Wolf Kanno's Bottom Ten JRPGs.

[Pumpkin]

Is X-2 going to be on there?

I'm not good at guessing :<

[Colonel Angus]

Is X-2 going to be on there?

It better not be, Canoe!

[Fynn]

So it's definitely XII and X or X-2. Hard to tell which, honestly.

[Pumpkin]

Does he not like XII?

I know he isn't a huge fan of X and X-2, but I'm not sure which he dislikes more








The mysteries of wolf canoe

[Ayen]

You really don't want to see me rage, Kanno. It involves tumblr and little girls. Nasty stuff.

[Fynn]

I meant XIII!

[Pumpkin]

WELL THEN


I feel betrayed Fynn. You have betrayed my trust forever more

Also

MOAR GAMES

[Fynn]

WELL THEN


I feel betrayed Fynn. You have betrayed my trust forever more

Also

MOAR GAMES

The only one I have betrayed is FFXII.

I shall live forever in shame.

[Ayen]

And live forever in shame you shall.

[Wolf Kanno]

Number 5!!!

White Knight Chronicles
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Another game I kind of wish I could have liked more but god help me, the game just wouldn't let me have any of that. WKC is a the brainchild of Level 5, the company that made the West pay attention to Dragon Quest when they were handed the rights to the series to make DQVIII and IX. With that said, the idea of this company building a really cool next-gen RPG that looked on par to Final Fantasy got several fans really interested. Sadly, the game wasn't exactly the second coming for the genre as many fans had hoped, even worse being that it left JRPG fans little to look forward to as FFXIII loomed forever in the horizon.

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You get to create this cool character with a deep character customization tool and then promise to send you off on a fantastic journey through mystical lands and Robot action. I did spend hours on that thing, and sadly I think my character ended up looking suspiciously like Orlando Bloom due to watching too many of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies at the time. Then my character is sent off on a cool adventure where this dopey kid who won't shut the smurf up has us runnign errands for work with his other dorky friend and then we go off and do stuff and it seems weird that the story is focusing on this dopey kid instead of my player avatar and then the palace gets attacked and then the signature White Knight shows up and then dopey kid gets awesome powers... wait a minute, what the smurf is up with this trout?! I spent hours making a... Orlando Bloom and you're not even going to give him the time of day? Why did I bother making the character if the plot is really about this other character? Hell my character is almost never acknowledged in the plot. What's that Level-5, I can use my character to play with other characters in the online mode, I guess that's cool if I wasn't such a misanthropic asshole who could care less about online co-op. I still tried some and watched as my player avatar skyrocketed in levels and ended up becoming too much of a crutch character for the plot. So after awhile, I ended up not actually using the character I spent so much time making in the main game. No Level 5, this is not how you do silent player avatar characters, you smurfing made DQ games and you've proven you don't know what the smurf you're doing with a silent protagonist. You don't spend media time promoting a game about character creation and exploring a whole world so you could bait and switch them with your own pre-made story characters, that's not how this works. If you want to make the player feel a part of the story you focus the narrative around them and their actions. If you wanted to tell a gripping story with plenty of character driven melodrama, you make a game around that cast and idea. You don't try to do both, or at least so blatantly halfassed. I'm sorry Level 5 but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

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The story mode may not have been so bad if the game wasn't such a cliche fest with characters that feel all too familiar and never get better, they are annoying as well. I don't know what it is about all the early PS3 JRPGs feeling the need to seriously grab a hold of all the anime cliches and play them straight but damn... Level 5 read that fan complaint about how quiet the XII cast was while exploring and made sure it wasn't going to be a complaint in their game as the characters won't smurfing shut up as the quip the same five lines of dialogue every few minutes making exploring far more tedious than it should be. Their dialogue in combat isn't that great and the ones in cutscenes are not any better. The plot is like a combination of Vision of Escaflowne meet a very generic fantasy RPG.

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Combat is actually pretty interesting, you get to buy attacks like types of swings for different weapons and then you can move place them together into special combo abilities. You can make these combo chains as long as you have the AP for it but since AP grows as you battle spamming singular attacks it's often better to go with smaller effective combos than big flashy ones. You even get to name them which was fun as made really hammy names like Flying Monkey God Slayer of Cake and other nonsense. Unfortunately, it really doesn't take long before you begin to feel like you have seen everything with the combat system. Maybe it was from building an uber character in mission mode but I never finished the game because frankly I didn't like the plot, characters and combos itself kind of lost the wow factor pretty quickly and I was left with listening to the obnoxious cast repeat their NPC dialogue as I explored and fought battles. Even the White Knight itself wasn't exactly exciting to play as, feeling more like a watered down version of the player experience. The fact I learned it ended on a To Be Continued ending was enough to make me realize I didn't care enough to finish it.

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White Knight Chronicles was a game that I felt got overhyped before it's release and just couldn't make good on its promises and proof that both pedigree and giant robots can't make every concept work. Hopefully when gaming historians look back on this time frame, Level-5 will be only be remembered for Ni No Kuni and the Professor Layton series and this embarrassment will just be forgotten.

[Shauna]

I remember we were going to pick this up when we got a PS3, but reading up on it, I believe it had a massive online component and they were talking about closing servers... so we sacked it and picked up Disgaea instead.

[Bolivar]

I've never seen someone so disdainful about a console they themselves bought of their own free will and I'm starting to think Wolf actually takes the crown as the biggest PS3 hater on these forums. It's the only explanation I have for why someone would put Valkyria Chronicles on a Worst RPGs List (or however he wants to rationalize it this week) or White Knight Chronicles, knowing full well he must have played dozens of RPGs with just as generic stories but not nearly as successful combat systems. Saying WKC was "overhyped" is almost as untrue as when you said people only liked VC because it was on a popular console, which the PS3 most certainly was not in 2008. I honestly have no idea where you come up with these things.

Likewise, I don't know who gave you the idea this was about a silent protagonist and not the kid with the knight, particularly when it says "White Knight Chronicles" right there in the title. Everybody knew that the custom avatar was so each player could bring a unique character into online multiplayer. Not only was its online component the saving grace of the game, what made it stand out at the time of release, it also conveniently receives no real evaluation in your breakdown. Imagine that...

I swear, we need to pool our money together and send Wolf to a rehabilitation retreat where he can learn to enjoy fun video games. Because I'm seriously starting to think we will see Demon's Souls before this list is done. You heard it here first.

[Wolf Kanno]

Honestly, I do not really have much love for the PS3, that is certainly true but I would probably go far enough to say that the last console generation was the weakest for me and my gaming taste. Let's face it though, compared to it's predecessor, the PS3 has not exactly been god's gift to RPGs, nor has that particular console generation seen the sheer volume of quality titles like the previous two so sorry if I'm feeling a bit peeved and disappointed I bought a gaming console to play good games and kind of feeling underwhelmed here.

As I stated in my explanation for VC being on this list, it came around the time I had a serious falling out over the Tactical RPG genre as I became burnt out and annoyed by the very flaws that are standard issue for the genre. Akin to someone who one day and woke realizing they didn't like RPGs because gosh darn it they just really don't like the random encounters and highly exploitative customization systems and frankly that's what most of them are. The fact the game had a very anime anti-war plot didn't help to endure it unlike say Disgaea which never took itself seriously and was pretty funny even if the gameplay still felt exhausting. Am I treating it unfairly? Probably but it had bad timing and some game was going to get the blunt of it. I still stand by the fact the game has one of the most absolutely terrible UI/Menu systems I've encountered in a game since the old PC days though.

As for WKC, I didn't mention much of the online component because frankly I didn't like it because as I've mentioned before on this forum, I'm not big into co-op/multiplayer games. I also don't really understand why you would build two different games, slap them together in a disjointed way and say "hey, the solo campaign sucks but the other part that involves us entertaining ourselves with each other's company wasn't as bad" constitutes as a success. That bulltrout might work in the FPS genre but the RPG genre kind of has different criteria of standards that I just don't think work that way. You yourself once mentioned you probably liked the game more simply because at the time you (and most of us) were in a serious drought for a good RPG and lapped it up despite realizing in hindsight it wasn't that great.

There are other more generic games, but this list only contains the ones I owned and felt promising. I don't really pick up the truly generic looking ones, but I've obviously been duped by some promising high profile titles or sequels. I would be curious to know what you would rank as 20 low-tier JRPGs.

[Fynn]

As he articulates his feelings about the games very clearly, I say Wolf has a full right to dislike the games he dislikes. De gustibus non est disputandum, after all

Frankly, I've never seen anyone quite so disdainful about someone disliking a game.

Also, the two best JRPGs on console last generation were both on the Wii /fact

[Pumpkin]

Level 5 also made Dark Cloud games and those were awesome

I am loling at making a character you don't really use though

Also, love my PS3, use that thing so (too) often