Help I'm Trapped in Mid-Budget Action JRPG Heck 04: Haha whoops I guess I'm still writing stuff here

Hahahahah oh fuck I guess we’re still doing this huh? While the state of this website and its various features are in flux, I guess I’ll still keep posting my write ups here, partially because I would like to still keep writing things and partially because I still haven’t gotten up the enthusiasm to purchase a stupid domain name for too much money. That’ll still happen though. Anyway, here’s the thing I was already writing when things went down.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

Developer: Falcom

Release Date: July 21, 2016

Price I Paid For It: $25 on a 2021 steam sale, apparently

Budget: Falcom + Vita = You know what this is gonna look like

Time Played: A little under two hours

Heaven or Heck: Ys

The holy triumvirate is completed and we now have Falcom representation on this feature. One might argue that Falcom were the OGs of mid-budget action-JRPGs, assuming one argues that in the context of them making the first ones that were remotely fun to play. I am well aware of the importance and historical significance of games like Tower of Druaga and Hydlide, but god help us all if I want to play either of them. Ys though? Ys still rips, honestly. Faxanadu ain’t half-bad either.

Ys 8 starts with our boy Adol Christin getting shipwrecked – a regular occurrence for him – at which point he resolves to bump and grind through as many enemies as possible while rocking guitars are constantly blasting. I played a couple hours of this game’s sequel, Monstrum Nox, and unsurprisingly the game that came before it plays very similarly. Lacrimosa of Dana gives off a very solid first impression despite the Vita stank visuals, almost immediately letting you zoom through the map slashing through things at 90 miles an hour. It’s the good combination of general mechanical simplicity + tight controls that I find defines a good Ys, and this one understands the goal of making the number go up while also demanding something of the player on higher difficulties.

However, because it’s a vita game there’s also an additional dollop of “anime” on top, including introducing your first female party member by having Adol happen upon her while bathing. Surely the rest of the game won’t be filled with the kind of cheap pandering that was abundant and common in like every anime thing during the 2010s. Surely not! I definitely haven’t seen plenty of evidence to suggest it maybe leans towards some of the more exhausting anime tropes of the period. Really though, it’s a shame that I don’t have access to the unpatched original translation, which is widely derided and mocked for a reason. No archeozoic big hole for me. No, seriously, look it up if you don’t remember it.

Where my concern lies is mostly in terms of hour count, which hovers somewhere around the 30-40 mark if people are to be believed. One of the secret appeals of Ys was always the part where those games are like a dozen hours at most, doing what they need to, and then ending with room for replays on higher difficulties. I wonder how I’ll feel about one that’s more the length of a regular JRPG, but I guess I’ll find out eventually when I get around to playing more. However, I didn’t play more Lacrimosa of Dana because I was too busy playing the next game on this list. Whoops. Sorry. I'll probably get back to it! There's kind of a lot on my plate right now.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R

Developer: Gemworks (original game by Tri-Ace)

Release Date: November 2, 2023 (original game: July 30, 1998)

Price I Paid For It: About $40

Budget: I feel like it’s abundantly clear that HD-2D looks a way and that way probably doesn’t cost much to fiddle with

Time Played: 34 hours

Heaven or Heck: I literally played it to completion.

It’s been a hot minute since I voluntarily played a JRPG to full completion outside of my various podcast and stream endeavors. One might say this feature was partially designed to weed out my backlog, but I didn’t expect to actually like one of these games enough to drop whatever else I was doing and play through it. For whatever reason this is the one that grabbed my attention, and I just want to say that I had a great time. Star Ocean 2R is the ideal combination of keeping an old game’s weird esoteric ideas intact while making them more accessible and easy to manage.

The story of Star Ocean 2 isn’t going to win any awards, but any game about being a doofus from space who has to avoid violating the Prime Directive is good by me. Claude C. Kenny *is* that doofus, and he and his group of likable JRPG idiots are a lot of fun to be around. Star Ocean 2 has a bunch of mutually exclusive party members based on various story factors, if you choose Claude or Rena as the protagonist, or in one case just being a hidden joke character. While the actual plot is very JRPG save the world stuff, it’s all breezy and enjoyable and doesn’t ever overstay its welcome. There are plenty of skits (or “Personal Actions” as they’re called here) in that Tales of tradition

The real appeal though is what this remake brings to the table as far as quality of life changes. Having seen people play the PSX original, it becomes abundantly clear very quickly that offensive magic is deeply underpowered, your defensive options are questionable at best, and your AI controlled party members have a tendency to just tank hits to the face until they die. It’s ambitious for the time, but it’s one of those things that reminds me the mid-budget action JRPG still had plenty of room to improve from 1998. While the combat still retains the occasionally clusterfuck-y nature of the original, characters have been rebalanced with multi-hit combos and a perfect evasion mechanic has been added to allow for some level of defensive play. It’s still archaic, but it makes the game far more playable as a fun throwback.

See, the thing is, this is a Tri-Ace game, and like all of the good Tri-Ace games this one gives the player enough tools to break it over their goddamn knee if they feel like it. Thanks to various subskills and subsystems, it’s very easy to overlevel yourselves almost immediately, and even passively auto grind with the right combination of traits. You can certainly go through the game ignoring a lot of the cooking, fishing, pickpocketing etc but the benefits for engaging with those systems are often immediate and obvious. The higher difficulties are built around using these exploits to their fullest. I didn’t go do any of the post-game super dungeon stuff, nor did I do a new game plus playthrough with all the characters I didn’t bring along. BUT I WAS THINKING ABOUT IT. Listen man, do you know how much it takes for me to replay a video game these days?

Tales of Rebirth

Developer: Namco Tales Studio

Release Date: December 16, 2004

Price I Paid For It: Definitely a real amount of money, officer. In Japanese Yen, no less!

Budget: abundantly clear that Symphonia was the one that got more of the budget.

Time Played: A little over two hours.

Heaven or Heck: This seems like “one of the good ones”

Unlike most of the games on this feature, my stream of Tales of Rebirth is not the product of an ill-advised impulse purchase from the last five years. Instead, it’s the most recent Japan-only Tales game to get a fan translation, with this thing dropping only last year. As a result, it’s one of the lesser-known Tales games; even the portable ones got fan translations pretty quickly in case you were the guy in the late 2000s who really wanted to go to bat for Tales of Innocence. It’s the last game to use 2D spritework for its characters and backgrounds, and also the second to last to use a 2D plane for combat. It’s, in other words, a weird obscure odd-duck and therefore trips whatever switch in my brain which goes off when something is sufficiently unpopular. You should understand why I had to look at this.

You can also immediately see why it didn’t come over here. 2004 was a couple years past the height of games publications in the west explicitly deriding 2D graphics as dated and old fashioned, but there was still enough of a stigma against fully sprite-based games on consoles that I could see either Namco or SCEA deciding it wasn’t worth localizing for that reason alone. Those people were fucking wrong, they were always fucking wrong, and we can retrospectively point and mock them for the extent of their wrongitude. The sprite work and backgrounds in this game are incredibly sharp, very expressive, and scale well in higher definitions.

Listen, you should know what these games are at this point, and I don’t need to spend all that much time to tell you “hey man it’s a Tales game.” The protagonist Veigue is from the edgy, emo side of the JRPG pool this time, and his initial party members are a little punk tonfa mage named Mao and a panther man named EUGENE GALLARDO. Once again, one of your starting party members is a panther man named Eugene who wields a naginata and immediately asks mopey protag to stop moping and start saving the world. I’m to understand the main thrust of this game’s plot deals with racial strife between beastmen and humans, literally culminating in your party fighting and defeating the evil god of racism because this is still a JRPG.

The most interesting aspect of the game off the starting line is the use of multiple lanes for combat. Rather than the weird bunched up clusterfuck I associate with early 2D tales games, the multi-lane aspect of Rebirth makes dealing with groups of enemies more visually legible. It also reminds me a bit of Fatal Fury, which is another plus. I can’t claim to know how the story develops or if the gameplay keeps things up, but it was a positive first impression! Which is more than I can say for some of the other games I played for this thing!

Afterword

Anyway, thanks to everyone who's still here or still stuck around. I frankly don't know if these forums or this community or even the wiki will be kept intact in order to keep the newly independent Giant Bomb solvent, but for now I'm going to still post (and eventually crosspost) here while I still have somewhere to post. I still have one or two more of these JRPG blogs to get through before we get back to something I've been trying to get back to for the last year and change. That's right, The Wheel of Dubious RPGs spins again, and I couldn't be more excited. I also have a Tomb Raider blog of sorts floating around in the back of my head

Once again, if you'd like to follow me, the best ways to do so are on twitch or on various discords, including the official Giant Bomb discord and the Deep Listens patreon discord. I'm still on here every now and then but those are the best ways of keeping in touch.