Wolf Kanno's Bottom Ten JRPGs.

[Pumpkin]

I might after I get through the 16-18 games I have left before I make my own list :P

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I kept thinking "Wait, I didn't know Thousand Arms was a Dating sim/rpg hybrid." And then I realized I was thinking of Wild Arms.

[Wolf Kanno]

I expect Quest 64 to make this.

Hate to break it to you but I don't own a N64 so it doesn't fit the criteria I'm using. Though if I was doing an actual 10 worst games of all time, you can bet your ass it would be on it.

I kept thinking "Wait, I didn't know Thousand Arms was a Dating sim/rpg hybrid." And then I realized I was thinking of Wild Arms.

Lol, the idea of trying to date Cecilia or Kanon though tempting would probably end poorly for Rudy and Ashley.

[Ayen]

I kept thinking "Wait, I didn't know Thousand Arms was a Dating sim/rpg hybrid." And then I realized I was thinking of Wild Arms.

Too many arms.

[Fynn]

Oh 90's Atlus. How weird you were.

[Wolf Kanno]

Oh 90's Atlus. How weird you were.

Well they did have stiff competition from Working Design

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[Fynn]

Oh 90's Atlus. How weird you were.

Well they did have stiff competition from Working Design

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Oh wow.

[Vyk]

That's too bad. Thousand Arms was one of the many PS1 RPGs that was on my list to eventually test out, especially back in the day. I think it was the art style though. And I too like dating sims sprinkled into my RPGs, as rare as they are. And even more rarely done well. So probably dodged a bullet on that one. RPGs were so weird in that era. Beyond the Beyond was the ugliest game ever at the time. There was that super expensive light gun themed RPG. Rhapsody the musical adventure RPG-lite. And this. It was all like a JRPG acid trip

[Wolf Kanno]

That's too bad. Thousand Arms was one of the many PS1 RPGs that was on my list to eventually test out, especially back in the day. I think it was the art style though. And I too like dating sims sprinkled into my RPGs, as rare as they are. And even more rarely done well. So probably dodged a bullet on that one. RPGs were so weird in that era. Beyond the Beyond was the ugliest game ever at the time. There was that super expensive light gun themed RPG. Rhapsody the musical adventure RPG-lite. And this. It was all like a JRPG acid trip

By all means still try it out. It's definitely an interesting trip but lord knows it's the flashbacks concerning the combat system that keeps me from digging it out and playing it again, though I'm probably due another playthrough.

To be honest it's that acid trip quality I really miss about the genre from back then. I missed the really experimental element going on in a lot of the games I mean barring FF almost everything else Square released in that time frame was radically different from another. Not like today where many of the franchises have become set in a formula and it comes down to whether you like one companies brand of poison over another. I think it's why a lot of RPG gamers are starting to turn more towards the indie scene, to get that raw artistic drive in their games again.

[Shauna]

I remember trying this game out once. I didn't get far enough in to hate it.

Maybe I'll give it a whirl. Once I've finished Wild Arms 2.

[Rocket Edge]

If the absolute abomination that is FF XIII isn't number 1 I'll lose all faith in you Wolf.

[Ayen]

FFXIII wished it was cool enough to be an abomination.

[Fox]

If the absolute abomination that is FF XIII isn't number 1 I'll lose all faith in you Wolf.

This is a 'Worst RPGs' list with Valkyria Chronicles on; I wouldn't hold out much hope of it making sense

[Galuf]

i havent played any games with this art style...

[Wolf Kanno]

I remember trying this game out once. I didn't get far enough in to hate it.

It starts off promising but around the 20 hour mark everything starts to really get old. I think in both of my playthroughs of the game I often rush towards the end because the gameplay can't hold my interest anymore.

Maybe I'll give it a whirl. Once I've finished Wild Arms 2.

Now there is a good game.

If the absolute abomination that is FF XIII isn't number 1 I'll lose all faith in you Wolf.

Well you'll have to wait and see.

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#8 Revelations: Persona
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So some of you may be surprised to see this on the list and I do feel I need to make some clarifications here. When I say Revelations: Persona I am exclusively talking about the PS1 port of Megumi Iboroku Persona for PlayStation and not the enhanced port of said game on PSP called Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. While the PSP port is still a love-it-or-hate-it experience, it a vast improvement over the butchered and poorly localized abomination that is Revelations: Persona.

Revelations: Persona was released ina time when companies felt that any foreign cultural reference will automatically turn off the player and make them not buy the title. So back then a lot of games would remove such references and "westernize" it. It wasn't such a big deal for games like Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star which often took place in fictional worlds, but this is a Shin Megami Tensei games which predominately take place in modern urban settings, specifically Japan. Even worse is that Japan is pretty open about smack talking other religions and showing all the dirty parts of it which some countries (Like Puritan-influenced U.S. of A) had strict guidelines about not exposing our impressionable youth on despite watching MTV and reading dirty sex scandals on the news. So yeah, this game was doomed from the beginning to being put under the knife of questionable translation/localization that was so predominate of the 90s era Japanese imports. Yet, there are always the horror stories, the ones where a game or anime got such a crazy hack job that people begin to look at other questionable changes in a more favorable light. In anime this was most predominately series like Cardcaptors, in the gaming world I don't think any game hit it quite as bad as Persona 1.

So what's so bad about the Localization you may ask, well I'll let the Boy with the Earring explain it:


So yes the game chose to scrub away everything that was Japanese about a game taking place in a fictitious city similar to Tokyo. How well did that work out for them? Not very well. In fact they went through and changed the casts names which is pretty standard for these kind of butcher jobs but then they did something that makes it live in infamy. They changed characters ethnicity.

Several character received hair dye jobs, and their skin was lightened to make them look more Caucasian, one character in particular, Masuo was renamed Mark and turned black for no real good reason.

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While ethnic diversity is a kind of an issue in JRPGs, this doesn't work out very well either as Masuo's personality and delinquent past makes changing his ethnicity have some unfortunate implications... He ends up becoming a really bad black stereotype which was the last thing this game really needed. The butchered script also made a game which had a pretty B-Movie plot to begin with to feel like a really bad Saturday morning cartoon show with the few redeeming parts of the plot being over-simplified and losing their impact.

The game wasn't even fully translated, the Snow Queen quest was removed from the game apparently due to running out of time and money to do it. It also helped that the Snow Queen arc is both more difficult than the SEBEC arc but also contains most of the game's questionable content that would have had to be seriously censored to make it in the market. The most infuriating aspect of all this is that Sony never had a policy concerning what was allowed in their games like Nintendo did, so most of these changes were completely unnecessary and Atlus ended up releasing an embarrassing game due to poor choices. The only good to come out of any of this was that the bad localization and the flak they got for it made it so Atlus would pretty much never do this again as Persona 2: Eternal Judgement largely retains its original script and the few changes were partially for technical reasons or to rectify elements from this game.

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So I've ranted about the localization job but what about the rest of the game? Well it's not that good I'm afraid. Persona 1 utilized a very experimental battle system that was interesting in theory and largely cumbersome in practice. Suffice to say that getting back attacked in P1 is far more devastating than in Final Fantasy. While the enhanced port didn't change the battle system, it did rectify one of the most obnoxious aspects of the game which was it's absolutely atrocious UI.

Let me explain. You know how other RPG will usually allow you to see if a weapon in the shop belongs to a character in your party and signify if it's actually better or worse than the one equipped? Yeah this game didn't do that. Did I mention that you can only have five people in your party at a time but there is a total of nine characters you can use in the game? Course once you choose your fifth character you can't recruit the others but shops will sell their stuff to you still and not tell you that your wasting money on equipment you can't use. This get even worse with the signature Personas, where all the character have certain good or bad compatibility with certain Arcana, yet the game won't tell you any of this and it's painfully easy to accidentally create a Persona that can only be used by a character you didn't recruit. The PSP port actually fixes all of this so setting your party up is not a hassle which is why it's not on this list. The game is also an early PS1 title so the 3D map it is very excited to show you is pretty atrocious. The pre-rendered cutscenes are also pretty laughable by today's standards.

Original
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PSP port
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About the only saving grace for this game is the awesome music. In fact I hate to say it but I feel the original has a better OST than the PSP port just because it's much more atmospheric. A case in point is the Hospital Level where the world gets flipped upside down and your party is fighting demons through a warped hospital.

The PSP Version

Not a bad track but this was the original.

The lone piano combined with the distant voices and screams make this dungeon one of the most atmospheric and creepy, the First-Person dungeon view combined with the fugly PS1 graphics only makes it feel more unsettling.

So yeah, don't play this game. If you insist on playing Persona 1 (which itself is just hard to recommend) play the better enhanced PSP port because the PS1 version is something that should be left in the past of the PlayStation's dark ages along with Beyond the Beyond and Battle Arena Toshiden.