving him leading to you falling to what appears to be a lower world but... No one can see you and you appear transparent like a ghost. It's obviously a hint at whats to come but certainly draws you in early on with a bit of a mystery.
  
• First dungeon is pretty standard design for previous DQ games but lots of little traps here and there including NPC's one of which you can either take the long way around or fight him and if you win you get through quicker but hes fairly challenging and will likely drain more resources and time then if you had just walked around. Favorite part was this little riddle about which of 3 NPC's is telling the truth and which is lying. Not hard to figure out but its fun that the game throws so many little mechanics to make this dungeon a lot more interesting then it otherwise would be.
  
• After completing the first dungeon you join the king's military and the guards in the castle are really nice complementing you on completing your task and even encouraging you to do your tasks well so the king notices you and you can meet him. It's surprisingly welcoming and personal.
  
• Neat little story about a maid, her boyfriend, and the boyfriends idiot father. It feels bad to see what happens and that the maid is completely innocent and not being able to tell anyone as you are a ghost.
  
• Once people can see you you can go back and tell the boyfriend what really happened and he goes after the maid. The father doesn't give a shit because hes a fucking asshole.

Weird way this formatted from open office but I think I fixed it. Also as of this entry I have 3 party members including my MC.

More to come!

 

[Thuddert]

I'm aware of the fact that Conquest's story is supposed to be terrible. The reason I love Fire Emblem is the gameplay though, so I'm more than fine with a terrible story if the gameplay is good, which people seem to agree that it is.

Click to shrink...

I also want to finish Conquest this blitz, have been on and off for a few years on it.

So I'll hopefully join you on this and not delay it again like last time.

 

[afreaknamedpete]

Cut for size

Click to shrink...

I've had this on my steam wishlist alongside a ton of Chinese-only RPGs that I believe will never get a translation.

I remember a time when there were a hundred japanese only exclusive games and I bemoaned their lack of a translation. A couple of my friends actually learned Japanese to play these games, something I was always jealous of their dedication towards, personally I had the opportunity to learn Chinese but my lay child self (and adult self now) never felt like I needed the languange.

Nowadays though every niche Japanese RPG is getting a translation, from every single one of the billion Atelier games, hell even Super Robot Wars is getting English translations despite the licensing nightmare. What's rather sad is the extremely large number of interesting looking Chinese video games that are not getting translated at all or are getting what might be described as incomprehensible translations. I'm glad to hear this one is getting a translation though, it literally had an English trailer. Now if only all the other Chinese RPGs were getting translated.

 

[Novel Mike]

DQVI Log #2 Spoilers up til you get classes unlocked.

Spoiler

• Entered the upper world from resting at a church with a crabby woman. Once completing the objective and saving her lover we were able to return it appears one of these worlds is a 'dream' world but still not sure how it works. It's interesting to be sure.
  
• Finally made it to the tower which is said to hold Ra's mirror. Interesting puzzles with mirrors here, simple but effective. Also really hard mirror mini-boss near the start with 3 zombie like monsters. Normal Monsters putting up a good fight as well.
  
• Finally got Ra's Mirror and got the 4th Party member! Upon taking the Mirror back to the king he... transformed into a woman (the Queen I'm assuming) not sure where this is going exactly...
  
• Queen's name is Apena, says that she comes the from the 'real world' and that Somnus (the king) is really Murdaw.
  
• We go to confront Murdaw, go through a long cave then a temple quite a tough area. The boss the 'fake' Murdaw was also kinda challenging with a fire breath attack. Craver's double up attack did a crapton of damage.
  
• With Murdaw defeated we find that he really was a fake and Somnus had been turned into him but the Ra Mirror revealed the truth. After the king regains himself he says that we are in the 'dream realm' so I figured this was the case already but confirmed now via him. Interesting that we start in the dream world.
  
• We return to Somnus to find that the king/queen and captain blade never made it back. Was that really Captain Blade? Did they really go back to the real world if so how'd they take blade with them?
  
• Arrived at Ghent a very... religious town. Met with the Elder who refused to grant us use of his ship until the Goddess appeared to speak to his grandson Nevan, neither he nor his grandfather questioned that it was the goddess who spoke to him. Either way we got a ship and the 5th party member.
  
• No control over the ship yet sadly. Found an old broken up ship on the shores near Murdaw's keep. This reinforces my current theory that the 'Dream world' is the afterlife of sorts in this game and the reason that the MC/Carver/Milly appear to lose in the beginning of the game is because they did, they died and now its some time later and they get a second chance to defeat Murdaw. Probably wrong but thats where my heads at right now.
  
• Into Murdaw's lair, everything seems to be like it was before but the party understands this as they all remember faint things from before.
  
• We find Carver's body turned to stone, when the Dream form fuses with his stone form the real Carver is restored. This more or less confirms my theory from earlier.
  
• We confront Murdaw and he confirms that he turned the party to stone and their spirits went to the dream world which is why we appeared as ghosts. Interesting. Also first round isn't to bad but second round is rather difficult. Took me a few tries but he eventually dies and the world is saved! Roll credits! Oh wait, not rolling credits we still have to find our real body!

 

[erd]

As promised, here's some early gameplay impressions for Banner of the Maid.

The game is essentially Fire Emblem. Which is already very interesting by itself I feel. I really like how FE approaches the genre and outside of stuff like Tear Ring/Berwick/Vestaria Saga (which are essentially spin-offs) I'm not really familiar with else like it out there. Even if the game was just a simple Fire Emblem clone in a different skin I probably would have liked it a lot, but it also has a lot of interesting changes that make it feel fresh and exciting.

As far as similarities go, the basic gameplay follows FE pretty closely. You even get the same kind of level-up screen (with essentially the same stats):

And the same kind of experience bar that always goes to 100 for a new level:

But there's also some big differences. The unit types are completely different - instead of the usual knights/archers/cavaliers/pegasus knights... you get things that are more fitting for the French Revolutionary Wars setting of the game. From what I have so far, there's light and heavy cavalry, light and heavy of infantry, artillery and musicians (priests, basically). It's not a lot so far, but the missions have also been rather small-scale, so it's not a big problem. This might seem like a minor change, but after playing a bunch of FE games over the years and often encountering the same kinds of tactics (blocking choke points with knights, hiding archers in a corner so they won't get sniped by a random unit, carefully avoiding archers with flying units, exploiting the rescue command against bosses...) the new variety of units makes for an interesting change of pace. Specifically, the prevalence of long-range artillery and the fact that there's no dedicated heavily-armored units changes the core gameplay up quite a bit.

One thing I really like is that most missions have optional objectives. Those have mostly come in the form of finishing the mission quickly or killing every enemy on the map instead of only the boss (mostly for missions that already have time limits for the main objective), but some have also been things like finding secret items on a map or killing a specific enemy before he runs away. It's a minor thing, but they give some nice variety to the missions. They have been rather inconsistently difficult though, ranging from completely trivial to really challenging. Still, even when they were easy, they tended to make the mission a bit more interesting.

One early example where this works really well is a mission where you're tasked with capturing a fort. For the main objective, you can just go around it and use the back entrance, slowly taking out enemies along the way. However, the optional objective comes in the form of a pretty strict time limit, which means you have to storm the front gate, at which point most of the enemies on the map start aggressively attacking you.

In addition, the mission design itself has been quite varied so far. There's been some standard, FE-like maps where you just slowly move through the map while carefully aggroing enemies, but there's also been escort missions, missions where you have to stop an enemy from escaping, missions with time limits which force you to play aggressively and defence missions. It's not some masterpiece-level map design but it does a good job of making the missions feel diverse and largely avoids that strategy of just carefully aggroing enemies that I really dislike in FE (additionally, the enemies just feel more aggressive than they do in FE games as well). This means that even though the early missions weren't particularly difficult they still felt fun to play as they required slightly different approaches. The difficulty is definitely starting to increase as I keep playing though, maybe partly because I've stopped doing optional missions that aren't story-related and because I dropped one unit that was just crazy overpowered. Or maybe because I've never really been good at Fire Emblem.

In particular, I really liked the last mission I've played:

Essentially, you have to storm a heavily fortified position protected by long-range infantry and artillery. Initially, I approached this as I would in FE: slowly approaching enemies, making sure I'm only taking on a few at a time, while staying out of range of the long-range units. However, the objective of the mission is to stop an enemy from escaping and by the time I got through this heavily defended position, that enemy was already on the other side of the map, hopelessly out of reach. The second time around, I went for a far more aggressive approach than I'd ever use in FE, making sure my attacks were as efficient as possible and blocking some key chokepoints to prevent myself from being surrounded and after failing once I managed to catch the enemy just before it was too late.

There's also a lot of other smaller changes I quite like:

• The weapon triangle (well, square in this case) feels much more impactful, with a large effect on damage, but not to the point where the game would just turn into rock/paper/scissors.
• There's a system where units get morale from dealing damage that they can then either use on smaller abilities or to unleash a 1.5x damage attack when the bar fully fills up.
• As far as I can tell, there's no crits. Those always sucked in FE.
• Weapon durability is per-level. Which means it basically doesn't matter so far, except for some of the more powerful weapons that have limited uses (the FE dancer ability that makes a unit act twice can only be used 4 times per battle here, for example). Items do not recharge though, only weapons.
• Healers can do more than just heal (they can also also raise morale, increase movement or use the dance ability mentioned above) so they aren't just standing around awkwardly when there's no one injured.
• There's a variety of skills your units can equip. Those are mostly smaller things, like dealing more damage when attacking from the side, pulling an enemy after combat, moving after combat, gaining armor for 1 round at the cost of attack or swapping with a friendly unit from 2 squares away. It's an interesting way to slightly differentiate your units.
• Enemies can also use those skills. This is pretty interesting with the pull skill in particular, since it means the whole "block a choke point with a strong unit" can get blown up pretty quickly if the unit gets pulled into a swarm of enemies.
• There's no perma-death. Instead, you get a major penalty to the gold rewards of each battle for each unit you lose. The penalty's pretty harsh too: 1 lost unit already takes away pretty much everything and with 2 you already receive 0 gold. I don't know how much gold actually matters in the long term, but I like the idea.

I don't really want to speak much of the story since I'm playing this with google translate, but it seems pretty good so far. It's basically French Revolutionary Wars + some prophecies about saints born with special powers. It's basically a Fire Emblem story - a continent wide war between several different countries + some magic stuff thrown in. Dragons probably won't show up though. It's far from being historically accurate, but it does feature a lot of real people and real events, which is nice to see.

I like how the game looks too. The 2D sprites are great, with some charming combat animations. The character design is questionable though. The artist clearly loves giant boobs and there's a couple of characters that just go way too far with that.

So yeah, so far it's definitely a very interesting game. It's clearly a lot like Fire Emblem, but it's also not afraid to make some big changes.

 

[Gevin]

Since people were talking about the Azure games

 

[Taborcarn]

As promised, here's some early gameplay impressions for Banner of the Maid.

The game is essentially Fire Emblem. Which is already very interesting by itself I feel. I really like how FE approaches the genre and outside of stuff like Tear Ring/Berwick/Vestaria Saga (which are essentially spin-offs) I'm not really familiar with else like it out there. Even if the game was just a simple Fire Emblem clone in a different skin I probably would have liked it a lot, but it also has a lot of interesting changes that make it feel fresh and exciting.

As far as similarities go, the basic gameplay follows FE pretty closely. You even get the same kind of level-up screen (with essentially the same stats):

And the same kind of experience bar that always goes to 100 for a new level:

But there's also some big differences. The unit types are completely different - instead of the usual knights/archers/cavaliers/pegasus knights... you get things that are more fitting for the French Revolutionary Wars setting of the game. From what I have so far, there's light and heavy cavalry, light and heavy of infantry, artillery and musicians (priests, basically). It's not a lot so far, but the missions have also been rather small-scale, so it's not a big problem. This might seem like a minor change, but after playing a bunch of FE games over the years and often encountering the same kinds of tactics (blocking choke points with knights, hiding archers in a corner so they won't get sniped by a random unit, carefully avoiding archers with flying units, exploiting the rescue command against bosses...) the new variety of units makes for an interesting change of pace. Specifically, the prevalence of long-range artillery and the fact that there's no dedicated heavily-armored units changes the core gameplay up quite a bit.

One thing I really like is that most missions have optional objectives. Those have mostly come in the form of finishing the mission quickly or killing every enemy on the map instead of only the boss (mostly for missions that already have time limits for the main objective), but some have also been things like finding secret items on a map or killing a specific enemy before he runs away. It's a minor thing, but they give some nice variety to the missions. They have been rather inconsistently difficult though, ranging from completely trivial to really challenging. Still, even when they were easy, they tended to make the mission a bit more interesting.

One early example where this works really well is a mission where you're tasked with capturing a fort. For the main objective, you can just go around it and use the back entrance, slowly taking out enemies along the way. However, the optional objective comes in the form of a pretty strict time limit, which means you have to storm the front gate, at which point most of the enemies on the map start aggressively attacking you.

In addition, the mission design itself has been quite varied so far. There's been some standard, FE-like maps where you just slowly move through the map while carefully aggroing enemies, but there's also been escort missions, missions where you have to stop an enemy from escaping, missions with time limits which force you to play aggressively and defence missions. It's not some masterpiece-level map design but it does a good job of making the missions feel diverse and largely avoids that strategy of just carefully aggroing enemies that I really dislike in FE (additionally, the enemies just feel more aggressive than they do in FE games as well). This means that even though the early missions weren't particularly difficult they still felt fun to play as they required slightly different approaches. The difficulty is definitely starting to increase as I keep playing though, maybe partly because I've stopped doing optional missions that aren't story-related and because I dropped one unit that was just crazy overpowered. Or maybe because I've never really been good at Fire Emblem.

In particular, I really liked the last mission I've played:

Essentially, you have to storm a heavily fortified position protected by long-range infantry and artillery. Initially, I approached this as I would in FE: slowly approaching enemies, making sure I'm only taking on a few at a time, while staying out of range of the long-range units. However, the objective of the mission is to stop an enemy from escaping and by the time I got through this heavily defended position, that enemy was already on the other side of the map, hopelessly out of reach. The second time around, I went for a far more aggressive approach than I'd ever use in FE, making sure my attacks were as efficient as possible and blocking some key chokepoints to prevent myself from being surrounded and after failing once I managed to catch the enemy just before it was too late.

There's also a lot of other smaller changes I quite like:

• The weapon triangle (well, square in this case) feels much more impactful, with a large effect on damage, but not to the point where the game would just turn into rock/paper/scissors.
• There's a system where units get morale from dealing damage that they can then either use on smaller abilities or to unleash a 1.5x damage attack when the bar fully fills up.
• As far as I can tell, there's no crits. Those always sucked in FE.
• Weapon durability is per-level. Which means it basically doesn't matter so far, except for some of the more powerful weapons that have limited uses (the FE dancer ability that makes a unit act twice can only be used 4 times per battle here, for example). Items do not recharge though, only weapons.
• Healers can do more than just heal (they can also also raise morale, increase movement or use the dance ability mentioned above) so they aren't just standing around awkwardly when there's no one injured.
• There's a variety of skills your units can equip. Those are mostly smaller things, like dealing more damage when attacking from the side, pulling an enemy after combat, moving after combat, gaining armor for 1 round at the cost of attack or swapping with a friendly unit from 2 squares away. It's an interesting way to slightly differentiate your units.
• Enemies can also use those skills. This is pretty interesting with the pull skill in particular, since it means the whole "block a choke point with a strong unit" can get blown up pretty quickly if the unit gets pulled into a swarm of enemies.
• There's no perma-death. Instead, you get a major penalty to the gold rewards of each battle for each unit you lose. The penalty's pretty harsh too: 1 lost unit already takes away pretty much everything and with 2 you already receive 0 gold. I don't know how much gold actually matters in the long term, but I like the idea.

I don't really want to speak much of the story since I'm playing this with google translate, but it seems pretty good so far. It's basically French Revolutionary Wars + some prophecies about saints born with special powers. It's basically a Fire Emblem story - a continent wide war between several different countries + some magic stuff thrown in. Dragons probably won't show up though. It's far from being historically accurate, but it does feature a lot of real people and real events, which is nice to see.

I like how the game looks too. The 2D sprites are great, with some charming combat animations. The character design is questionable though. The artist clearly loves giant boobs and there's a couple of characters that just go way too far with that.

So yeah, so far it's definitely a very interesting game. It's clearly a lot like Fire Emblem, but it's also not afraid to make some big changes.

Click to shrink...

Seems really cool, thanks for the detailed impressions. Sounds like something I'd like to play if there's ever a translation.

 

[Deleted member 11413]

As promised, here's some early gameplay impressions for Banner of the Maid.

The game is essentially Fire Emblem. Which is already very interesting by itself I feel. I really like how FE approaches the genre and outside of stuff like Tear Ring/Berwick/Vestaria Saga (which are essentially spin-offs) I'm not really familiar with else like it out there. Even if the game was just a simple Fire Emblem clone in a different skin I probably would have liked it a lot, but it also has a lot of interesting changes that make it feel fresh and exciting.

As far as similarities go, the basic gameplay follows FE pretty closely. You even get the same kind of level-up screen (with essentially the same stats):

And the same kind of experience bar that always goes to 100 for a new level:

But there's also some big differences. The unit types are completely different - instead of the usual knights/archers/cavaliers/pegasus knights... you get things that are more fitting for the French Revolutionary Wars setting of the game. From what I have so far, there's light and heavy cavalry, light and heavy of infantry, artillery and musicians (priests, basically). It's not a lot so far, but the missions have also been rather small-scale, so it's not a big problem. This might seem like a minor change, but after playing a bunch of FE games over the years and often encountering the same kinds of tactics (blocking choke points with knights, hiding archers in a corner so they won't get sniped by a random unit, carefully avoiding archers with flying units, exploiting the rescue command against bosses...) the new variety of units makes for an interesting change of pace. Specifically, the prevalence of long-range artillery and the fact that there's no dedicated heavily-armored units changes the core gameplay up quite a bit.

One thing I really like is that most missions have optional objectives. Those have mostly come in the form of finishing the mission quickly or killing every enemy on the map instead of only the boss (mostly for missions that already have time limits for the main objective), but some have also been things like finding secret items on a map or killing a specific enemy before he runs away. It's a minor thing, but they give some nice variety to the missions. They have been rather inconsistently difficult though, ranging from completely trivial to really challenging. Still, even when they were easy, they tended to make the mission a bit more interesting.

One early example where this works really well is a mission where you're tasked with capturing a fort. For the main objective, you can just go around it and use the back entrance, slowly taking out enemies along the way. However, the optional objective comes in the form of a pretty strict time limit, which means you have to storm the front gate, at which point most of the enemies on the map start aggressively attacking you.

In addition, the mission design itself has been quite varied so far. There's been some standard, FE-like maps where you just slowly move through the map while carefully aggroing enemies, but there's also been escort missions, missions where you have to stop an enemy from escaping, missions with time limits which force you to play aggressively and defence missions. It's not some masterpiece-level map design but it does a good job of making the missions feel diverse and largely avoids that strategy of just carefully aggroing enemies that I really dislike in FE (additionally, the enemies just feel more aggressive than they do in FE games as well). This means that even though the early missions weren't particularly difficult they still felt fun to play as they required slightly different approaches. The difficulty is definitely starting to increase as I keep playing though, maybe partly because I've stopped doing optional missions that aren't story-related and because I dropped one unit that was just crazy overpowered. Or maybe because I've never really been good at Fire Emblem.

In particular, I really liked the last mission I've played:

Essentially, you have to storm a heavily fortified position protected by long-range infantry and artillery. Initially, I approached this as I would in FE: slowly approaching enemies, making sure I'm only taking on a few at a time, while staying out of range of the long-range units. However, the objective of the mission is to stop an enemy from escaping and by the time I got through this heavily defended position, that enemy was already on the other side of the map, hopelessly out of reach. The second time around, I went for a far more aggressive approach than I'd ever use in FE, making sure my attacks were as efficient as possible and blocking some key chokepoints to prevent myself from being surrounded and after failing once I managed to catch the enemy just before it was too late.

There's also a lot of other smaller changes I quite like:

• The weapon triangle (well, square in this case) feels much more impactful, with a large effect on damage, but not to the point where the game would just turn into rock/paper/scissors.
• There's a system where units get morale from dealing damage that they can then either use on smaller abilities or to unleash a 1.5x damage attack when the bar fully fills up.
• As far as I can tell, there's no crits. Those always sucked in FE.
• Weapon durability is per-level. Which means it basically doesn't matter so far, except for some of the more powerful weapons that have limited uses (the FE dancer ability that makes a unit act twice can only be used 4 times per battle here, for example). Items do not recharge though, only weapons.
• Healers can do more than just heal (they can also also raise morale, increase movement or use the dance ability mentioned above) so they aren't just standing around awkwardly when there's no one injured.
• There's a variety of skills your units can equip. Those are mostly smaller things, like dealing more damage when attacking from the side, pulling an enemy after combat, moving after combat, gaining armor for 1 round at the cost of attack or swapping with a friendly unit from 2 squares away. It's an interesting way to slightly differentiate your units.
• Enemies can also use those skills. This is pretty interesting with the pull skill in particular, since it means the whole "block a choke point with a strong unit" can get blown up pretty quickly if the unit gets pulled into a swarm of enemies.
• There's no perma-death. Instead, you get a major penalty to the gold rewards of each battle for each unit you lose. The penalty's pretty harsh too: 1 lost unit already takes away pretty much everything and with 2 you already receive 0 gold. I don't know how much gold actually matters in the long term, but I like the idea.

I don't really want to speak much of the story since I'm playing this with google translate, but it seems pretty good so far. It's basically French Revolutionary Wars + some prophecies about saints born with special powers. It's basically a Fire Emblem story - a continent wide war between several different countries + some magic stuff thrown in. Dragons probably won't show up though. It's far from being historically accurate, but it does feature a lot of real people and real events, which is nice to see.

I like how the game looks too. The 2D sprites are great, with some charming combat animations. The character design is questionable though. The artist clearly loves giant boobs and there's a couple of characters that just go way too far with that.

So yeah, so far it's definitely a very interesting game. It's clearly a lot like Fire Emblem, but it's also not afraid to make some big changes.

Click to shrink...

Sounds really interesting, thanks for the write up. I will probably pick this up once the English version releases. If you want a SRPG that takes some cues from Fire Emblem, you should try Vandal Hearts on PS1 if you haven't already. You would probably like it.

 

[erd]

Sounds really interesting, thanks for the write up. I will probably pick this up once the English version releases. If you want a SRPG that takes some cues from Fire Emblem, you should try Vandal Hearts on PS1 if you haven't already. You would probably like it.

Click to shrink...

I've heard about Vandal Hearts before but I didn't know it was similar to Fire Emblem. That definitely makes me interested in checking it out at some point.

 

[Deleted member 11413]

I've heard about Vandal Hearts before but I didn't know it was similar to Fire Emblem. That definitely makes me interested in checking it out at some point.

Click to shrink...

Yeah it has elements of both Fire Emblem and Tactics Ogre. It is like FE in that it is split between Player Phase/Enemy Phase with free movement of units during your turn (not based on individual speed stats), there is a weapon-triangle-esque system but with character classes instead, the promotion system is very similar to PoR/Radiant Dawn. Map and objective design is varied and interesting.

 

[Pellaidh]

Just saw the new blitz, and decided to actually sign up this time (I was thinking of last time, but didn't really have time to play anything of note anyway).

Went with the following:

Bloodborne, which I really should just finish. Stopped playing it near the end because the difficulty just kind of dropped of a cliff, and because some of the later areas just felt like unfinished placeholders which weren't any fun to go through. But I still have to go through all of the DLC, which was supposed to be the best part of it.

Atelier Meruru, which I likewise stopped near the end. Specifically, I just lost steam after beating the final story boss, and moved on to other games. but there's still at least a year left on the timer here, and plenty of story and character events to go through, as well as at least one optional boss.

Pillars of Eternity 2. Played this at launch and liked the unique setting, which fixed the biggest issue I had with the first game (that it was just incredibly generic). But the load times were just unplayable thrash, so I didn't get very far. Hopefully the SSD upgrade I recently picked up will make this actually playable.

Gwent: Thronebreaker. I don't even own this yet, but had it marked as "buy this when it's on a decent sale" for some time, so it's technically part of my backlog. And now it's finally on sale, so I'll probably pick it up. Don't even play Gwent that much anymore, but at this price point it seems to be a super good value just for the multiplayer rewards alone. Plus I like the Witcher world, and this was supposed to have a decent story. The only thing that was holding me back was that I heard multiple people describe it as super easy.

Hollow Knight. Tried to get into it twice now because literally everyone keeps hyping it up as the best thing ever, and it didn't really work for me. First time because of the dreadful performance issues, and the second time because of the crappy map mechanics. But the performance has mostly been fixed now, and I hear they added map markers at some point? Which would hopefully make the map stuff bearable if nothing else. So maybe it's time for another go at it.

And Fire Emblem Thracia 776 as the bonus game. Since I like Fire Emblem, and people seem to like this one. Although the last time I was looking into it, it didn't really seem to have a good fan translation. I think I remember there being two of them. One with a bunch of memes in the story, and one that didn't translate the menus. Or something like that, it's been a while. Worst case scenario, I'll just deal with the memes I guess. Can't be any worse than Conquest story wise.

 

[Thuddert]

Bloodborne is a good choice. Old Hunters on NG+ was exciting.

 

[Luminaire]

Bloodborne holds a special place in my heart, especially The Old Hunters.

I like the Banner of the Maid impressions above. I await an English release!

 

[penguindrum]

Hovering around the 34 hour mark, and I just got my Skell License in Xenoblade Chronicles X. I figure this makes it a good time to write down some thoughts, seeing as many people say this is the halfway-ish point of the story, and also where more parts of the world become within reach.

Spoiler: no story spoilers, just a lot of text

FIrstly, this game is impressive for it to have been on the Wii U. I knew this was an open world game, but the utter surprise I felt when I realized that not only could I just walk to Oblivia and Noctilum without a single load screen, but that I could also go cross the ocean to get to the other two, was unlike any other. It's kind of a big deal that Xenoblade X was able to instill a feeling like that within me, when other open world games of this generation on more powerful systems were unable to. I was also expecting the continents of the game to open up to me via a questline. I had no idea I could go there at any time I wanted. Around hour 15 I happened upon the entrance to Noctilum and realized I could just go anywhere I wanted in this game. That was a big wow moment.

Another big wow moment, and one that I continue to experience and seek out, is the lack of fall damage coupled with the absolutely ridiculous heights. I've played Xenoblade 2, which had really high points as well, but in that game there was fall damage. There was no hope for survival. In Xenoblade X, I'm constantly looking out for points I can jump from. There's a really exhilarating feeling I've always gotten from jumping off of high areas in video games, starting with Super Mario 64. It's a bit of a vertigo feeling but it's also thrilling. It sounds weird when I type it out, but the heights in Xenoblade games are amazing and scenic. I love that X doesn't punish you for wanting to jump.

My third wow about the game, and possibly the one that made me want to play the game the most, is the creature design. I've always loved monster design and variation in games, but of the JRPGs I've played, this one takes the cake. Sure, many are reskinned for regional variations, or resized, but there are still a lot of freaky and cool looking indigens in Xenoblade X. The engine is also a bit janky, so put together, some of these creatures are quite frightening. And I love it. Exploring new areas in this game is almost like playing a horror game for me, and I don't like horror games to be fair, but I do love every new discovery this game has. It also adds to the fact that we're on an alien planet. There are an abundance of jump scare monsters which startle the hell out of me. Giant creatures pop out and take up half the damn screen, clipping through the camera view, and it's crazy but so much fun to see them. This game is full of borderline eldritch abominations, I love it so much. I almost wish there was a way to turn off aggro and go into some kind of HUD-less camera mode, I would easily, easily, make an online archive of the indigens like I were making a nature blog.

Now that I've finished raving about the things I adore, let me go into some of the things I'm kind of just meh about.

The music in this game is hit or miss. It's definitely recognizable as Sawano's work, but it's inconsistent. I haven't heard every track in the game, but I don't like the NLA music at all. So far, I think my favorite track is Noctilum day theme. Overall, coming off of the music in Xenoblade 2, I'm a little disappointed. I'll see how I feel when I finish the game. This game also suffers from moments during cutscenes where the music completely drowns out the dialogue. That also happens in 2 so I'm used to it. It's kind of funny, but not an issue.

The battle system is another thing I'm iffy on. Granted, I don't fully understand it. I read some of the manual, and I've read a guide online, but I still don't have a good grasp on it. I know how some of my arts work together, but the system itself doesn't feel very engaging. I think I'm going to read more on it, because I want to like battling as much as I like exploring. One thing I do really like is the fact that the things you fight have breakable parts. I think that's really creative, and you can even see some of the creatures' models change once you break a part off of them. I also like that you can move around/jump and don't have to fight while standing still. A somewhat QoL feature I like is that you can see which creatures will aggro, and from what, and which ones won't. The sheer amount of weapon variety is also interesting. I'm still locked off from most of the cooler looking weapons, but I look forward to trying different classes. Cosmetic options are also very neat.

When it comes to quests in this game, the gathering ones annoy me the most. I try to pick up most things I see, as long as they aren't super close to some enemy that's gonna curb stomp me. Luckily there are many quests I'll see in the list where I already have all or most of what I need. I just wish the map would point you in the direction of what you need. For some quests it does do this, but not for normal gathering quests I've taken on. Bounty quests are fine, I don't have a problem with them. Naturally the quests with storylines are the best ones. I haven't gotten to any juicy ones yet, but it's generally just fun learning about the various NPCs and their lives in NLA. It makes the world feel more alive, and reminds me that not every character in NLA is a fighter, some are just normal people. For instance, a while ago I did a quest for a barista who was bad with equipment like the espresso machine.

The story is a little bare bones but also mysterious to me. I like it. It isn't perfect but I'm glad there aren't cutscenes everywhere. I just wanna get out there and explore planet Mira. So far, the playable character I like the most is Elma. Tatsu is annoying, what a surprise. /s. None of the characters have made a huge impression on me, though. Currently that's one of the game's weaknesses. I've already been spoiled on something that happens with one playable character, but without saying anything else, I don't feel attached to any of them in the same way I feel like I would in most JRPGs. I think I've probably seen someone say this before, but I feel like the strongest part (character?) of this game is the planet itself. I will say that the english dub is good, though. I'm a person who if it's available will always play with the JPN voices. In this game it wasn't available and I don't really mind!

The game feels like something I need to play at my own pace. I get kind of overwhelmed after I've played for 1-2 hours.

I think that's all I have to say right now. I don't hate anything about the game, and I probably understand less than half of the systems and things I can do. For instance, there are some menus that I haven't even properly gone through. Looking at this post, my main issue is my lack of enjoyment in the battle system. I hope that as I learn more, I can come around on that front.

 

[Iva Demilcol]

Bloodborne

:goodvideogame:


Update about my playthrough of Kingdom Hearts 3D: lowering my expectations so much based on all the comments I've read has made me actually like it for what it is despite some questionable choices made by Team Osaka.

16 hours and counting.

 

[Luminaire]

Bloodborne

:goodvideogame:


Update about my playthrough of Kingdom Hearts 3D: lowering my expectations so much based on all the comments I've read has made me actually like it for what it is despite some questionable choices made by Team Osaka.

16 hours and counting.

Click to shrink...

I've not heard good things of DDD so my expectations would be quite low. The story seems....interesting from what I recall of the recaps.

 

[Thuddert]

Hovering around the 34 hour mark, and I just got my Skell License in Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Click to shrink...

Now you have to work towards getting a flight module.

You might have to look up some of the requirements. And read the ingame manual the game assumes you know it lol.

I swear it feels like they wanted to make a mmo and then backtracked later on. It might explain the lack of gameplay direction. It's a bit too free.

 

[penguindrum]

Now you have to work towards getting a flight module.

You might have to look up some of the requirements. And read the ingame manual the game assumes you know it lol.

I swear it feels like they wanted to make a mmo and then backtracked later on. It might explain the lack of gameplay direction. It's a bit too free.

Click to shrink...

Oh heck yeah I can't wait to fly. I have to finish three more chapters until I can do the quest for the flight module, it seems.

 

[Novel Mike]

Meant to do one of these yesterday but I completely forgot. DQVI Log #3

Spoilers up to where you get the magic key!

Spoiler

• With Murdaw defeated the Abby has opened up so I can finally get some classes! Also several towns have some new events, Johan found his love and the asshat is no longer mayor, yay!
  
• Returning to king Somnus reveals that the MC is really their son and the Prince (but what about his life in the dream world with his sister?) and they task him with finding his real body. Also it appears Captain Rusty/Blade fell in battle which is why he disappeared. The corrupt minister in the real world sent him into the front lines which got him killed which seems to confirm that the 'Dream World' isn't an the afterlife as both worlds version of him have perished.
  
• Luca instructed me to head towards the north, I found two locations one a castle recruiting warriors and another a town with a lot of strange residents. After talking to everyone and spending the night I found a large monster outside. Upon defeating it turned back into a human and that person is the town hero who has been cursed by a monsters bite.
  
• Not sure if I want to continue this storyline, head towards the castle I've already been to or just explore the open seas as the ship is now fully under my control!
  
• Decided to help Amos, a NPC told me to go to the mountain north of town which I did and got the Seeds of reason. Interesting thing is the plant at the top spoke to the party and told them to just pick up some seeds on the ground rather then getting them from the plant itself. Quests like this are common in RPG's but its nice to see the standard endpoint get shaken up a bit by the plant in question being able to talk with the party.
  
• Amos saved and has joined the party! He says he can turn into the beast at will now... I wonder how that works in battle. Should be fun to figure out.
  
• Headed to Arkbolt, had to fight several guards to prove I was strong enough for the task. The king then gave me a coffin of all things and told me to hunt the monster who is preventing a sealed cave from being opened.
  
• We reach the bottom of the cave and Terry a swordsmen is able to kill the beast himself without our help... Meaning we don't get any kind of reward or any glory. I'm assuming Terry will eventually join us but interesting way to introduce this character, also the comments the party makes are cute with them being quite congratulatory towards Terry and impressed by him.
  
• With the way clear we make our way past Arkbolt and arrive in Aridea with people talking about an island of smiles. Sounds like a trap if I've ever heard one.
  
• We find a floating island taking people to the island of smiles, turns out its a trap who knew!? We get taken to this dark looking castle with this boss talking about how Murdaw dying doesn't mean anything and hes turned the people of the town to stone. We get forced into a fight and whoop his ass saving the townspeople and the demons scatter but the monster does elude to another villain at work. Nice short little quest and our reward is the floating island to use as a ship? Neat!
  
• I spent quite a bit of time exploring the seas of the dream world, most notable thing was several NPC's talking about the legendary equipment and giving clues to find it. Found a few random treasures and mini medals but none of the equipment.
  
• Ended up at Howcastle with a little weak willed prince we had to help escort and clear out a cave to prove hes worthy of being the next king... He was a complete coward and literally ran away several times and we had to go find him. Annoying as hell but a rather standard quest overall. Got the magic key as a reward as well as a new Slime(!!) Party member!