Doods Reviews Shit He Played

What are you playing. Hands out of your pockets!

Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sat Feb 17, 2018 3:00 am

Hey y'all.

Since I've done a book version of this, I thought I'd do a version that's all video games. These reviews won't be as long as my individual reviews, but them's the breaks. No time to waste, let's go:

Dragon Warrior 5, Dragon Warrior 9

Or Dragon Quest, whatever you prefer.
The other big series that Square Enix is known for, the Dragon Quest series has always been the more charming and--dare I say--childish of the two. That's not necessarily a bad thing; unlike Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest doesn't bother itself with hefty narratives or anything of the sort. It's just a fun JRPG, and it's one that I've been playing since Dragon Warrior 3. Unfortunately, they've yet to make a Dragon Warrior Monster since the Gameboy, but oh well.

To my mind, the Dragon Quest series falls into two camps: Dragon Warrior 8 and Dragon Warrior 3, with features scattered between, and they are:

Dragon Warrior 3:
You can customize your party members for classes. That's the primary feature of Dragon Warrior 3.
You run into monsters that aren't on the world
More classic party turn-based combat
Very unclear as to what your next step is
Harder Bosses

Dragon Warrior 8:
Alchemy
Monsters are physically on the world and chase you
You can use monsters in combat
Tension Mechanic
Obvious path of quests
Easier Bosses

At their core, every game shares the same core. There are monsters with punny names, it's very throwback turn-based JRPG, and the game often doesn't give you a very clear clue of where you should go next. You collect tinymedals/minimedals to gain rewards, you quest forward to fight some kind of evil demon bent on destroying the world, and there are a few varying elements between what's basically the 3 category and the 8 category.

With that said, let's talk about Dragon Quest IX, first.

Dragon Quest Nine concerns an angel who's tasked with looking over a village, until evil strikes him and you have to figure out the mystery to what happened, why somebody attacked the Yggdrasil Tree, and so on and so forth. It's not a very involved mystery, and it exists for you to be shunted from place to place.

To be fair, as unenthusiastic as I sound about the story, there are good bits here and there. I really liked the Wight Knight, an undead knight searching for his princess which they turn on its head a little by having you help him rather than kill him. For the most part, though, this is a pretty uninspired game. As for the gameplay, it's very clear that this happened after the success of 8. The whole tension mechanic is here, where you can pump up party members to have them deal catastrophic damage if you get them far enough along.

I was surprised to find that there was also class changing in this. In DQ 3, that was a HUGE part of the game, where you'd lead all of your characters along until you can make each of them a Sage. The Sage, unfortunately, is not as OP as it was in DQ3, where it was a more powerful mage and a more powerful cleric, instead it's a less powerful version of both, making it more of a multi-tool rather than the desired class for all your peeps.

Alchemy also shows up here, but I never used it for anything more then medicine, because this game is unusually generous with its gold for a Dragon Quest game. Otherwise, I'd recommend giving it a pass. It's like a less better version than DQ8.

Dragon Quest 5, on the other hand, is my favorite of the series that I've played. It goes 5>3>8>9.

Dragon Quest 5 follows your hero (Dooders, in my case) who grows up with a legendary hero who is also hiding the fact that he was once a king. I would spoiler that, but they reveal it in the very first scene. Anyways, it revolves around you being captured as a child, forced into slavery, only to break out and marry and have children, who will then become party members.

Oooh yes, this reminds me a bit of Fire Emblem: Awakening. Your children's skills and classes depend on which woman of the three you decide to marry, who vary between warrior, mage, and some combination of the three. The story, as well, is a bit stronger than the rest of the DQ fare, which is always a pleasant surprise.

What's also important is that you can catch some of the monsters you fight, who can then be shuffled in and out of your lineup. This is a fantastic addition to an already strong game, adding something of a Dragon Warrior Monsters angle to all this that I've only seen in DQ 8. This is also a game that's more forward about where your next step is, compared to most entries here.

There is, however, no class mechanic here. Your characters are your characters, and they will not change in any way, shape, or form. They don't progress in the same way that the classes in 8 and 9 do, where you can attribute points to different weapons and skills to customize them. At a certain level, they gain a spell or ability that was predestined for them, and that's just how it is.

The bosses are also more difficult. In 8 and 9, they're toned down since there's no save mechanic outside cities, so five doesn't allow you to go fighting through an entire dungeon simply to fight the boss at the end. In nine, you can go all the way through a dungeon and then slap up the boss. Five, you have to be overleveled, then you can go through the dungeon and beat the boss.

At the end of the day, though, the monster and family mechanic makes this a much stronger entry than 9, which was just a faint ripple behind the wave that was 8.

So that's my review of 8 and 5. If you're ever curious about this series, I would recommend Dragon Quest 5 first, followed by 3, then 8, then 9.

Upcoming: Endless Space 2, Rimworld, Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
  • 3

Doodle Dee. Snickers
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 2730
Joined: Mon May 06, 2013 8:15 pm
Show rep

Re: Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby octoberpumpkin » Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:08 pm

Dragon Quest V is amazing.

I hope you like ToCS, I love it!
  • 2

User avatar
octoberpumpkin
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1968
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:24 pm
Show rep
Title: Pinkasaurus Rex

Re: Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sun Mar 04, 2018 2:43 am

Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

A few years back, I played a game called Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky that blew me right the fuck away, and it looked like this:
Image

If I were to pick my top three favorite 'pure' JRPGS, that list would go:
1. Final Fantasy X
2. Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
3. Dragon Quest V

Frankly, if I were to put a top ten all time list, Trails in the Sky might find its way on there at nine or ten.

This game is a series that takes place a few years after the events of the Trails in the Sky series (which will be referred to now as 'Skies', since shortening it to TitS is funny but kinda distracting). It was upgraded for the PS3, with full-fledged modern graphics, lots of voice acting, and the whole nine yards. I went into this eager to be just enlightened the way I was with Skies.

I've never been more disappointed. I played about 30-40 hours of this, then just wasn't interested in playing any more. It actually made me want to go back and play the prequel trilogy more than I wanted to play this.

This game takes place in a neighboring country from the one in Skies. You now play a student going to a high school military academy, where everyone's wearing school-approved short skirts or buttoned up shirts and has crazily-colored hair and--wow, this sounds like a bog-standard JRPG, doesn't it? Maybe it was just the impression I got coming right off of Persona 5, a game where you also play as a thief in a high school where everyone's wearing short skirts and buttoned up shirts and do a bunch of tests. Maybe next I'll buy and play the acclaimed Danganronpa, a game about high schoolers that--you get the point, high schools in JRPGs seem weirdly like WW2 military shooters: a lazy and genre-standard setting. Skies was a game where you play as a guildmember of a freelance monster hunter/problem solver guild who's trekking across the country to find someone, here you're in high school. You can see why it feels like this game went a little too generic compared to the last one. Oh, there's even a scene in the very beginning where a girl accidentally falls boobs-first in your face, and that was the point at which my brow drew down and I began to realize I wasn't playing the same game as I did the last go round.

You know, this game made me realize that I feel a world is more real in visual mediums when you're trekking around as opposed to a game like this, where you operate out of a hub (with the exception of games like KOTOR or ME, where you're in space). After playing a bit of FFX and FFX-2 again, that only strengthened my feeling that a world feels more fleshed out and complete when you're on a path through it rather than having a point you come back to in order to venture out again. Just an epiphany I had.

There's still a lot of depth, humor, and lore to this story that features endless depths of geopolitics in this fictional steampunk world that I really like, so I tried to pinpoint exactly why I got incredibly bored of this game considering it has the same gameplay as Skies--just moved to new graphics and third person.

And I think, in the end, it's because it takes the problems of Skies and amplifies them to a point where I find the game unbearable.

Cutscenes that go on for twenty minutes, forcing you to just start skipping through it because you're getting bored. Yet another game where a girl wants to fuck her adopted brother (less justified here than in Skies; at least in Skies, they were like...nine when the boy was adopted. These two grew up from the beginning) to a point where even the princess of the country is like "Yo, you gonna get that dick or...?" while SHE (the princess) is wearing her miniskirt from her academy in another city. Lore dumps that are now longer than Skies. Backtracking through entire wide swathes of area (the nadir of this whole experience was the highlands, a region where you spend about half an hour clicking through dialogue to start it and you spend about half an hour getting from one side of the map to the other).

The combat system was also much more simplified, to my disappointment. The orbment system in Skies is so interesting, because you combine different gems that have different elements. Each gem had their own stat or something (like more money/items dropped or upped strength and health), but the combinations of the elements in each gem would also allow different spells and abilities. So like...if you had two or three different fire-element gems in your orbment combining for five fire, you have all the best fire attacks. Instead, in this game, each gem is attributed an ability or statues, and there is no combining elements anymore. Cooking was also lame compared to the last one. In the last game, when you ate something, you learned a recipe. Here, you can only learn them by talking to people at certain times. So at the end, though the gameplay was mostly the same, it was still kinda...not as good.

Even the atmosphere isn't as good. Skies always felt more varied in the environments, whereas here every dungeon you go to feels the same (and indeed, it does that ever-so-JRPG thing where there's a dungeon under a place you frequent that just goes on forever and looks the same on every level but for the floorplan). The music is also pretty forgettable. Skies did that thing that a lot of games do where they have one song (Nier:Automata, Final Fantasy X, etc) where they have a main song that plays in many different variances and with different instruments throughout, kinda like a leitmotif. This one just kinda felt...bland on the soundtrack side.

I talk a lot about liking stories in games, but I do hate when the story is basically a Peace and War-sized script that they force upon you. Bioware games get guff for how much writing is in them (or, these days 'writing'), but at least it's optional. When I spend about fifteen to twenty minutes just clicking through dialogue on a regular basis, when we're halfway through the game and they're still introducing three or four characters at a time...this game has a lot it wants to talk about, and unlike the last game, it will make you sit there for half an hour and either listen or wear the spacebar out on your keyboard.

It a shame, because I still want to know how this ends. Also, considering I've spotted at least one character from Skies in here, I'm curious if more make an appearance (they namedropped another). Unfortunately, I've just lost interest in putting myself through more of this to get to the end. Maybe one day when I'm bored and just have loads of time to kill I'll force myself into it, but today's not this day. I don't know, maybe some of the charm (or a lot of the charm) was just lost when this series (which debuted about a decade later, I believe) transitioned onto a more graphics-oriented generation.

In the end, I got to the point where it became clear that the crux of this story was about tensions between commoners and the nobility after I stopped a terrorist plot in the capital, but then I was back to doing mundane tasks in the academy again and eventually I grew tired of the game and decided to just move on to something else. I'd only recommend this game to people who really like JRPGs as opposed to someone like me, who just sometimes likes them if they strike a perfect balance between story and gameplay.
  • 3

Doodle Dee. Snickers
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 2730
Joined: Mon May 06, 2013 8:15 pm
Show rep

Re: Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby octoberpumpkin » Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:09 am

Sorry you didn't like it, I loved it. Personally, Sky has been having a hard time keeping my attention eheh
  • 1

User avatar
octoberpumpkin
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1968
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:24 pm
Show rep
Title: Pinkasaurus Rex

Re: Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:39 pm

octoberpumpkin wrote:Sorry you didn't like it, I loved it. Personally, Sky has been having a hard time keeping my attention eheh


I think the problem is, in the end, that I'm a dirty Westerner who loves dirty Westerner things.My favorite JRPGs that are made for wide release in the West and my favorite animes are FMA: Brotherhood, Cowboy Bebop, and Trigun...the entry-point animes. As I pointed out, Cold Steel was very much a game in more classic JRPG fashion with all the tropes and level design I expect from a JRPG, whereas Skies avoided much of what makes me grit my teeth in a JRPG. So I think it's just that you and I have different tastes where JRPGs are concerned.
  • 1

Doodle Dee. Snickers
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 2730
Joined: Mon May 06, 2013 8:15 pm
Show rep

Re: Doods Reviews Shit He Played

Postby octoberpumpkin » Wed Mar 14, 2018 5:32 pm

Yeah I can definitely see that Cold Steel is basically a love letter to JRPG's so if they aren't your genre of choice, having a game that is as JRPG as it gets can be pretty grating
  • 2

User avatar
octoberpumpkin
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1968
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:24 pm
Show rep
Title: Pinkasaurus Rex


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests

cron