"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

The internet can't enjoy anything, because everything is the worst thing ever.

Pay attention.

Speaking of which, isn't it about time you LP another bad NES game?

Talking Time could always use another accidental LP-borne meme.

But...

This... is what video games are all about!

BECAUSE THAT'S NOT THE BEST VERSION OF- *Gets shot*

Random encounters are the worst artifact of NES RPGs ever anyway. Don't say "we shouldn't try this new thing because this old thing is in the way and we don't want to change it".

I love the occasional RPGs that have autofight. I just restarted Final Fantasy: Four Heroes of Light and realized how much I missed it. FF12 would have been perfect if all gambits were available from the beginning.

My favorite is Rush mode from Persona. It's not only autofight, but autofight on speed. It cuts any mash-fight-until-victory battle down to about a third of its usual time. It's a shame that this never became a standard feature of the genre.

Personally, I see it as an artifact of an earlier era that the even are elements to RPGs that more or less require the player go on autopilot. And the solutions of ludicrously easy random fights, no-encounters options, and auto-win/auto-retreat abilities are really just bandages put over outdated gameplay design. Someone really does need to eliminate the grind factor from RPGs and make it a constantly diverse experience. Hell, that's one of the unspoken goals of most challenge runs. I've seen plenty of attempts towards that end (EarthBound, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, most Metroidvanias, even the Suikoden series to some extent), but no real triumphs.

guys

guys

what's your opinion on emulation and piracy

This x9000

I'm in love with Rush mode from the Persona games, it should be retroactively added to every RPG ever.

People have done that. It's just, once it happens, the games are no longer RPGs.

The average American spends, like, six hours a day in front of the TV. Let me have my passive, mind-numbing FF games!

I did one 16-hit combo to see if it got me anything, and was content to treat the occasional 2-hit combo I got from button mashing as a free crit.

I actually ended up having an easier time with the game than one of my friends who obsessed over the Sound Battle system. Sadly, Chapter 2 requires use of it or grinding to overcome the hump that is solo Duster.

The problem is the displayed-on-map brand of enemies isn't much better, from a general appearance standpoint. I can agree that random battles are an outdated pain, but unless a game takes advantage of the map screen to be able to get a jump on the enemies(like literally jumping on them in Mario), all that really happens is you touch an enemy and then get transported into a magical fairy dimension where a fight occurs.

FF13 did this poorly.

For those who haven't played it, it works like this: Your "random encounter" squads are fully visible on the map. This gives you the ability to avoid encounters you don't want to have, but that's pretty much it.

Now, the game gives you the ability to get a pre-emptive strike on the enemy by jumping into the battle before they detect you, which in this particular game is a massive advantage as you do a little damage immediately, and enemies start out nearly "staggered" which is almost always a win condition as it weakens the enemy considerably and they have a lot of trouble attacking(you also start off with a full ATB after that). The problem is early on, in Pretty Hallway Mode of the game, enemy squads are set up so that you are almost never able to do this. In fact, if you run past them in hopes that you can get behind them once you're out of range... The squad's direction is inverted so that it is still facing you. The only way to get a pre-emptive strike on said squad is to use a rare item that prevents enemies from detecting you.

Like I said, too... When you touch them, you get sent to the stereotypical "battle map" we all know and love. There's rarely any problem with having the battle on the actual movement map besides the occasional ceiling(which they could have designed to not exist, quite frankly), but for some reason they felt the need to break the immersion for your battle.

The reason why Mario is forgivable in this case is because... Well, okay, first let's establish that I'm thinking of Paper Mario(and M&L) here, as much as I loved SMRPG. Anyway, map enemies are ALWAYS able to be attacked in the map. No extra consumable items needed; you got your hammer? Stand just out of range of stationary enemies, or be very good with reflexes for non-stationary enemies, and attack. You got your jump? Jump on anything that doesn't have spikes. You can even up the ante in TTYD by using one of your upgraded field moves for a free special attack at the start. Of course, enemies are able to do the same to you if they hit you with an attack in the field, but the point is map enemies serve a consistent purpose.

What I'm getting at here is that if you don't make map enemies consistently worth interacting with in non-standard ways, they either shouldn't be used, or the battles should take place without a battle transition. FF12 got it about right I'd say, even if the battles felt pretty boring sometimes(I never beat it/got most of the board filled though so what do I know, there).

I consider SMRPG exempt from this partially because it was in the SNES era. Still, it always just felt right to jump on the enemies before starting the battle.

Here's hoping Mother 3 gets an exported remake on 3DS so I'll know what you people are talking about without violating my stubborn sense of honor (I don't download games I don't own past the NES).

You say this like it's not a vast, mind-boggling improvement that makes for a far, far better experience. I love first strikes as much as the next guy, and once you've graduated to on-map encounters there's not much reason not to use a similar mechanic, but just giving the player some degree of control over what they fight and when does wonders towards producing a more player-friendly environment.

Oh, I dunno. In my P3 and P4 playthroughs, Rush Mode was only useful against low-level enemies with no particular resistances or dangerous attacks. Shadows with physical resistances would need magic, and those with weaknesses were best taken care of by shutting off Rush Mode immediately before hitting the last enemy in the "One More" chain, so I could initiate an All-Out Attack instead.

(It was pretty handy against Gold Hands, though.)

I wish I had taken the time to really get into Persona 1's Auto Mode. You could have characters, well, rush enemies with physicals like in Rush Mode, but you could also define specific roles and actions for the characters to perform automatically, like using guns, spells, or items. Unfortunately, Persona 1's battles are so dynamic, with such a variety of enemies, and they can go south so easily, that these strategies would never last more than a few battles and I'd go back to manual mode pretty quickly. It was like having a Gambit System where you could only select one gambit per character.

However, when it comes to roaming enemies visible on the map, P3 and 4 have the best implementation I've seen. Running around enemies takes practice, but your skill is rewarded by fighting only the battles want --because you're running low on items, your HP/SP are depleted, or you simply want to rush through the dungeon to the next save point. The maps themselves provide plenty of obstacles to hide you from foes, or escape from them if they spot you first and chase you.

And if YOU are too strong for the enemies? THEY run away from you on sight. You can leave them alone if you want, but if you want to chase them down, you're pretty much guaranteed a Player Advantage if you hit them, because they'll always try to face away from you. Better yet, fearful enemies start the battle "Distressed," a status effect that leads to lower accuracy, lower defense, lower evasion, and higher susceptibility to ailments.

But best of all, striking them from behind while unawares would give you a Player Advantage and a free turn. Usually, you'd take advantage of this to deal a round of damage with impunity (up to and including hitting Weaknesses to Knock Down enemies, leading to All-Out Attacks) but you could also choose to run away immediately and the enemy wouldn't respawn for a while. Meaning, not only could you choose WHEN to fight, but also WHAT to fight. So being low on HP/SP didn't mean you had to run from everything... OK, so you ambushed a behemoth of a Shadow, so you wisely run away. But next time you ambush a weak enemy, realize you can take it down during your Player Advantage turn, and, if you trounce said enemy badly, you win a free full heal from an Arcana Chance or Arcana Shuffle at the end.

And even if you DID run away, since the enemy won't respawn on the map until you get pretty far away, you could "clear" a floor by ambushing and running away.

(This is how I dealt with most of Heaven and Yomotsu Hirasaka in Persona 4 )

And, unlike the FFXIII example above, the game NEVER breaks this rule. You can try to ambush/avoid enemies from the last floor of the last dungeon with the same ease as those in the first floor of the first dungeon. All it takes is practice and patience.

I don't know. I'd still like to see someone take a swing at making the RPG equivalent of Shadow of the Colossus. I mean, I suppose the best case scenario would pretty much turn into an oddly themed adventure game since you'd have to lean pretty heavily on puzzle bosses, but you could probably save it some by going all Mega Man and having each defeatable through either an elaborate strategy, or a simple strategy after equipping junk you get from killing one somewhere else.

It's an improvement, but the point I was making is that they pretty much did the bare minimum they had to to remove random battles. On one hand, random battles would suck suck SUCK with FF13's Stagger mechanics, but on the other hand, Stagger mechanics suck enough on their own that they should have just changed that if they had a choice between "random battles" and "difficult nonrandom battles." What FF13 was trying to do was be Mario, but also be Final Fantasy. The end product appears to be the bare minimum of both brands - you have a withered husk of an ATB system(I can only control my leader? wtf is this?), and you can trigger battles with a pre-emptive strike... But in the latter case, you can only reliably trigger it if the game designers wanted you to.

Most squads end up positioned like this, instead:



^ And it's not unheard of for those red dots to all be hard-to-kill/hard-to-stagger enemies that you actually WANT to have staggered early.

Oh... and enemies partially detect you by default anyway and will try to get you in their line of sight as soon as you walk into range. ...And in my experience, sometimes the enemies will detect you during the screen transition, so you don't get your pre-emptive strike anyway.

...You know what, talking about FF13 is bad for my blood pressure, so I should stop here.

A separate screen for battles and nonbattles is just fine.

Ugh, this was the most annoying thing. "Yessss, finally managed to ambu-what the hell"

Getting the initiative in FFXIII was usually such a hassle without using the stealth veil that I wonder why they even bothered.

I actually do not enjoy on-map encounters, and prefer random ones, if an RPG must have that kind of encounter system. The reason is that on-map encounters have two problems:

1) Players will instinctively want to avoid encounters, which will lead towards them being unprepared for future battles. Even if the random encounters are tedious, the dungeon design intends you to be fighting a certain number of them. Likewise, a game with on-map encounters will be tending to assume you are fighting all of them; in that case, why make them optional?


2) Players who WANT to grind have to leap through hoops in order to get the encounters to respawn. If I just want to grind AP in FFIX, I can just run in a circle and fight monsters forever. If I want to grind XP in FFXIII, I need to either leave the map or walk really far away from the encounter location in order to get it to respawn.


The only real problem with a random encounter system is that the encounters can come at inopportune times; but since most RPGs make fighting random encounters a fairly inoffensive matter, I'm not so offended by this.

I bought a hard copy of Mother 3 from PlayAsia--no honor violations required. (PlayAsia is out of stock and/or the game is out of print, so this is all too little, too late.)

Hahaha imports are ridiculously expensive. With good reason, but still. Also, I hate waiting for things I buy online to arrive. I'd much rather be able to buy it in the store, like you would with a 3DS rerelease (or it would be downloadable, which would be even better).

Personally, I'm excited for obscure classic rereleases on 3DS with the Cave Story 3D announcal.

It's not September yet, B-Road!

You have to wait for September, like the rest of us, B-ROAD!

I highly recommend This It's a beautiful fan made english guide, as good or better than the Earthbound Nintendo Guidebook.... oh it's sold out... if they do another run, check it out!

I snagged Mother 3 when they had it on sale for $10 B')

it's just a nice thing to have!

So... an RPG with only ten or twelve battles, total? How, then, do you capture the sensation of gradually increasing in strength, which is part of the core RPG experience? And how do you convince the RPG-playing market to buy a game that's only 2% as long as the next-shortest RPG in their collection?

Each battle would have to be a dungeon in and of itself. The character would traverse both the surface area of the giant colossus, fighting whatever animals might be nesting on it's bulk, and delve inside its body, with the minor battles being against enemies like parasites or oversized antibodies. The boss fight would then be against the colossus's brain or heart or whatever magical relic that gave it life in the first place. You could have a traditional experience and leveling system, as well as a Mega Man or Zelda-style unlockable tool with every colossus eliminated.

So basically you're describing Blood of Bahamut.