Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: misc. old JRPG's

[quote name="Bananadine"]Shining Force and Shining Force 2 were fun. I like RPG-style battles that take place on grid-shaped maps. But they were too easy. I tried to play through Super Mario RPG, which I never finished as a kid. People seem to love that game. But I couldn't stand it. The introductory section is well done--they frame it as a saving-the-princess game, and then everything gets turned upside-down. Mario acts without speaking, in surprisingly charming sprite-based pantomime that I don't remember appreciating as a kid. But after Bowser disappears, it's a normal JRPG except with minigames crapping up all the battles. And also, you only get three characters (or less) at a time, and it's one of those games where each character has only one type of "magic" (or whatever) and uses only one type of weapon ever, meaning that you can hardly customize anything. It's okay, but I couldn't imagine it doing anything surprising so when my emulator froze up in a shop, I gave up on the game. I played through Mother (EarthBound Zero) for some reason. It was old enough to rely on tedious grinding, but also old enough not to make you wait much for any individual action. The plot turned out to be just barely weird enough to keep me motivated all the way to the end. I'll probably finish EarthBound one of these days. I tried some SNES JRPG that was recent enough for the hub section of its overworld to look as pretty as the overworld in Chrono Trigger. I had never heard of it back then, and I can't remember now what it was called. You start in this hub area, and there's an adventure-game feel there, with items you can examine and use, and the menus are painfully slow but the items are drawn nicely. That seemed promising, but then I got into the first chapter or whatever and it was an adventure in a desert world where two clans of comical cat-pirates are fighting a war and you have to run errands back and forth between the sides and the battles are uninteresting and surprisingly unpretty and it's just standard JRPG nonsense. So I stopped playing. Oh, and I guess Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden fits with this category, even though it's only old-style and not actually old. It was funny and a pretty solid game, although I would have liked it to force me to use the characters' different abilities in different ways (they were fun to explore, but they felt interchangeable). If every RPG were hilarious, then this one would probably be surpassed by something better balanced and better edited, but I don't know what RPG is hilarious, except for this one.[/quote]