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I had a good feeling! Celebrating 40 Years and 108 JRPGs of Destiny

i think the character renders are just detailed and tall enough that giving them SD style cartoon legs look a little weird, yeah. i mean, hardly a dealbreaker, it just happens to be a game that i didn't play very long since i was borrowing it from my brother for a bit more than any particular dislike.

three houses is a game i like but kind of suffers from the modern bioware thing where big parts of the game are too time-consuming and samey to see all the varied stuff. maybe worse because it's just that much longer. though i didn't personally vote for any fire emblem, which is a series i'm sometimes in the mood for but rarely reaches the heights of something truly exciting for me.
 
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Damn I voted for neither of these FEs!

Don't get me wrong, of course; they're good femblems. But the ones I liked more were Engage (#45) and Sacred Stones (#50). Still, I can't say these weren't deserved; Awakening was series-defining in a lot of ways, and the 3H discourse never. ever. ends.
 
Sarge said:
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I could watch this for hours. And not only this. They are incredible. Even the bow users, which is crazy to me. Favourites are probably sword users, though (looks at Lyn, I know, WildCat posted one of her on the page before, but I'm too lazy to click on that, when I have this right here).
 
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82. Etrian Odyssey
Atlus, 2007: DS. Points: 208 Votes: 6 Previous Rank: 37
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Etrian Odyssey is such a surprise breakout hit, considering the Bard’s Tale-ian principles it champions. I’m not sure what the state of the classic dungeon crawl was in 2007, but Etrian, with its fresh anime aesthetics and touchscreen mapping gimmick, definitely fely like a revitalization an ancient genre whose era had come and gone.

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Certainly it is the mapping that did it. The fun conceit of drawing your own map in the game itself—the play-act of the old 80s necessity of documenting your adventure on graph paper—is such a compelling use of the DS’s design that it’s no wonder the game spawned sequel after sequel. Why did Nintendo make that second screen if not to longingly trace labyrinthine halls, mark secret doorways, and untangle devious teleporter mazes? The brilliant utility of it has been lost as we move into our modern single-screen dystopia.

It’s not the mapping alone that calls back to our grandfathers’ days and makes Etrian Odyssey special. Something must be said of its punishing difficulty. Even floor 1 treerat and woodfly encounters are a dangerous threat to a novice party, to say nothing of the humble ragelope who will happily impart the lesson that a casual approach won’t succeed here. There is an unfairness in Etrian Odyssey’s design intended to keep you always on the back foot. The dungeon is mean, encounters are tough, resources are scarce, and the way that character classes are specialized and the limited number of spots in the party means it's impossible to cover all bases. There will always be a strategic gap.

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But through careful mapping, discovery of class synergies, and a conservative dive-and-return approach to dungeon exploration you can discover strategies that not only succeed at the game’s devious challenges but engender a potent sense of fiero—that ecstatic feeling of elation that comes only from having bested a true difficulty via your own efforts. If that feeling could be bottled it would be worth its weight in gold, and more than anything else it is Etrian Odyssey’s old-school sensibilities that are the source of this wonderful and uplifting excitation.
 
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I think Torelbaum is actually touching on something important there. In the days of a younger internet, EO was one of the first games I can recall that had memetic appeal. Today with your Pokopia Tik Toks and whatnot it's hard to remember that there was a time when wanting to play the fun new cool game that everyone on social media was having fun with was a novel concept. I felt like a genius for getting in on the ground floor and buying it day 1; the only thing I knew about it was that it was an RPG with fun anime art and I preordered it. Imagine my surprise when I got it home and found myself playing Wizardry.

Lokii said:
I’m not sure what the state of the classic dungeon crawl was in 2007
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I am-- it was bad! At least domestically. Dungeon Crawlers have always been one of my favourite genres, and although we're spoiled with great indie crawlers today, they were vanishingly rare after the 80s/early 90s surge. Even classic dungeon crawler greats had been moving off the grid and real-time in an attempt to stay relevant. No one had the patience for a boring turn-based crawler on a grid anymore, and the indie scene that could generate them with a low budget to appeal to a niche audience didn't exist yet. EO was both a revelation and like coming home.

Lokii said:
Certainly it is the mapping that did it.
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I think I agree, but I also don't want to undersell what else EO brought to the table. No one had every really made an effort before* to modernize the creaky dungeon crawler genre, and EO took great strides towards making it more appealing to a modern audience, both mechanically and aesthetically. I think it really unlocked my favourite genre for a lot of folks who hadn't given a dungeon crawler the time of day before, and all without compromising on the punishing difficulty that was responsible for so much of its core character.

* - And even since, there hasn't been a lot. We're spoiled for indie crawlers now, as I said, but a lot of them are pretty faithful to the games of old, in order to appeal to old sickos like me. The only title I can even think of that also tried to radically rethink and modernize the formula (in very different ways) is the also excellent Stranger of Sword City, and there's also some really cool modern entries in both the Bard's Tale and Might & Magic series that return to their turn-based, grid-based roots.

Anyway, I love EO (this particular entry didn't quite make my top 50, but was in my long list), and I hope this isn't the last time we'll see it in this thread. I'm literally playing an EO game right now! Like, right now, on my 3DS, and not even one of the Steam ports. Time was that they were releasing EO games literally every year, and I was quickly unable to keep pace, and have slowly been plugging away at the backlog ever since, which is why I am now finally winding down my sequential playthrough of the series with the excellent victory lap of EO Nexus.

I feel like I might have more to say on both the series in general and this entry in particular, but nothing's coming to me at the moment, so maybe I'll circle back later.
 
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It can be tricky to source introductions to particular genres or game concepts to singular works, but I think I'm comfortable saying that Etrian Odyssey was it for me and dungeon crawlers. Blobbers either didn't exist on the prominent console platforms of my youth, or they didn't get any major pushes from publishers if they technically did. Atlus's confidence in their own modern-interpretation-with-a-twist project meant that people actually talked about it in the nerdy spaces that I orbited as a teenager, that people took notice of it as a fresh concept even if its bones were old. The game had so many hooks to grab one's attention with, whether it was the tactile joys of mapping, Koshiro's FM melancholies, Himukai's character art--double-edged as it may have been--or the localization that made each textual bit of the journey lively and engrossing. And when you really got down to the mechanics, all the immediately graspable aspects of the systems--a skill point per level, across seventy levels--opened the door into the partially withheld complexity of the numerical rules under the hood that you could sit down essentially in perpetuity with and amuse yourself with the sheer granularity of the calculations. This is a game that at this point has been "solved", with its less and overpowered strategies charted out, its peculiar programming bugs internalized by those enthusiastic about it... and it remains so comfortable to return to even so, partially for that familiarity, and for the FFI-esque appeal of ramshackle ambitions of the code coming to define the game's lasting character. It's a personally important game and likely the historical record has cause to acknowledge it too.
 
I've got a friend of mine that's trying to get me into Etrian Odyssey since I just finished off Might and Magic. They're both of the Wizardry lineage, but I'm not sure I'm up for the brutality this (or Wizardry) brings to the table yet. The soundtracks rock (love that it used FM synthesis), and it certainly seems to smooth over some of the rougher aspects of blobbers.
 
Etrian Odyssey 1 was not on my list (a later entry was), but it's an incredible game and was the first dungeon crawler I gave a serious shot to. I'm now a big fan of the series (he says, not having really touched Nexus... mainly because I'm saving it for a rainy day, as the probable last dual screen EO we'll ever get). Even if my preferred game in the series doesn't make our list, I'm happy at least one game from the series did.
 
While I can squarely blame TT for a lot of the games and especially RPGs I played in the late 00s, it's EO that was the biggest "I would never have played this if not for TT". Reading people's posts about it (I did a lot of reading about games I wasn't planning to play, back then!), as well as the half-in-character article up on Gamespite, I came around to the idea of it despite having bounced hard off first-person dungeon crawlers as a younger teen when playing far too many JRPGs through emulation and PS2 bargain bins. I didn't bounce off EO, but I did play every entry about a year after everyone else (initially due to the much-delayed UK release date of the first game, then because it took me a year or more to beat each one!) so was often reviving dying threads to gush long after most had moved on. This failed to deter me either!

Absolutely one of my all-time faves, frequently being one I put in my top 10 games of all time, let alone JRPGs.
 
Sarge said:
I've got a friend of mine that's trying to get me into Etrian Odyssey since I just finished off Might and Magic. They're both of the Wizardry lineage, but I'm not sure I'm up for the brutality this (or Wizardry) brings to the table yet. The soundtracks rock (love that it used FM synthesis), and it certainly seems to smooth over some of the rougher aspects of blobbers.
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Coming off of the original Might & Magic, you're more than ready for EO, IMO.

Also, echoing Loki's rec for IV being a great jumping-on point.
 
I tried EO4 (I think) but found it just wasn't for me. It's one of those series where I like that people like it, but can't seem to get into it myself, and that's OK.
 
I had EO at #9. The game that got me into first person dungeon crawling and drawing my own maps. For all the talk of difficulty and unfairness, I think it’s a very friendly game - the aesthetics help (from memory it’s not hard to just not use the dodgier character portraits in this one), the touchscreen mapping helps, having your position on the map shown to you helps a lot, the later maps where there are areas where you can’t see yourself on the map are a bridge to playing older games where you’re doing the maps on paper with no or limited ability to have the game tell you where you are, there are warp wires (absolute highlight of EO is going into the dungeon and realising when you’re all but out of resources that you forgot to restock your wire and managing to crawl back to town alive. Absolute lowlight is the same scenario but you don’t make it back), it had unlockable shortcuts so that once you’d been through and area enough you wouldn’t have to do it again, and you can exploit some quirks of the battle system to get ahead - I think there was a skill that reduced elemental damage and eventually led you to absorb it at higher levels but if you stopped levelling it at the point where it just cancelled the damage it would also make you immune to status effects associated with elemental damage that you’d still get if you absorbed the damage and that would ruin your party.

I’ve still got a few unplayed 3DS Etrians. I should get around to those.
 
I only ever played the first one, but it came at an opportune time in my life where I didn't have much else going on and needed something to focus on, and I was able to focus on this to the extent that I was able to clear it within a month. It was a good time! Definitely one of the games that works best on the DS.
 
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81. Parasite Eve
Square, 1998: PSX. Points: 211 Votes: 7
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Praise the short JRPG! The lengthy adventure is an admirable thing, but there’s something to be said for a JRPG that gets in, gets out, all killer no filler. Parasite Eve might be the poster child for the 10 hour whiz-bang experience.

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This svelte escapade sees rookie cop supermodel Aya Brea trying to save Christmas from a mitochondrial revolution. Hoppin and boppin across a New York City besieged by an uppity opera diva, she faces a bevy of animals whose DNA has gone into revolt, mutating them into goopy monstrosities; perfect fodder for a Resident Evil style body horror experience while also serving the encounter structure of a JRPG. Notably, and perhaps also taking a cue from RE, Parasite Eve is the only Square game where battle encounters take place on 2D prerendered backgrounds. There’s an interesting dimension to combat as the player has to contend with positioning within the specific constraints of the cinematic angle of any given prerendered background. Sometimes the background is rendered from a high angle, giving the player an easy bird’s-eye view to work in, and sometimes they’re in a cramped halfway framed from an odd lowshot or cramped angle, compromising their ability to dodge attacks.

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In this way the prerendered background is simultaneously the encounter arena, the visual style, and the means by which Square injects an action element into turn-based combat. Prerendered backgrounds would become obsolete by the end of the console generation, but here they’re working not just as a backbone for combat, but also to realize such an ambitious and recognizable setting as contemporary NYC. These elements of concept and execution come together in a tidy little package that is immediately compelling and playable and fresh.
 
Parasite Eve is one of my Ones That Got Away, and it seems to have a positive reputation these days. Never been able to try it, but if I ever get around to emulating a PS1, that'll be the first game on the list.
 
I quite enjoyed Parasite Eve back in the day; I don’t think I had it on my list but that’s probably only because it didn’t scream “JRPG” in my head. Horror in a contemporary real-world location isn’t generally a video game setting I’m into but this came out during a period when I was buying pretty much everything Square served up, and I wasn’t disappointed. The hybrid combat system took a bit of getting used to but worked well once you found your footing, and the brisk pace Lokii mentioned keeps everything fresh and exciting. And hey, there’s even a Chocobo (statue)!

Pity it seems like the sequels dropped the ball, though I haven’t tried them personally so that’s just hearsay.
 
Parasite Eve was some really cool shit when I was a teenager. I don't remember the last time I tried playing it now, but I'm sure it's been over a decade. I was also a big fan of Resident Evil 2, so getting to merge Squaresoft with a similar horror setting and all the gameplay similarities was just incredible for me. Ah, and I did vote for it at #44 (I couldn't quite remember if it made my list haha).
 
Had this high up in my list; just a wonderful game in every way. Lots of goofy character in the our-spinoff treatment that's given to the concepts drawn from the novel, as well as in the on-the-cusp-of-greatness localization tenor for Square projects where they're not past the awkward growing pains of hitting their platform stride quite yet. I don't usually care for Shimomura's music much, but in here I absolutely do; the game wouldn't work without the atmosphere granted by it. Game's systems are as straightforwardly intuitive or fiddly sweaty as you want them to be, and neither's the wrong way to play for as compact as the narrative tells it--the Chrysler Building is always there for the real maniacs. Just no notes at all, always thoroughly enjoy it when I play.

Kirin said:
Pity it seems like the sequels dropped the ball, though I haven’t tried them personally so that’s just hearsay.
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I'm a big fan of Parasite Eve II. It veers closer to survival horror than RPG in its genre fusion (uses proper tank controls for instance, unlike the first game) in just about a complementarily opposite way to the original, which is just the kind of experimentation I want to see in a sequel. Incredibly, unspeakably gorgeous visually like everything Square did late on PlayStation, with some camerawork and shots interacting with FMV backgrounds I haven't seen done anywhere else. By this time, the Square localization department was producing truly great work, which is seen in just how better the game reads moment-to-moment compared to the first game. It has some of the best horror/RPG environmental descriptive text around; Aya actually exhibits a personality in this one.
 
Parasite Eve would have easily made my list, and likely even a top 10er. It's just still an incredible game.

Modern setting might not have been novel for other genres like Survival Horror, but in an RPG it was essentially a unicorn. Exploring real, and familiar locations made the whole experience that much more immersive.

To this day, I still think about why the game's combat system never seemed to lead anywhere beyond this game and Vagrant Story. Mixing ATB with real time action is in a lot of ways, a precursor to what FF15 and 7R became, just without the attack range spheres. (Which are still dope.) If I became a multimillionaire overnight and could just quit my job forever, I would make indie games as a hobby, and an RPG with PE-style combat is what I'd do. I've felt that way for decades at this point.

Aya is a fantastic protagonist, and the cast in general is strong and compelling.

Something I'm surprised nobody has really mentioned yet is the music. This isn't Yoko Shimomura's best work, but it always strikes the right vibe/sets the proper mood for whatever is happening. And there's a handful of all-time tracks that just bop.


Peklo said:
I'm a big fan of Parasite Eve II. It veers closer to survival horror than RPG in its genre fusion (uses proper tank controls for instance, unlike the first game) in just about a complementarily opposite way to the original, which is just the kind of experimentation I want to see in a sequel. Incredibly, unspeakably gorgeous visually like everything Square did late on PlayStation, with some camerawork and shots interacting with FMV backgrounds I haven't seen done anywhere else. By this time, the Square localization department was producing truly great work, which is seen in just how better the game reads moment-to-moment compared to the first game. It has some of the best horror/RPG environmental descriptive text around; Aya actually exhibits a personality in this one.
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I marvel at the work and talent that went into PE2. But I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't immensely disappointed by it. Experimentation is one thing. PE itself was a massive experiment! But making a Resident Evil clone didn't feel like experimenting rather than blindly chasing fads. RE games are iconic for a reason, and I know a lot of people loved those experiences. But they never clicked with me. It never really made a lot of sense to me why Squaresoft would take a successful game like Parasite Eve, and then in the sequel do almost nothing that made the first one a success.
 
"Almost nothing" is an exaggeration that doesn't reflect what the game is, but more importantly, don't really care to hear about why someone didn't like an RPG in a thread about liking RPGs.

WisteriaHysteria said:
If I became a multimillionaire overnight and could just quit my job forever, I would make indie games as a hobby, and an RPG with PE-style combat is what I'd do. I've felt that way for decades at this point.
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It's a budding subgenre these days--I can think of at least four Parasite Eve clones off the top of my head. Parasite Mutant above is one, yes.
 
Never played Parasite Eve, but what I saw of it oozed style. Certainly seems like a cool little action-RPG hybrid I'd have likely enjoyed if I had played it in its heyday.

Unfortunately, the only game in the Parasite Eve "franchise" I ever played was 3rd Birthday, and, well...the less said about that one, the better.
 
I wish we could get another in this style - had a blast with it back in the day. I'm due a replay, and as noted, it's short and doesn't even try to overstay its welcome.

A weird, random memory, though - I bought this from a Blockbuster, but the discs had issues and I ended up having to return it. They let me swap it out for a game that I very desperately wanted even more, Tactics Ogre, and they finally relented because I was returning PE. I then ended up snagging PE off of eBay so I could finish off what had been an absolute blast to that point.
 
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