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Lesser known RPGs

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Merkava:

--- Quote from: ScrambledGregs on 18 May 2007, 07:59 ---Xenogears was awfully cool, but I don't think you'd find many who agree with you.

--- End quote ---

I think he would. Maybe not here, but a great deal of avid RPG-gamers rank the game quite highly. Many find the game too convoluted, but I loved every second of the game and found its complexity to be a strength, rather than a weakness. It has incredible detail, as well, which I have found, though a replay of Chrono Trigger, is what made that game so great. The developers put of their conceit with incredible ardor, which lends both of these games a great deal of power.

Xenogears is also a great cinematic experience. While the second disk seemed to show the ambition of the developers stretched too thin (they had missed almost every deadline prior to its creation, and development was later cut short), I was totally involved with the game until its conclusion. And that is something special, when a game can keep the player involved completely and throughout the entire experience.

Patatat:
Non-Linear RPG's for the win!

I am sorry, I hate Japanese RPG's they are utter crap in my opinion. They barely even make sense half the time, and the things I am suppose to take serious I usually laugh at. They just don't draw me in like KOTOR, Oblivion, Jade Empire, Neverwinter Nights, Baldurs Gate, etc.

ScrambledGregs:
Did anybody ever play Saiyuki: Journey West for the PS1?? It was one of those seemingly infinite "not made by Square" RPGs that fell through the cracks during the later PS1 era, except it was a strategy RPG based on the same Chinese fable that inspired Dragon Ball.

Jade Empire immediately becomes a 'meh' sort of game when you realize how shallow almost all the mechanics are. American RPG developers seem obsessed with good/evil choices in their games, and no moreso than Bioware. The problem is that the two opposite 'moral' codes in Jade Empire are fancy ways of saying "Light Side" or "Dark Side." They made this big deal about how morality would be more ambiguous in the game, but the truth is that just like in KOTOR if you want to maximize your skills you pretty much have to play to the extreme of either end. If that's not enough for you, imagine the kind of reception this game had in Asia. It'd be like a group of Chinese RPG geniuses who are really good at making Asian themed RPGs suddenly deciding to do a RPG about the Wild West in American during the 19th century. They may really love the topic and think they grasp it all, but something is always lost in translation and cultural differences. Plus some of the voice acting/characters in Jade Empire are borderline "wow this would be kind of stereotypical and racist but it's not meant to be taken seriously." It's as if someone who grew up watching badly dubbed kung fu movies decided to make an action RPG with a heavily modified KOTOR engine.

At any rate, Jade Empire, IMO, was hugely overrated when it came out, and it does not hold up as well as KOTOR or Bioware's other games.

MrTibbles13:
Hmm.. I'm surprised that the Vandal Hearts games haven't got a mention yet. I'm not sure just how "rare" they were over in the States, but here in Blighty they were pretty hard to get a hold of in most games shops. The second game in particular was fantastic, IMO the game that FFtactics should have been, with almost a perfectly refined version of the FFtactics combat system, excellent plot and character development, and a solidly designed, if not entirely original magic-meets-modern-setting feel (Spells etc, but also TRAINS! woo). Also it had some seriously cool cover and manual art, done in a watercolour style, which gave you a decent character profile to identify with, given that the graphics were on a par with Tactics. As for more free-roaming RPGs (Jade Empire, Oblivion, Morrowind etc), i always found it really hard to get inot properly, simply because the multitude of choices, and the generic nature of the characters required to make these choices viable a game option, meant that it was just difficult to empathise with the characters as they progressed through the game. Most of the RPGs mentioned here are merited pretty highly on the character development in line with the story, something i think fans of the more traditional jRPGs enjoy. Not that Oblivion isn't great for devouring whole weeks of your life... :-D

ScrambledGregs:
Vandal Hearts 1 was one of those preFFVII PS1 RPGs that made the system worth owning. It's a pretty straightforward strategy RPG, my only gripe being that the hidden class for the main character is ridiculously hard to obtain.

I'm pretty sure nobody but you liked Vandal Hearts 2. It's notorious for having a boring story and ugly-as-sin character art. You're probably also the only person in the world that thinks it's the game FFT should have been, too.

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