What are you playing?

[Guest]

Im a snes kid

Fuck off old man.

[Sieg Zeon]

Soykoden is pretty fun. Feels comfy. Basically a golden age snes rpg with no loading times.

That’s funny because I was looking at my PS1 library after finishing Legend of Dragoon and that title caught my eye. I’m kinda bad about dropping off on long games and checked howlongtobeat(your meat) and saw that it wasn’t too lengthy so I may take a crack at it soon.

Side note, anyone here seen a game called 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim? It looks very odd but I’m intrigued by it, once it drops down to budget price and I clear some titles off my to do list I might give it a go.

[Complicity]

Side note, anyone here seen a game called 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim? It looks very odd but I’m intrigued by it, once it drops down to budget price and I clear some titles off my to do list I might give it a go.

I finished 13 Sentinels and, as long as you get past the fact that the battles look like something out of a PS2, the game is as good as the other Vanillaware games.

The story is great, it plays out kinda like Forbidden Siren and puts together Serial Experiments Lain, Evangelion, GITS, Terminator and something from Westworld and Total Recall.
Even if you hate everything else about the game, it's still worth playing because of it.

The decision of not showing an animated sequence after every attack makes the semi-RT battles very fast, and fun in the second half of the game when you have swarms of enemies and missiles all over the screen.

The soundtrack is on par with the SMT games.



The game overall is pretty easy, i played the whole thing on "intense" and rarely i had to replay a map in order to get the S rank, and that was all the grinding needed to have sufficiently upgraded mechs to beat the final boss with (none of the bosses are overpowered cheating fucks like the ones of the Valkyria Chronicles games).
I thought the game could use more and harder maps, and it gives them to you after you have finished the story, when there is not much point in playing them aside the trophies Reddit gold.

As far as i know the lunatics who translated it changed a line of the crossdressing fag from "it's more convenient this way" to "some binaries don't work for me", but that's it.
Like always the jap dub is good, the eng one is shite.

[Sieg Zeon]

Yeah I saw that about the non binary shit, but thankfully that’s not enough to stop me. I might go ahead and grab a copy sooner or later, games like that always seem to be limited in physical quantity. Thanks for the good review.

[Guest]

I'm glad that "obscure" weebgames are still getting limited print runs in the current year.

[Le Redditeur]

Arc the Lad is terrible though. I played all the three PS1 games and they sucked. And the PS2 one is even worse.

Whats wrong with ATL? I've never played any of them.

Frankly, it's a goddamn waste of potential. ATL1 is basically just an extended introduction to ATL2, and the only thing that barely saves it is the cast, which is very charismatic (except for Arc himself, who is you average goody good shonen hero, and Kukuru, who is just an extremely dumb bitch).

ATL2 starts cool, very different from ATL1, and it has some serious dystopian sci-fi vibes, but once the main party splits and gets paired with the ATL1 cast, it quickly goes to shit. Once the entire cast is finally reunited, the story goes downhill pretty quickly.

Gameplay wise, it's just a very barebones strategy RPG with very few things going for it. You basically move and attack once per turn on a grid, and that's it. Sometimes you have hard to reach treasure that you'll need old mage Gogen to teleport to it, but that's the extent of it.

ATL3 I didn't play much, but I remember it being quest-driven, much like the Atelier games. Battle was still boring.

The PS2 games is a repetitive, atrocious slog that keeps changing back and forth between two insufferable twin brothers who are half human and half nigger monster. I remember it having some really, REALLY unfair fights at the beginning of the game that basically require you to cheese them out to win, and after that, it becomes dead easy and all you fight for the remainder of the game are basically Evil Empire soldiers.

[Complicity]

after that, it becomes dead easy and all you fight for the remainder of the game are basically Evil Empire soldiers.

Until the final boss which required the previous purchase of items that shielded your party from his light and dark based attacks, from a merchant who was unreachable at that point, forcing you to restart the whole game again because you kept only 1 save file (i never did, and i never saw the ending).

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Like always the jap dub is good, the eng one is shite.

That has been my experience with every Vanillaware game - aside from Dragon's Crown (which only has a narrator).
I think my most triggering moment was when I switched Odin Sphere to English and noticed that Gwendolyn sounds exactly like Aigis from Pissona Surii because hack Burger VAs use the same voice for everything.

ATL3 I didn't play much, but I remember it being quest-driven, much like the Atelier games. Battle was still boring.

Did it at least have quality waifus? You can't compete with Atelier without.

[rabidtictac]

Arc the Lad is terrible though. I played all the three PS1 games and they sucked. And the PS2 one is even worse.

Fuck you. Arc the Lad 2 is great. The film noir aesthetic is kino.

I tried playing it through emulation but since Im a snes kid I can never really get used to playstation graphics. Only if a game is really good I can get passed that but I tried Suikoden and while it peaked my interest I quickly got tired off having to talk to everybody in some specific order just running around the place trying to find "who do I talk to next for some progression" and then I read you can easily miss characters and that a good ending requires them all and I was like alright fuck it Ive still got 100 rpgs in my backlog Ill play instead of this.

Don't let your autism scare you away. Don't worry about doing a 108 stars run on your first try. Let go the notion of a perfect run and just play the game normally. It's not that long anyway. You'll get more than enough characters without needing to hunt for missable ones. Most rpgs are generous if they let you choose from among 10 potential party members and a 4 person party. Suikoden gives you a 6-person party and potentially 108 party members, but more like 80 in practice.

You might think six people to a party would make the game slow, but Suikoden has very fast animations, minimal loading and allows turns to play out simultaneously after orders are given.

[Le Redditeur]

Arc the Lad is terrible though. I played all the three PS1 games and they sucked. And the PS2 one is even worse.

Fuck you. Arc the Lad 2 is great. The film noir aesthetic is kino.

I don't disagree that the atmosphere in ATL2 is great, but it doesn't last very long. It gets sidelined after the first evil general is destroyed and Arc's party and Elc's party finally get together.

Gameplay-wise, it's very barebones and repetitive. Maybe it was fatigue because I jumped into ATL2 right after ATL1 and I just had done the Ancient Dungeon run (you had to descend 60 floors without saving or checkpoints and then climb them back up) and the Choko power-leveling to prepare her for ATL2, but I couldn't really enjoy the battle system anymore.

Did it at least have quality waifus? You can't compete with Atelier without.

Arc the Lad 2 is where the waifus are, due to the enormous cast.