I disagree. I despise Unlimited SaGa, but I like Etrian Odyssey.
Well I also give my recommendation to these two games but its a stretch to call them RPG's. I see them as brawlers personally with slight RPG elements thrown in. The games do have random encounters though. But good luck finding a copy of either game. Yakuza is quite old now and Yakuza 2 was in limited print. Although its best to get them now before they wind up fetching over £100 online in 2 years.
Not an RPG. Although its easily the best adventure game ever made.
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...
Umm...okay I have no idea how you made that leapOn the one hand, Disgaea is a Strategy RPG where grinding is a necessity. At least for post game. And Ar Tonelico is a RPG/Dating Sim that requires no grinding, at all, the games a cake walk. Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but way, waaaay to easy. The second one fixed the difficulty a little. It's still on the easy side, but not a cake walk. Also, they're made by two different companies. Sure NISA distributes them both over here, but Atelier and Ar Tonelico are Gust games.
Shiren the Wanderer > Etrian Odyssey in terms of 'uber hardcoreness'.
With Shiren, you actually have to have the mindset of playing Super Mario Brothers instead of Final Fantasy when you play. Imagine playing Super Mario Bros for the first time, not knowing *anything* about the game besides the fact you can run and jump. You run forward a bit and then you hit a Goomba and you die. Start over, you see the Goomba again you go 'ok, don't hit the Goomba this time' and jump over it, not dying and continuing on. You might even jump on top of it by accident, and then you discover 'oh wow, I can kill it by jumping on it!' That's the kind of 'skill building' effect Shiren goes for.
You will come across enemies who will kill you. At times, the game does conspire against you and actively tries to brutally murder you, putting you in a randomly-generated room with over-leveled monsters that you can't escape from. And when you die, you start over again from the beginning. But as you play, you learn what each type of monster can do. After a while of playing SMB, as soon as you see a Goomba you know 'jump on it'. As soon as you see a winged Koopa, you know to time your Jump to knock it out, and then jump on it again to finally kill it. You see a fire-breathing plant, you know there's a certain spot you can wait and hide where it won't hit you, then move on past it once it goes back into the pipe.
Shiren is probably the deepest RPG I have ever played, period. It might seem very simple or that it's missing some features that you might like in an RPG (such as 'classes' or a 'party' or a 'story' :P), but it's very deceptive. If you do get the game, the first town gives you an incredibly extensive (and optional) Tutorial to get you more familiar with some of the devious things you can (and have to) do in the game.
It's probably not going to be for everyone, but I definitely consider this to be one of the RPG Classics.
Note: The full name of the game is "Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer". Do not substitute getting Shiren for one of the other recent 'Mystery Dungeon' games, like Pokemon or Chocobo. They are similar in essence, but extremely diluted.
Last edited by JKTrix; 02-11-2009 at 08:53 PM.
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What he said. Shiren is a good time waster...
Etrian Odyssey is good, too.
And there's always Pokemon...
Love is patient, love is kind.
I said he doesn't like the graphics in Ar Tonelico. They're pretty much the same in Disgaea.
And Snatcher could /technically/ be considered an RPG since RPG stands for Role Playing Game and in Snatcher your sole purpose is to play a role. I guess most games could be considered RPGs in that case huh
all of this sounds pretty fun but i'll be honest, dungeon crawling is not my idea of fun. anybody remember dark cloud, yeah you do but not for any good reason.
She looks so pretty in her casket, I'm in love with a corpse!
The Dark Cloud series is one of my favourites from last gen. Nothing wrong with dungeon crawlers if they are made without feeling repetetive. Persona got it right as well.
As for non-crawlers go, I'd say Front Mission, if no one has said it already.
Pretty fun game, says I. Its a tactical RPG. With customizable Gundams, more or less.
Love is patient, love is kind.
There's this really great RPG called Final Fantasy 7. You ought to try it out. The main character is a badass who doesn't know himself and travels around the world repeatedly giving and taking a black stone to and from his worst enemy. At the end the enemy gets the black stone and uses it to destroy the world. But this dead chick uses a white stone to save the world. Eventually the world fights back against both the black and the white stone and wins and nothing mattered in the whole first place.