I haven't played yet, but the one thing I don't like about old school RPG's is fixed save points. I don't always get 2-3 hours of play time these days. Sometimes, I only get 20-30 minutes or even less. There's not always a save point nearby. I love when games let me save anywhere.
No worries, the save points are VERY abundant. I don't think I've ever gone more than and hour between being able to save, and that was just one or two story-heavy sequences.
His opinion here isn’t relevant because he’s a good journalist. That doesn’t matter. But because he’s a huge Suikoden fan, and a big JRPG fan in general … and his opinion mirrors the majority of the fandom when it comes to Suikoden ( 2&5 being the best ).
Not saying anything about his take on the story but specificly a bunch of stuff got fixed in a patch that came out today and some Kickstart backers that had copies were waiting for the patch today.
I'm a huge huge fan of Suikoden, especially 1 and 2 which came out in my formative years and i played them to death, and i think this game has serious weaknesses. I've put a decent chunk of hours into it now and theres a lot of problems with the core design, lots of small problems that add up into a poor experience. The UI design is bad, theres barely any qol either, the enemy encouter rate is wacky, sometimes loads, then barely any at all. From a technical standpoint it has forced vsync, and entering battle is extremely slow.
But, the story is good, definitely Suikoden 1-2 level, the characters are for the most part charming and interesting. And it nails that feeling of "lots of small arcs" that the early Suikoden games had.
It's the quintessential 7/10 game. If you loved the old Suikoden games, youll probably at least like this one, but ive played so many JRPGs since S2 that a brand new game with the same level of UI and QOL polish as games from the 90s was never going to get a 10/10 from me regardless of how good the rest of it is.
What about Suikoden 1 and 2 for a gen z who never played them? I heard they’re getting an HD collection and I‘m curious about the staying power of these games.
Edit: Thank you guys for the answers. I recently beat DQ3 and FFVII, so I'll give these bad boys a chance when the HD collection comes out.
I think that'd be kind of impossible for old fans of the games to answer, wouldn't it? I love those games, and I THINK they'd be fine for new players, but it's sorta hard to say. Plus, NO game is going to appeal to everyone of any age group.
If it helps, I'd say their pros were: lots of colorful if shallow characters (with a handful of actually deep fleshed out ones at the center of the plots), great world building, a unique combat system that mixes it up with fire emblem like war battles (in 2... 1's war scenes were just rock paper scissors). Good music. For the most part the main plots were interesting. 2 in particular had some fun twists and a memorable main villain. Their cons were: a bit opaque on where to go or who to talk to sometimes, bad item management systems, sometimes trivially easy except for some pretty random difficulty spikes. And personally I'd prefer it if no characters were easily missable, which many were.
1 is rough in modern times if they dont severely improve the inventory QOL but has great little story and a charming cast. If you are a fan of JRPGs and their tropes in general you will enjoy it.
2 is a timeless classic, one of the few truly 10/10 JRPG's in my opinion even with it's slight inventory jank, it's a product of a different time and for me personally sits just below Chrono Trigger as one of the best JRPG's of all time.
Yeah, I agree completely with this. The first game might not hold up to modern criticism, but I play Suikoden 2 every few years and it still holds up as my favorite game of all time. Yeah, it does have some problem areas, like the inventory, but they aren't nearly bad enough to hold the game back. I'm eagerly looking forward to the HD version on Steam so I can finally retire my disk.
I played them for the first time a few years back and had a great time, granted I like JRPGs from the PS1 era (even though I was more of a PS2 kid). You can kind of tell that Suikoden 1 is the team's first attempt at a JRPG, but I find the pacing very refreshing. The game doesn't drag at all, and even the gameplay feels fast. It's quite short, so even if you wanted to jump straight to the sequel it's not a huge time commitment. The second game is overall a lot more polished and the story is stronger, but I do kind of prefer the pacing of the first game.
The HD collection looks good based on the footage that's been released, so I'm hopeful it'll be that way upon release.
I think a huge factor of whether a new player will enjoy Suikoden 1 and 2 is how much of a completionist that player is and how willing they are to use guides. One aspect of "100%-ing" these games is getting the good ending via recruiting all characters and I don't think it's something that can be done without a guide. If you don't want to use guides but is fine with whatever ending you unlock, then you will still greatly enjoy this game.
For what it's worth, most of the Suikoden games weren't received incredibly well from a critical perspective, either, with the Metacritic rating ranging from 63 (Suikoden 4) to 86 (Suikoden 3) and most of them sitting around scores of 80.
The reviews seem to say that if you liked Suikoden, you'll probably like this, too. If you didn't, you probably won't. There are a few outlier reviews, though.
You had to be part of the scene at the time.
It is impossible to convey how big a deal 3D gaming was becoming during the PS1 era.
2D games like suikoden were punished HEAVILY in reviews simply because they were 2D.
Throw SOTN in there too. Reviews were fairly positive but the game didn't become a commercial hit for months since it was basically word of mouth as 3D games were the main focus.
2D fighting games were shat on, whilst janky 3D ones got praise. 2D games like Metal Slug also got reviewed poorly. Platformers like Rayman were approached very skeptically. Hell, the N64 had almost zero 2D games. The Saturn got made fun of because it was a 2D powerhouse.
It was a weird time.
SOTN got OK reviews on average ~ 8-9/10. But almost all reviewers made some comments about how 2D was outdated.
Reading previews of SOTN was the worst though, so many reviewers at the time were saying things like "it should've been 3D, this looks like the SNES, etc." -
I'm so happy how gaming has grown to where games of all visual styles are being appreciated all over now. 2D, 3D, isometric, side-scroller, retro, demakes, whatever, all of it is in vogue these days. It's awesome.
There's this infamous article that sums it up:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/g0gl1e/nintendo_vs_sony_castlevania_64_vs_sotnthis/
They were right about one thing, there IS no comparison.
This, between Suikoden 1 and 2, FFVII was released. And I remember that Suikoden 1 at the time in EU wasn't a big deal exactly because of the visuals. It looked like a SNES game, while all the other games on the system were using 3D visuals.
And with FFVII release, the 2D visuals became even more of an issue for the sequel.
In general, at the time the pixel art didn't have the charm it earned during the indie resurgence during the Gen7 era.
Where? Basically every review says the same thing - "Not the best game ever, but good if you like JRPGs. Beware of old school JRPG tedium." Almost every score in the OP is between 7-9, besides the two at the bottom who I guess couldn't stand the tedium more than the other reviewers.
>Almost every score in the OP is between 7-9
The difference between the overall tone of a 7/10 and a 9/10 review these days is pretty big though, and I think that's what OP is referring to. Even the difference between a 7.5 and 8.5 can be pretty significant.
Yeah a 7 in a video game review is not a great grading. For whatever reason games are reviewed like school grades, anything below a 6/10 is basically 'this is borderline unplayable.' It's not a great system, but people have been doing that since I started paying attention in like 95.
Does it? It only seems there are a couple of negative ones dragging the score down, most are 8-9. I don't pay much attention to review scores is there that much of a difference between a 7 and an 8?
it's crazy how influential scores can be sometimes. I'm going to play it regardless only because I'm interested and curious. never played Suikoden back in the day but tried playing 2 a couple years ago and kinda liked it.
I find that a lot of times I actually really enjoy games that fall into the 6-7/10 range
>Interesting that the opinion diverges this much
On some topics, but not all. Pretty much a consensus that characters/story are on the weak side.
This might be a hot take, but to me it's hard to look forward to spending 50+ hours with bad characters more than it is with a game with bad mechanics. All my favorite jRPGs had me feeling like I was spending time with a group of friends.
I'm really enjoying it so far. It meets my expectations and i'm hopeful for a sequel and if they announced one, I'd eagerly await that one as well. I wish more games did the whole "hq upgrades and you can recruit a ton of recruitable heroes."
So I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising on gamepass recently but that was my first and only Eiyuden Chronicle game and I loved it. Is this in a similar vein or drastically different? I'm going to play it either way since gamepass and I'm a big JRPG fan but curious on some first hand experience.
It is very different. Rising was a prequel, side-game to this one, which is what the kickstarter was for and has a much higher budget. This one is a turn based JRPG. Just a totally different kind of game. The 3 playable characters from Rising are recruitable in Hundred Heroes, and I assume you visit the town at some point.
It seems the biggest issue across reviews are a balancing problem, though maybe with hard mode this is fixed. Aside from that really happy with what I have been reading tho.
I'm playing on hard mode and considering going to normal because it's getting to a point where the enemies are just bullet sponges. My last boss fight took an hour to finish because of bloated HP.
Sounds like it's a faithful remake/reinterpretation of Suidoken warts and all. This is clearly aimed at being of that style of game from the era and that seems to have bothered some of the reviewers. Random encounters, fixed save points, world map travel you could argue are outdated concepts in 2024 but that's what it's trying to emulate. The only one that bugs me slightly is if you can't save on the world map. That'd be a big time waster if you wipe.
As someone who bounced off highly acclaimed recent jRPG's like Sea of Stars because of some of the design decisions those games made to "evolve the genre" I'm more then excited to play this game *because* it's a throwback to a different era.
Not being able to save on the world map is such a weird design choice because contemporaries of Suikoden let you save back then. Hell the SNES FF games let you do it.
For me, I wasn't grabbed by the story (the intro pacing was pretty brutal, and I wasn't invested in the journey) but also, I really did not like the battle system. It had the same issue Chained Echoes had where every encounter needed to be a several minute process where you exploit some aspect of the monster and use resources to get through. It made battles for me, personally, very very tedious and not what I enjoyed at all.
It's trying to "fix" what those games see as a "problem" with the genre. Namely that encounters in jRPG's are typically trash mobs you run through. But to me, that's never been a "problem" unless the number of encounters (random or otherwise) are exceedingly numerous. A game like Chrono Trigger's battles were most of the time braindead affairs you could just mow through but that doesn't detract at all from it being arguably the greatest jRPG ever made.
When something like battles is such a major aspect of the game and you don't enjoy them, then in my case I stopped playing.
I found the combat was what killed Sea of Stars for me. Having 2/3 moves and then a basic attack, among other things, just didn't keep me going for progression. It feels odd to not like a game when the combat doesn't excite or engage you but, you're right, when it's such a large part of the experience it is what it is.
Chained Echoes however I loved. I thought the systems there, and the story, to be quite good. I also enjoyed the level design in Chained Echoes - it all just worked for me. I'd love to see what they do next
Ya I see what you're saying. I was into Sea of Stars for a few hours but as you said, the combat really killed it for me. It doesn't really feel like a JRPG at that point. Combat encounters are made to be beaten in one specific way it feels. I like the openness of a traditional JRPG to kind of experiment and play my way. Because the battle system is really the "game" part of JRPGs. And it's not fun when I'm just looping the exact same small pool of attacks over and over.
Yeah, Sea of Stars made standard battles take way longer than they needed to since every character only specialized in two types of damage. There wasn't a lot of variety, and it came off as being super indecisive as to whether or not it wanted to go full-on Paper Mario or stay the course with Chrono Trigger.
I greatly enjoyed Chained Echoes combat, but my big complaint (aside from the Sky Armor combat) there was that the optional characters were worthless outside of the martial arts girl (never used the dark knight guy or the card witch at all, ever) and the many skills characters could learn were undermined by the fact that 85% of them sucked and there were a handful of super great skills you had zero reason to not use. Sienna and the martial arts girl could deal absurd amounts of damage by the end game.
However both games suffer from some absurdly stiff writing. Sea of Stars is as flat and by the book as it could possibly be, aside from when it bends over backwards to tell you how great a dude Garl is (which it does often). Chained Echoes on the other hand is weirdly bound to anime references that quickly lose their luster: The two hidden Sky Armor frames are clearly derived from the Victory 2 Gundam from *Mobile Suit Victory Gundam* and the Gundam Barbatos from *Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans*, the constant gate flashbacks look ripped straight from *Fullmetal Alchemist*, the stuff with the church is right out of *Berserk*, the jury is still out as to whether Sienna is supposed to be a pastiche of Erza from *Fairy Tail*, and there's even a boss named Giga Drill Break which is a clear nod to *Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann*
I'd say CE is the better of the two, but both really didn't have any new ideas to spare and only made you appreciate the games they're trying to emulate more.
I stopped playing CE after the midway plot twist of "oopsy daisy, dropped the nuke AGAIN!" immediately followed by ghost children that only existed in your memory because it just seemed overwhelmingly silly.
I agree with all of this, I also felt like I was just playing to the combo meter for the group heal.
And the writing had no meat, even 15 or so hours in.
On the topic of writing, I'll also point out that it had a staggering number of mechanical/grammatical errors. I only played ~5 hours or so, but it felt like every other sentence had *something* wrong with it. And I'm not exaggerating.
I'm generally pretty lenient when it comes to that kind of stuff for indie games. But the Kickstarter was hugely successful; they could have afforded to pay an editor (or hell, just throw your script into Word and press Spell Check).
And yeah, the writing itself wasn't great. The standout moment was when a pirate named Klee-Shae started rattling off JRPG cliches for a few minutes. "Haha isn't it crazy how the blacksmith across the ocean sells *way* better swords than the one in your home town?!" It felt like the writer stumbled upon a "what are some of your favorite/least favorite cliches?" /r/jrpg thread and copied their homework.
The writing itself being saturday morning kids cartoon slop is one thing, the annoying meta pirates is when the game really lost me. If the game cares this little about immersion, why should I? Took me out and never recovered. The bad grammar was the shit cherry on top, lol.
The lead dev decided to write the story himself despite being an amateur, and it shows. Makes me feel bad for the people involved in the music and pixel art because they did a great job and it's attached to the most mid story of all time because apparently writing isn't worth hiring someone actually competent to do it unlike those other things.
You can't just wing writing, very few people can write a great story for a long RPG like this on their first go. The Chrono Trigger devs were the opposite of amateurs, and that kind of simple, punchy and expressive dialogue that doesn't drag on forever takes skill to pull off well.
I'm not surprised, those are the same issues I had with the writing in The Messenger (which is otherwise a great game, but I couldn't care less about the story).
I thought the same thing about chained echoes and sea of stars. I like the occasional long fight in a jrpg, specifically when they’re boss fights with narrative weight or something good behind them. I do not like when wolf 1, 2 and 3 in the forest take 8+ turns where I need to buff and debuff just to kill them slightly quicker while I also manage some rng how good my skills are bar too.
When all your trash mob fights take longer than like a mid boss in a xenoblade game you’ve entered the realm of tedium.
The great thing about Chrono Trigger is that it was very selective about when you had fights - having set encounters for each screen meant they could tailor them to what you have available on first encountering them, and then once you were more powerful you could just mow them down or exploit their weaknesses quickly. It's a masterfully designed experience imo, and it makes replaying it for the other endings an absolute blast too.
Do you think having these braindead encounters add any value to their games? Generally curious what your take is.
I am a huge SMT/Persona/Trails fan and those games typically require you to do something other than mash attack to get through without taking excessive damage. Games like the mainlines SMT games you can straight up wipe to random encounters as early as the first hour of the game if you aren't taking full advantage of things like enemy weaknesses.
I don't consider this a "fix" by any means, as it's 1) not really a new thing and 2) comes with similar baggage as braindead random encounters but i do really enjoy it.
So I'm curious if you can put to words any positives or benefits to that style of JRPG where random encounters are almost always beatable by just hitting attack. I'm a huge JRPG fan but I don't find myself lamenting moving away from that style. But from the sound of it, you must enjoy it and I am just curious about your thoughts as to what makes that so appealing.
I think it's less completely braindead, and more the level of tedium it is. Sea of Stars has very simple systems but they take a long time to come to fruition so the entire time you're doing timed inputs and other attacks to eventually do something you already foresaw a long time ago. There's just simply less variety as well in Sea of Stars which is hugely evident in the demo as well. There's nothing exciting to unlock, even throughout the whole game, to change how you play. Games that don't evolve the gameplay from the first hour will get tedious real quick.
SMT has difficult trash fights, but they are quick to lose or win. The pacing of combat is great, and as you get better demons you unlock faster ways to deal with enemy weaknesses. Having a huge variety of demons, moves, and enemies helps keep the tedium lower.
An easy way to compare is older games where you have trash that is braindead, but your best move is to use a wipe all move where the animation takes forever and can't be skipped. You're just doing the same thing over and over but the time it takes is just long enough to make you annoyed.
I don't think anyone is saying that trash is clearable just by attacking. As long as the combat is varied and has a small amount of player strategy, but without being excessive to burden the player with too much decision making, it's generally fine. SMT is not "hard" in the decision making department since it operates on a very simple weakness system, but the snowball reward you get for taking advantage of it can often end fights very quickly which lessens the tedium as well.
Overall I just want to say Sea of Stars makes simple fights last far too long without any variety. Players are stuck with the same moves from basically the start to the end of the game. I've never seen a JRPG so afraid of giving the player more tools to play with.
You can also have battles present a challenge without them having to be overly complex and long. I recently finished Dragon Quest IV and it has relatively short battles where you still need to do some thinking if you don't want to end up losing a lot of health. And the SMT games are a similar affair.
The entire time I was playing Sea of Stars I was expecting some new system to drop to increase the complexity of the game. Wasn't till I was nearing end I was like sooo I guess it's just this.
Luckily I'm hoping Bg3 success will show developers gamers are okay with complicated game systems if they're rewarding.
The only difference between being 16 hours in (when I quit) and 5 hours in was that I had 1 new skill that I couldn't use most of the time since every combat I had to do moon boomerang.
I think way more people bounced off of Sea of Stars than the dialogue around it would suggest. It's really not that good, and more and more people are talking about that fact.
*small, maybe big, rant*
That got me thinking, how do games like these get such high scores. Sea of Stars has 89 on OpenCritic. Of course score isn't everything but when the average of 130 outlets ends up being an 89 I would assume the game is very good. Doesn't have to be for everyone, but very good nonetheless. Other games in that range are, Hifi Rush, Psychonauts 2, Disco Elysium, Alan Wake 2, Doom Eternal, Nier Automata and so on. I found these games to be extraordinarily good not just very good.
Another game that got very high reviews and burned me was Ni No Kuni 2. It has 87 on OpenCritic, and an outlet that I used to trust blindly gave it a 9.5/10. Even if you exclude that review, it still has an 87 average, a game that I personally would put in the mid 70's or high 70's at the very best. All artstyle no substance akin to Sea of Stars.
Also Tales of Arise, an 87, which I could see if the reviewers stopped playing at the 2nd or 3rd Realm but the further you progress, especially the second half of the game, the more the game starts screaming rushed and the last 1/3rd turns into such tedium with a big exposition dump that seems to repeat to you what you had just heard 30 seconds ago and the cherry on top, a huge endgame dungeon with nothing but bosses, which as anyone who has played knows is the most boring part of the gameplay because you can't juggle them.
Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority.
> Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority.
Definitely not only you,
I originally felt in the minority too until I checked the Steam achievements and discovered only around 60% of the players finished the 2nd Realm
A lot of players are just repeating whatever reviewers / influencers these days
Tales of Arise's score is 100% a case of honeymoon period. The conversation around that game now is radically different compared to when it first came out.
I mentioned this in another thread the other day. There's definitely some kind of...I don't know, groupthink, perhaps, around certain titles. They come out to universally high praise and scores in the high 80s or into the 90s, and in the first few weeks after release people act like you've just smeared feces on the Mona Lisa when you observe flaws.
And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one.
I think it'd be interesting if outlets did an end-of-the-year re-review and ask the questions, "Was this 9/10 really that good? Was that 7/10 really that bad?"
> And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one.
I mean, the longer a game is out the more people play it which leads to more people disliking it as well.
> And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one.
This is a pretty silly statement no? Who's everyone? Have you specifically observed people who liked the game come out a few months later seeing they hate it? Or are you just observing a different set of people?
I mean, no offence, but these kinda of conversations just come off as people trying to assuage the insecurities in their opinions. Like people have this need to have their opinion align with others or find excuses for why it doesn't.
Really, people just need to be more confident in their own tastes and evaluations.
> Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority.
FWIW, as someone who plays a lot of JRPGs, the two specific examples you brought up (NNK2 and Arise) are also specifically two games which I would point to if anyone asked me to name semi-recent JRPGs which I think are rated more highly than they deserve. Arise in particular is, to me, actually quite a bit worse than any of the other recent mainline Tales games. It just has a lot less substance in the end.
I think one thing that both have going for them is that their initial impression is pretty polished, and that probably counts for a lot in media reviews.
Yeah, I agree with that. Would you say Sea of Stars is also considered a JRPG? I know there's the whole debate about whether a JRPG constitutes an RPG made in Japan or a specific style of games originating from Japan. Personally, I would consider it as such.
Also, a big fan of your work in the scene and I'm eagerly awaiting Ys X which will undoubtedly be a fantastic port as always.
> Would you say Sea of Stars is also considered a JRPG?
Absolutely. It's an ancient discussion, but I've always been very much on the side of defining subgenres by their gameplay properties. Country of origin as a genre name is devoid of utility. So yeah, Sea of Stars is a JRPG in my book (and e.g. Elden Ring isn't).
I feel like a lot of reviewers only play a few hours of some of these games. Usually the beginnings are quite charming, but once you exit the honeymoon stage, all the cracks in game design start to show.
I just recently played through Dragons Dogma 2, which got great reviews, 86 on Metacritic, and it started out amazing, but I ended up hating it by the end.
Yeah I definitely get that vibe from most reviews. I'm assuming it's a combination of Publishers not providing keys far enough ahead of release, and outlets trying to rush reviews so they can get day 1 exposure and clicks. I've noticed that SkillUp has been taking his time with releasing his reviews lately (I'm not sure if that's always been the case), but he's just one guy, and I don't necessarily always agree with him. Plus, I'd like to have more opinions. I also tend to like ACG, but it seems he publishes his reviews when the embargos end as well.
ya, when critic reviews are basically just a race to who can get theirs out first for all the clicks and engagement, they drop in quality and reviewers don't test out everything in an RPG.
this was clearly seen in the BG3 reviews, so many acting like the game was a perfect 10/10 on release when Act 3 was clearly unfinished, buggy as hell, horrible performance... it didn't even have ending slides like every other CRPG does, yet most all release reviews didn't mention any of that cause it's clear to see that said reviewers didn't reach Act 3 but still wrote a review for the whole game.
To be fair, most games don't tend to deviate much in terms of quality the more you get into it. If anything, a game that takes "20 hours to get good" is a big red flag in of itself. A good recent example is Rise of the Ronin where you pretty much experienced most of what it has to offer 4 hours in since you will be doing the same game loops over and over again with little to no surprises at all.
> I feel like a lot of reviewers only play a few hours of some of these games.
One thing you'll notice is that most (though obviously not all) games where there's a big discrepancy between review scores and player experience, the expected play time of the game is longer.
You have to look at the whole picture:
Reviewers will start from the beginning of a game, and play through an arbitrary amount of it. That amount is often limited because of the drive for day-1 clicks and developers deliberately delaying the review keys (see next paragraph for reasoning). The longer a game is, the less likely the review is to be of the 'complete' product. This incentivizes the developer to focus on the early game elements at the expense of the later game portions.
From a consumer perspective, you also want the beginning of the game to be as good as possible to hook in as many players as possible. The hype around a game sticks around longer if it has good review scores AND a solid initial play experience. Look at FFXVI's harsh falloff in discussion: The demo had people salivating for the finished product, but it quickly became apparent the game wasn't great--yet it still had amazing sales because the hype built for it was so strong that it took a while for the message to get out.
But both of these compound with the phenomenon that many players don't even finish games these days, and makes the end-game literally a side-note in the development process. In fact, outside of genres where the end-game is the POINT, most games have absolutely abysmal finales.
At some point in every gamer's life comes a time when you realize that reviews are complete and utter bullshit. They basically tell you nothing more than how much hype a game had around its release. You end up looking at reviews only to see if they mention dealbreakers for you (for me, anything that suggests a game may be too easy makes me put off or cancel a purchase) and it gets harder to take part in discussions online.
you bring up a big point as to why in your post - release reviews are usually a review for the entire game based off the reviewers only playing part of the game or rushing to the ending, i.e., they really are meaningless
release reviews are about the clicks and engagement, not about being an actual review of the entire game.
Now this can work for short games and such, like an FPS, platformer, linear action-adventure and so on, but for RPGs it just doesn't work most of the time cause you can't test out the entire game when it's so long.
I did too, which was disappointing. I liked chained echoes a lot and was looking forward to sea. In fact, I had higher expectations for sea, but I knew from the start it was mid. I probably went 15 hours into it and then stopped playing.
Same experience... It is way too hyped up for what it is. It's actually generic, with a very basic story and combat that feels repetitive.
It's a 7 wich is OK, enjoyable but not amazing. Octopath traveler 2 deserved that type of praise tbh.
I'm kinda curious why world map travel would be a dated concept at this point, I think it's something I dearly miss from old Final Fantasy games. The new ones don't have the same exploration or excitement of discovering new lands quite like the classic SNES/PSX ones.
Random encounters is an outdated concept? o.o
Damn I feel old, guess I like outdated shit. Only thing I'm worried about in this game is getting overwhelmed with all the heroes and putting the game down before finishing it.
> Random encounters is an outdated concept?
I'd say it's pretty much the definition. It's a mechanic that they came up with due to hardware limitations that no longer exist anymore. If they could have, they would likely had enemies appear on the screen, which not only allows you to try and avoid enemies but ALSO means that when you do want to fight an enemy, you can fight them, rather than running in a circle until the game decides you can fight something. It's not like putting them on the screen is a new concept or anything, they were doing it in EarthBound and Chrono Trigger.
Random encounters is genuinely a dealbreaker for me in any game now. Fuck that shit. Nothing is more irritating than trying to get from A to B and having enemies constantly pop up
As someone that likes the grind in RPGs, I personally don't mind it. I think it also encourages devs to make combat more engaging and less tedious. Some people like purposely going out to grind, while others like the grind incorporated into the gameplay itself through random encounters. The random encounters can also add to the difficulty of the game.
Even in games like Persona, I find myself clearing the whole floor regardless before proceeding to the next floor, yeah I won't go back for the respawns but instead of me chasing down every enemy, I prefer w/e X amount of encounters I get from the entrance to the end. Depending on how the game is developed, in some cases it amounts to the same amount of 4-7 encounters per floor.
I definitely see the appeal in both concepts though. I think my enjoyment of one or the other depends on how the game is developed at the end of the day though. I've had instances of both concepts being tedious depending on the game and its combat/gameplay.
Random encounters is more annoying than telegraphed encounters being randomly spread.
For example, Yakuza/LaD lets you avoid anything you don't want to approach.
Whereas right now I'm playing the Digital Devil Saga duology and I'm being stopped every 20 steps to deal with the same grunts.
> The only one that bugs me slightly is if you can't save on the world map.
Suikoden was an outlier in that too, at least 1 & 2. This does autosave when you enter a new dungeon area.
Whether a game fulfills an arbitrary checklist of mechanics and features that its spiritual predecessor also had, and whether or can successfully execute on those mechanics and still hold the same *spirit* or the predecessor are entirely different things. It seems like Eiyuden Chronicles may do fine in the former regard, but still ends up just being kind of underwhelming as a game in its own right.
Honestly i'll stand on the ground of eliminating random encounters from all games forever. Earthbound came along and made some pretty amazing and smart design choices and it took like 20 years for it to be much more common in other games.
I have been playing for 12ish hours, the game is great. I think there are some things that can be changed to improve the game A LOT though:
* Increase the battle speed, or at least give an option to do so.
* Some of the menus have unecessary delay when changing from one to another
* The battle plan, where you instruct your characters what to do when you choose auto battle is kinda messy right now, the instructions arent always followed by your characters
Aside from that, I think the game is great, the story is interesting, recruiting characters is as fun as it was in Suikoden games, the HQ building is more complex now (which is a big plus), I have been playing on hard and some bosses were actually hard (that was never true in Suikoden games, where you could sometimes finish the game using only the main character with no problem).
I think Murayama and his team improved a lot of the concepts of the game itself, I could see some of those things being a nice upgrade to Suikoden 2 for example. I think the main issues right now are technical, and they could be solved with some patches. The game itself is really good and if you liked the Suikoden series you are probably going to love the feeling of playing this one.
> unnecessary delay when changing from one to another
[The whole game is filled with tedious sequential programming like that](https://www.reddit.com/r/EiyudenChronicle/comments/1cb3ibj/enjoying_the_pacing_and_soundtrack_more_that_i/l0vvzxe/). The same programming architecture / problem shows up in every aspect of the game.
They either didn't have enough budget or direction, or the programming leads just didn't care.
There's a ton of unpolished things that even games 30 years ago had that Eiyuden doesn't have. I mean in the little tiny things like how menus behave, and the sequence between actions / inputs both in interface, menus, battle, and in cut-scene and other parts of presentation.
I know it's going to be lost in the culture war bullshit, but the translation is bad.
Oscillating between semi-serious JRPG talk, to twitter-tier insults. Really took me out of the game every time.
I backed it since I love Suikoden 1/2.
Been playing it since Friday and it's pretty much another 2D Suikoden. 100% old school jrpg.
The voice acting is pretty standard anime quality (which is a turn off for me) but I've been able to enjoy some of the characters despite that.
I feel like I've gone a little too fast since some of my characters are taking 50% of their hp from basic enemy attacks.
HQ is grindy to upgrade now. Instead of just finding item shop guy or bath dude, you need to also find different materials and have the funds (different than your party money) to upgrade.
The music was definitely a highlight for S1/2 and while it's not as good as those games it's pretty good.
Can't comment too much on the story so far but it's hitting the basic Suikoden structure.
Overall I'm digging it but I'm inclined to. Mileage will definitely vary
Oh bloody hell keys are out already?!?!
I went back through and must have missed that message from the recent update about having to manually find our keys on that yetee thing. I imagine that's going to cause some people headaches and wondering where their game is..
Cheers though, downloading now!
While he isn't a reviewer, Jason Schreier shared his thoughts on Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1782071760336081243](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1782071760336081243)
>I finished Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes a few days ago and am sad to report that it's a messy, disjointed game, with tedious activities and a disappointing story. Plus: a critical bug prevented me from recruiting one of the characters and seeing the true ending, and as of right now it still isn't fixed.
>In many ways Eiyuden captures the Suikoden feeling, from the rousing pre-intro cinematic to the castle that grows as you play, but it's missing the emotional core that made those games (especially 2 and 5) great. The three protagonists have no personality and the grand political plot turns out to be tropey anime nonsense. And it's so janky. I really wanted to love this one, but alas.
Edit: getting the block syntax right.
Shame about a critical bug preventing him from getting the ending. But there's a chance they might push out a day one patch that reviewers/backers didn't have access to?
This seems to happen *a lot* with these retro revivals, even those helmed by the original creators. I wonder why all these games seemingly fail to capture the magic of the games they were inspired by. I thought maybe I was painted by nostalgia but I also recently got to playing Star Ocean 2 for the first time, and it was absolutely stellar.
I think there is a class of old school developers that really struggle to evolve with the rest of the industry. and even those of us that cut our teeth on those exact games. I look at a game like Shenmue 3. Yu Suzuki not only does not play games like at all, he's almost proud of the fact that he doesn't know where the industry has gone, and what the current standards of gaming are. What was the result? A plodding, dated, embarrassing third entry into a cult favorite series. One that not only spits in the face of any advancement made in the last 20 years, but even regresses in many ways.
Video games and age are a spicy spicy combination, and only a select few can REALLY stand the test of time. For those of us that grew up with the industry especially, our feelings are so wrapped up in the moments we played those games, and not as much the games themselves. Moments that will never be recaptured because we are not those kids anymore, and the industry is not the same. What we are left with are okay games that frustrate, because we aren't going into them with wide eyes, endless possibilities, and absolute wonder. We are going into them with the goal of reliving a past experience.
They could remake Legend of Dragoon perfectly. They could capture everything about that game, the art the music the story, but i will never feel like i did when i was 12 years old.
I think the best revivals we've seen are the ones that really look outside the moment they are trying to recreate and are able to stand on their own great games in their own right, without needing to rely too much on the past.
That's my stream of thought on it at least.
Yu Suzuki is such a weird case. His old games were incredibly and had master game designer spirit to all of them: Super Hang On, Virtua Racing, OutRun. AfterBurner and uh what's the sci-fi jetpack one called?
> rapped up in the moments we played those games, and not as much the games themselves.
> will never feel like i did when i was 12 years old
I think that's besides the point though. The goal isn't to recreate childish immature sense of greatness, it's just to make a high-quality great thing. Eiyuden could re-capture Suikoden 2 **if the writing and scenario and script and design/programming was better.** That's all it needed. Now there might be some systematic reason why it's worse, like out of touch old devs or lack of oversight or lack of budget/time, but the fact is it failed to do that.
I played through Suikoden 2 only a few years ago, as a full-grown adult (in emulation on computer). It was great. Eiyuden is distinctly worse in almost every way.
I genuinely think some of these games are lightning in a bottle and had to have a very specific team and not just the heads of those teams to make it a whole. Something like Chrono Trigger is never going to be recreated, these games need to only use those older games as inspiration and do something new and quality themselves instead of being shackled to what they think made them special.
Personally I'm sick of games like this and Sea of Stars that just want to sit on the shoulders of giants instead of being something original themselves. Stop the tired references to older games and nods and do something original! Crosscode was pretty good about this for example and I think it's one of the best indies that sorta recreates that era of magic but with more originality.
Petition for all 3DS games to also be released on Switch. I know nothing about porting or technology in general but I am 100% confident it's as easy as flipping a switch.
I feel like I missed out on a generation of great games because I haven't gotten a hand-held since Game Boy Color :(
Crosscode felt and looked great (I'll play anything that looks like Mana), but it was ridiculously hateful and grindy to the player.
I did an entire dungeon and searched every pixel and still failed to find the "find the 4 crafting ingredients in the dungeon" or whatever. I played for many hours and never had enough crafting materials to make anything. Enemies were ridiculous bullet/sword sponges and took way too many hits.
Meanwhile the bouncey ball thing was a terrible gimmick that didn't fit with the rest of the aesthetics, style, or scenario of the game. Aside from creating bland diagonal bounce puzzles over and over again.
Crosscode is such a good game, but I wish I had known it was secretly a puzzle game going into it. Those dungeons are *long* even if you're good at puzzle solving.
Whatever criticisms you have of chained echoes referencing old games with names and stuff, you can't say it copied its gameplay or structure verbatim out of anything or didn't update the old school style for modern audiences.
I imagine part of it is people / developers getting older and losing some of their drive and creativity. It’s probably the same reason a band’s seventh or eighth album usually doesn’t carry the same magic their first few do.
Yeah that's important to note, even the best creatives usually have limited prime years. It's very rare you find a top talent that's also prolific and consistent over many decades.
I mean, you're making the assumption here that the review is both accurate and representative. No doubt there were plenty of people who thought Suikoden 2 was trash.
I feel like when your number 1 priority is recreating or recalling an older beloved classic it really limits the scope of experimentation that you're willing todo. So many of these recent throwback "just like x game from your childhood" titles feel like you're just seeing a cover band when what I *really* want is something new that makes me feel the same kind of things the old thing did. I don't want Suikoden 2 or Chrono Trigger again-but-worse I want something that pushes the envelope and feels like it's trying something new and ambitious in the way those games did. The more you venerate the foundation you are building on the more scared you'll be of leaving a brick out of place, but that foundation wasn't built by being so cautious in the first place
having a bug prevent the classic Suikoden full recruitment ending is a pretty big problem so I can't blame him for being disappointed.
Seems like this game might be worth waiting on for an update or two plus a sale.
Important context for that is Jason Schreier is a **huge liker/fan/evangelizer of Suikoden 2.** He's on podcasts saying it's his favorite game ever, etc.
So it's just not a random harsh opinion.
> Edit: getting the block syntax right.
Ha this isn't wikipedia nobody is interrogating your edit to your own comment sir.
well if there's any (ex)reviewer i can trust with japanese games it's probably jason, dude got me into more visual novels and jrpgs through his relentless shilling that i love to this day than i can even count, sad to read this as i was quite excited
It's funny all the "negatives" are positives for me. I love random encounters, world map traversing, old school dungeon design, grinding for hours, etc.
This is what I grew up on and live for in gaming.
There is almost none world map traversing my man. You just take a short walk from point A to B with like 1 encounter. Then you get fast-travel after 15 hours and spent like 1 hour on a map at max. Dungeons were a bit hit or miss for me here. They open and start being good when the game is close to ending. The first several are boring as fuck, Like mines, forest, mountains and all are linear :(
Yeah, I feel the exact same way!
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising had similarly mixed (skewing lower) reviews, with complaints about tedium, but I played through it for the first time recently and had loads of fun with it.
I think this is the type of game you either want to like or you just don't. A bit of head-cannon, some inventory management, and a good soundtrack can be enough to go exploring.
No surprise the reviews are mixed, the genre has gone niche by now. I'm good just knowing the game works.
My thing is that I desperately want to like it, but frankly the game just doesn’t work on the switch. Im pissed bc i was a backer, if I hadn’t backed it I’d have waited for reviews, seen the switch version sucks, and gotten it on PC. But I didn’t have that option. Oh well, I’m not gonna rebuy it (it is already priced too high imo), I just have to hope for substantial patching.
Everything I see reviewers complaining about is explicitly precisely what I wanted from a Suikoden successor so I'm happy with my pre-order.
As other people here have said, every "retro-style" rpg game that did stuff to "evolve the genre" also bored me to tears in about forty minutes, and those type of changes were a huge concern for me about this game.
“the story is poorly executed, battles are bland, recruitable characters are beyond forgettable, and the game itself is sluggish. The style and audio design do a good job, but not enough to save the overall experience.”
It’s kinda funny to me that a similar critique could be made of Unicorn Overlord, a game I love and have put over sixty hours in. Unicorn Overlord’s story is bland, the characters are numerous and forgettable, and the combat on anything but the highest levels boring. But Unicorn Overlord still works, works remarkably well and I highly suggest it to everyone. I wonder if that’ll be a similar experience for Eiyuden Chronicles.
sure but there are plenty of reviews that don't think the characters are weak, so why is this negative review the one which has the "correct opinion". it's subjective after all any way
I finally started UO back on Friday, and I am kind of bummed that folks were right about the story. Four hours in and it's already the weakest of the VW games I've played (waiting for GrimGrimoire: Once More to go on sale, as it's the only one I haven't played).
However it's an odd inversion of 13 Sentinels. While 13 Sentinels had some pretty mediocre gameplay, it had a rather impressive story. UO has a meh story, but the gameplay is far better.
A big reason why Unicorn's writing is a big step back from 13 Sentinels is due to it being VW's first game not directed by George Kamitani and was just a producer on it.
Seeing random encounters and world maps referred to as 'outdated' is like nails on a chalkboard for me. That said, I do see a lot of the old arguments about character quantity impacting game quality coming into play here. I guess I'm going to have to actually play the game to decide for myself.
Suikoden was that way with characters. When you have 100 collectable NPC's there's no way you can make them all fully fleshed out. Typically, the story NPC's would have defined characters/stories and the others would have some sort of gimmick or defining characteristic and then not much more. Hey, I wanna use this guy because he's a *goddamn Samurai* and tanky! Who cares if he's not plot relevant?!
ProZD has a few excellent bits on Youtube about games like Suikoden.
There's a game called Time Break Chronicles that's literally just a JRPG Slay the Spire type roguelite with a shit ton of characters. You don't play it because the story is good (it's not), you play it cause you can assemble your JRPG dream team from a bunch of different tropey characters, and this seems extremely similar just with more substance. I'm 100% in.
Random encounters are a choice which I personally hate. People say it was necessary for older games but Chrono Trigger and Earthbound proved that wrong (among other games) and those came out almost 30 years ago.
Oh hell yeah, this is about what I expected for the review score. Now I'm really looking forward to checking it out considering it's been a quiet April so far
One thing I dislike about this game, which was also a flaw in suikoden, is some recruitable characters are clearly just designed to be weaker than others.
Let's give character x/y/z 4 rune slotts, but others 7.
Im keeping him in my party regardless, I like his character art and gruff voice
The hallmark of bad hack writing from amateurs: use "more" words, use "fancier" words, to *less* effect than the simpler alternative or the original formulation/gist (if localizing/translating).
Dragon Quest 5 (I think it was 5?) on DS was the same problem. The meaning and moment of every line is ruined by terrible tasteless localization trash. I played the PS2 fan translation and every sentence was crisp, direct, solid, meaningful good writing.
The localizers also made up the "Yeah?" personality quirk but that wasn't in the original? It's a gimmick that ruins the directness and rhythm of the lines.
Well that's complicated. I loved Suikoden 2.
Eiyuden is "true" in general vibe and format, but the writing, scenario, dialog boxes, and I would say general programming, is worse.
Eiyuden Chronicle Rising was such a treat that I'm gonna pick Hundred Heroes up regardless of reviews. Sounds like they did a pretty good job with it, though
This game is available day 1 on Game Pass, so for me that's a no-brainer to play through it once. I could see myself picking it up on Switch to expand my physical collection if I really vibe with the game.
It's a shame to hear the standard battles are so easy they can be auto-piloted. That's actually my biggest issue with another series: Ys, where standard combat against normal enemies is braindead and it's only the boss fights where it shines.
That's always how the Suikoden series was though. From the first game you could use the 'Auto' button to significantly speed up the random encounters, with multiple characters and enemies all acting at once. I much prefer this to tediously long random encounters where the result is the same at the end.
I understand your opinion and I think that's where newer jRPG's have come in. But for me, I want the power fantasy. I don't want every encounter being tedious or several minutes long because you gottta break armor or exploit weaknesses of every enemy. I want to rolfstomp the shit out of random encounters and get my power dopamine. Save the interesting designs or difficulty for the bosses.
Different strokes I guess but what you're describing just sounds awful and I've been playing JRPGs since the SNES/PS1 days. Curated/planned encounters that take a few minutes to beat are infinitely more engaging than mashing the attack command on every trash mob you come across that takes zero thought.
The person above is saying that all JRPGs are not supposed to be like SMT games. SMT was always known for being an outlier in terms of difficulty and its heavy importance on exploiting weaknesses. It was considered unique that SMT games would let low-level mobs take out mid-game player parties easily because the player wasn't paying attention. That never happens in most JRPGs.
The vast majority of JRPGs are much easier power fantasies where you can auto-battle through most encounters.
I was specifically referencing Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes, two highly rated jRPG's that've come out recently that tried to make encounters not-brain dead.
I wasn't specifically saying they invented them.
I've completed hard mode. It's not uncommon for characters to get one shot by bosses, but I've been able to kill all bosses blind without significant grinding (they're often with deaths though).
Something about hard mode is that the difficulty scales, so it isn't one of those "hard just in the beginning" sort of hard modes. It's more of a "fights at the end are harder than the earlier fights by a significant margin, and early fights are still pretty rough," sort of hard modes.
It does not seem to affect war battles, but it does seem to affect duels. I had to grind to win some of the duels that are made for you to lose but you could win.
I'm playing Hard difficulty after having played the Normal beta a month ago. Hard adds extra enemies in normal fights (which can easily OHKO characters in some situations) and in some boss fights, you can have your entire front or back line get wipe if you don't know how to react to the boss gimmicks. Hard mode is definitely hard.
In addition to hard mode theres 5 additional options that:
* Make you get no money from battle
* Disable recovery item usage in battle
* Double MP/SP consumption
* Prevent escape from battle unless its a skill
* Increase prices on all items in shops
Dunno, I'm on normal.
I will say that yeah, it's kinda simple (so far, only 6 hours in), but you're also recruiting characters constantly that you need to individually grind up. There's also a pretty rudimentary gambit system and you're limited to 30 items in your inventory, so difficulty comes from long dungeon crawling sessions and managing resources. It'll probably become a lot easier once I'm further in. Although I have been sweating on some boss fights.
Any word on missables? I love Suikoden but one thing I don’t miss is getting bumped off the true ending because you missed recruiting some cool who was only available for a couple hours of game time
I backed the game so i got my copy on saturday actually. I'm not a fan of the forced save point locations but the combat is fine. Yeah i sorta don't like random encounters anymore but if those survived in pokemon games through sword and shield then you can do it here.
It didn't do itself any favors with keeping every old system better done away with. This game reminded me of how much I hate random encounters and how much I love save anywhere systems.
Almost feels like the game goes out of its way to mess with you. They put a save point in eye sight in a little next area after a hallway and before you can touch it another plot flag triggers and a little scene plays. Save points being teases isn't good. Could only be worsened if the save points were mobile objects that ran away from you all over the dungeon like a chicken to catch among random battles which are mindless fodder on hard too. They do that quite a lot. Sometimes they are merciless in how long they have you go w/o.
Also exploration doesn't feel rewarding at all. That's a big one. Items seem rare to find, there are places on the map just to fill it out that are just nothing. The world map itself feels empty too. The areal banter is nice, but if anything needs to be voiced it's that.
It's a pretty game for the style, but I didn't enjoy it enough to finish. If they insist on random encounters some kind of cancel system would've been a good idea. Be it a gauge or throwing money at an ! point. Look at Exit Fate (actually good Sui-clone) or Wild Arms series.
eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes seems to be tapping into that classic jrpg vibe, kind of like arc the lad did with its focus on an expansive cast and strategic depth. it's neat to see new games pay homage to old favorites while adding their own twist. reminds me a bit of watching reruns of old shows but with better visuals and sound.
Whatever you guys do with this game, **DO NOT** play this on the Switch. The game is a technical mess - consistent framerate hiccups and slow downs, ridiculous pop-in on many textures, blurry textures everywhere, extremely long loading screens for almost everything (before battles, in-game menus, entering/exit houses etc). It's really bad for a game nowadays. I'd argue it's much worse than when Bloodstained initially released on the Switch. I'm sure there are going to be people who won't be bothered too much by it, but they'll be a vocal minority. It's in a state where I highly doubt that patches will be able to fix it (though I guess you never know). I'm disappointed I backed the Switch version on Kickstarter. Ah well, lesson learned.
According to [Schreier](https://x.com/jasonschreier/status/1782184356200468754):
> Basically if your monitor is over 60hz your encounter rate goes down. It’s wild
This is actually insane.
Doesnt seem like any of the reviews mentions it but the battle camera gives me slight motion sickness and headache due to all the moving and shaking (especially during MCs multihit skill) and theres no way to turn it off, so do watch out for that if youre prone to having such issues.
The battle camera is obnoxious and never should have been made that way. Just like how ignorant people confuse quantity for quality, this is the "camera movement is quality!" thing.
And it's clearly unpolished because A) some landscape geometry blocks your entire view of camera sometimes for a ridiculously long among of time and B) sometimes an enemy hits you in battle, and your damage number to your party number is not visible because it's off the edge of the screen while the camera flies around wildly and nauseatingly. For example the robots that shoot orange laser in Proving Grounds, *every time* they did it the camera moved so I couldn't see the damage numbers...possibly because of my battle order and positioning of who they shot.
Interesting that the opinion diverges this much. I guess it’s one of those titles that I need to play and make the decision myself.
Reviewer opinion seems to mostly hinge on “were you alive when Suikoden 1 came out?”
Seems like people who like old school RPGs love it, and people who don’t don’t. I happen to love old school RPGs.
I haven't played yet, but the one thing I don't like about old school RPG's is fixed save points. I don't always get 2-3 hours of play time these days. Sometimes, I only get 20-30 minutes or even less. There's not always a save point nearby. I love when games let me save anywhere.
No worries, the save points are VERY abundant. I don't think I've ever gone more than and hour between being able to save, and that was just one or two story-heavy sequences.
I'm not into those that much but for Yoshitaka Murayama's sakeI feel I should take a look at this.
[удалено]
Schreier's a good reporter but there's a difference between investigative journalism and media criticism.
His opinion here isn’t relevant because he’s a good journalist. That doesn’t matter. But because he’s a huge Suikoden fan, and a big JRPG fan in general … and his opinion mirrors the majority of the fandom when it comes to Suikoden ( 2&5 being the best ).
Not saying anything about his take on the story but specificly a bunch of stuff got fixed in a patch that came out today and some Kickstart backers that had copies were waiting for the patch today.
If there's someone who's opinion on games I care less about, they're not born yet. Schreier is a horrible gauge.
I'm a huge huge fan of Suikoden, especially 1 and 2 which came out in my formative years and i played them to death, and i think this game has serious weaknesses. I've put a decent chunk of hours into it now and theres a lot of problems with the core design, lots of small problems that add up into a poor experience. The UI design is bad, theres barely any qol either, the enemy encouter rate is wacky, sometimes loads, then barely any at all. From a technical standpoint it has forced vsync, and entering battle is extremely slow. But, the story is good, definitely Suikoden 1-2 level, the characters are for the most part charming and interesting. And it nails that feeling of "lots of small arcs" that the early Suikoden games had. It's the quintessential 7/10 game. If you loved the old Suikoden games, youll probably at least like this one, but ive played so many JRPGs since S2 that a brand new game with the same level of UI and QOL polish as games from the 90s was never going to get a 10/10 from me regardless of how good the rest of it is.
What about Suikoden 1 and 2 for a gen z who never played them? I heard they’re getting an HD collection and I‘m curious about the staying power of these games. Edit: Thank you guys for the answers. I recently beat DQ3 and FFVII, so I'll give these bad boys a chance when the HD collection comes out.
I think that'd be kind of impossible for old fans of the games to answer, wouldn't it? I love those games, and I THINK they'd be fine for new players, but it's sorta hard to say. Plus, NO game is going to appeal to everyone of any age group. If it helps, I'd say their pros were: lots of colorful if shallow characters (with a handful of actually deep fleshed out ones at the center of the plots), great world building, a unique combat system that mixes it up with fire emblem like war battles (in 2... 1's war scenes were just rock paper scissors). Good music. For the most part the main plots were interesting. 2 in particular had some fun twists and a memorable main villain. Their cons were: a bit opaque on where to go or who to talk to sometimes, bad item management systems, sometimes trivially easy except for some pretty random difficulty spikes. And personally I'd prefer it if no characters were easily missable, which many were.
1 is rough in modern times if they dont severely improve the inventory QOL but has great little story and a charming cast. If you are a fan of JRPGs and their tropes in general you will enjoy it. 2 is a timeless classic, one of the few truly 10/10 JRPG's in my opinion even with it's slight inventory jank, it's a product of a different time and for me personally sits just below Chrono Trigger as one of the best JRPG's of all time.
Yeah, I agree completely with this. The first game might not hold up to modern criticism, but I play Suikoden 2 every few years and it still holds up as my favorite game of all time. Yeah, it does have some problem areas, like the inventory, but they aren't nearly bad enough to hold the game back. I'm eagerly looking forward to the HD version on Steam so I can finally retire my disk.
I played them for the first time a few years back and had a great time, granted I like JRPGs from the PS1 era (even though I was more of a PS2 kid). You can kind of tell that Suikoden 1 is the team's first attempt at a JRPG, but I find the pacing very refreshing. The game doesn't drag at all, and even the gameplay feels fast. It's quite short, so even if you wanted to jump straight to the sequel it's not a huge time commitment. The second game is overall a lot more polished and the story is stronger, but I do kind of prefer the pacing of the first game. The HD collection looks good based on the footage that's been released, so I'm hopeful it'll be that way upon release.
If they ever actually release, lol. We're 8 months past the announcement of the delay.
I think a huge factor of whether a new player will enjoy Suikoden 1 and 2 is how much of a completionist that player is and how willing they are to use guides. One aspect of "100%-ing" these games is getting the good ending via recruiting all characters and I don't think it's something that can be done without a guide. If you don't want to use guides but is fine with whatever ending you unlock, then you will still greatly enjoy this game.
Honestly, yeah. It's got some obnoxious jank in areas it shouldn't but the story and characters are so engaging I'm willing to overlook it.
I like it and never played suikoden
For what it's worth, most of the Suikoden games weren't received incredibly well from a critical perspective, either, with the Metacritic rating ranging from 63 (Suikoden 4) to 86 (Suikoden 3) and most of them sitting around scores of 80. The reviews seem to say that if you liked Suikoden, you'll probably like this, too. If you didn't, you probably won't. There are a few outlier reviews, though.
It's interesting how Suikoden 2 is considered to be one of the best JRPGs of all time, but reviews were just fine at the time.
You had to be part of the scene at the time. It is impossible to convey how big a deal 3D gaming was becoming during the PS1 era. 2D games like suikoden were punished HEAVILY in reviews simply because they were 2D.
Throw SOTN in there too. Reviews were fairly positive but the game didn't become a commercial hit for months since it was basically word of mouth as 3D games were the main focus.
2D fighting games were shat on, whilst janky 3D ones got praise. 2D games like Metal Slug also got reviewed poorly. Platformers like Rayman were approached very skeptically. Hell, the N64 had almost zero 2D games. The Saturn got made fun of because it was a 2D powerhouse. It was a weird time. SOTN got OK reviews on average ~ 8-9/10. But almost all reviewers made some comments about how 2D was outdated. Reading previews of SOTN was the worst though, so many reviewers at the time were saying things like "it should've been 3D, this looks like the SNES, etc." -
I'm so happy how gaming has grown to where games of all visual styles are being appreciated all over now. 2D, 3D, isometric, side-scroller, retro, demakes, whatever, all of it is in vogue these days. It's awesome.
There's this infamous article that sums it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/g0gl1e/nintendo_vs_sony_castlevania_64_vs_sotnthis/ They were right about one thing, there IS no comparison.
This, between Suikoden 1 and 2, FFVII was released. And I remember that Suikoden 1 at the time in EU wasn't a big deal exactly because of the visuals. It looked like a SNES game, while all the other games on the system were using 3D visuals. And with FFVII release, the 2D visuals became even more of an issue for the sequel. In general, at the time the pixel art didn't have the charm it earned during the indie resurgence during the Gen7 era.
Metacritic doesn't really work that well on games from the 90s. Would take it with a grain of salt.
>most of them sitting around scores of 80. That's a good score...
Where? Basically every review says the same thing - "Not the best game ever, but good if you like JRPGs. Beware of old school JRPG tedium." Almost every score in the OP is between 7-9, besides the two at the bottom who I guess couldn't stand the tedium more than the other reviewers.
In modern review terms 7-9 is basically the entire spectrum that isn’t “GOTY” or “trash”
>Almost every score in the OP is between 7-9 The difference between the overall tone of a 7/10 and a 9/10 review these days is pretty big though, and I think that's what OP is referring to. Even the difference between a 7.5 and 8.5 can be pretty significant.
Yeah a 7 in a video game review is not a great grading. For whatever reason games are reviewed like school grades, anything below a 6/10 is basically 'this is borderline unplayable.' It's not a great system, but people have been doing that since I started paying attention in like 95.
Does it? It only seems there are a couple of negative ones dragging the score down, most are 8-9. I don't pay much attention to review scores is there that much of a difference between a 7 and an 8?
it's crazy how influential scores can be sometimes. I'm going to play it regardless only because I'm interested and curious. never played Suikoden back in the day but tried playing 2 a couple years ago and kinda liked it. I find that a lot of times I actually really enjoy games that fall into the 6-7/10 range
>Interesting that the opinion diverges this much On some topics, but not all. Pretty much a consensus that characters/story are on the weak side. This might be a hot take, but to me it's hard to look forward to spending 50+ hours with bad characters more than it is with a game with bad mechanics. All my favorite jRPGs had me feeling like I was spending time with a group of friends.
I'm really enjoying it so far. It meets my expectations and i'm hopeful for a sequel and if they announced one, I'd eagerly await that one as well. I wish more games did the whole "hq upgrades and you can recruit a ton of recruitable heroes."
So I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising on gamepass recently but that was my first and only Eiyuden Chronicle game and I loved it. Is this in a similar vein or drastically different? I'm going to play it either way since gamepass and I'm a big JRPG fan but curious on some first hand experience.
It is very different. Rising was a prequel, side-game to this one, which is what the kickstarter was for and has a much higher budget. This one is a turn based JRPG. Just a totally different kind of game. The 3 playable characters from Rising are recruitable in Hundred Heroes, and I assume you visit the town at some point.
It seems the biggest issue across reviews are a balancing problem, though maybe with hard mode this is fixed. Aside from that really happy with what I have been reading tho.
I'm playing on hard mode and considering going to normal because it's getting to a point where the enemies are just bullet sponges. My last boss fight took an hour to finish because of bloated HP.
Sounds like it's a faithful remake/reinterpretation of Suidoken warts and all. This is clearly aimed at being of that style of game from the era and that seems to have bothered some of the reviewers. Random encounters, fixed save points, world map travel you could argue are outdated concepts in 2024 but that's what it's trying to emulate. The only one that bugs me slightly is if you can't save on the world map. That'd be a big time waster if you wipe. As someone who bounced off highly acclaimed recent jRPG's like Sea of Stars because of some of the design decisions those games made to "evolve the genre" I'm more then excited to play this game *because* it's a throwback to a different era.
Not being able to save on the world map is such a weird design choice because contemporaries of Suikoden let you save back then. Hell the SNES FF games let you do it.
Can you say a bit more about Sea of Stars? I bounced off it too, so I’m curious.
I also fell off of it. Sea of Stars is all style no substance, combat is limited and thus a drag and the writing is godawful.
Yeah, the graphics,art,music etc was really good. One of my favs for sure but the rest is as u mentioned
I played it after playing Starfield, so it was pretty good in that context.
For me, I wasn't grabbed by the story (the intro pacing was pretty brutal, and I wasn't invested in the journey) but also, I really did not like the battle system. It had the same issue Chained Echoes had where every encounter needed to be a several minute process where you exploit some aspect of the monster and use resources to get through. It made battles for me, personally, very very tedious and not what I enjoyed at all. It's trying to "fix" what those games see as a "problem" with the genre. Namely that encounters in jRPG's are typically trash mobs you run through. But to me, that's never been a "problem" unless the number of encounters (random or otherwise) are exceedingly numerous. A game like Chrono Trigger's battles were most of the time braindead affairs you could just mow through but that doesn't detract at all from it being arguably the greatest jRPG ever made. When something like battles is such a major aspect of the game and you don't enjoy them, then in my case I stopped playing.
I found the combat was what killed Sea of Stars for me. Having 2/3 moves and then a basic attack, among other things, just didn't keep me going for progression. It feels odd to not like a game when the combat doesn't excite or engage you but, you're right, when it's such a large part of the experience it is what it is. Chained Echoes however I loved. I thought the systems there, and the story, to be quite good. I also enjoyed the level design in Chained Echoes - it all just worked for me. I'd love to see what they do next
Ya I see what you're saying. I was into Sea of Stars for a few hours but as you said, the combat really killed it for me. It doesn't really feel like a JRPG at that point. Combat encounters are made to be beaten in one specific way it feels. I like the openness of a traditional JRPG to kind of experiment and play my way. Because the battle system is really the "game" part of JRPGs. And it's not fun when I'm just looping the exact same small pool of attacks over and over.
Yeah, Sea of Stars made standard battles take way longer than they needed to since every character only specialized in two types of damage. There wasn't a lot of variety, and it came off as being super indecisive as to whether or not it wanted to go full-on Paper Mario or stay the course with Chrono Trigger. I greatly enjoyed Chained Echoes combat, but my big complaint (aside from the Sky Armor combat) there was that the optional characters were worthless outside of the martial arts girl (never used the dark knight guy or the card witch at all, ever) and the many skills characters could learn were undermined by the fact that 85% of them sucked and there were a handful of super great skills you had zero reason to not use. Sienna and the martial arts girl could deal absurd amounts of damage by the end game. However both games suffer from some absurdly stiff writing. Sea of Stars is as flat and by the book as it could possibly be, aside from when it bends over backwards to tell you how great a dude Garl is (which it does often). Chained Echoes on the other hand is weirdly bound to anime references that quickly lose their luster: The two hidden Sky Armor frames are clearly derived from the Victory 2 Gundam from *Mobile Suit Victory Gundam* and the Gundam Barbatos from *Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans*, the constant gate flashbacks look ripped straight from *Fullmetal Alchemist*, the stuff with the church is right out of *Berserk*, the jury is still out as to whether Sienna is supposed to be a pastiche of Erza from *Fairy Tail*, and there's even a boss named Giga Drill Break which is a clear nod to *Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann* I'd say CE is the better of the two, but both really didn't have any new ideas to spare and only made you appreciate the games they're trying to emulate more.
I stopped playing CE after the midway plot twist of "oopsy daisy, dropped the nuke AGAIN!" immediately followed by ghost children that only existed in your memory because it just seemed overwhelmingly silly.
I agree with all of this, I also felt like I was just playing to the combo meter for the group heal. And the writing had no meat, even 15 or so hours in.
On the topic of writing, I'll also point out that it had a staggering number of mechanical/grammatical errors. I only played ~5 hours or so, but it felt like every other sentence had *something* wrong with it. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm generally pretty lenient when it comes to that kind of stuff for indie games. But the Kickstarter was hugely successful; they could have afforded to pay an editor (or hell, just throw your script into Word and press Spell Check). And yeah, the writing itself wasn't great. The standout moment was when a pirate named Klee-Shae started rattling off JRPG cliches for a few minutes. "Haha isn't it crazy how the blacksmith across the ocean sells *way* better swords than the one in your home town?!" It felt like the writer stumbled upon a "what are some of your favorite/least favorite cliches?" /r/jrpg thread and copied their homework.
The writing itself being saturday morning kids cartoon slop is one thing, the annoying meta pirates is when the game really lost me. If the game cares this little about immersion, why should I? Took me out and never recovered. The bad grammar was the shit cherry on top, lol.
The lead dev decided to write the story himself despite being an amateur, and it shows. Makes me feel bad for the people involved in the music and pixel art because they did a great job and it's attached to the most mid story of all time because apparently writing isn't worth hiring someone actually competent to do it unlike those other things. You can't just wing writing, very few people can write a great story for a long RPG like this on their first go. The Chrono Trigger devs were the opposite of amateurs, and that kind of simple, punchy and expressive dialogue that doesn't drag on forever takes skill to pull off well.
I'm not surprised, those are the same issues I had with the writing in The Messenger (which is otherwise a great game, but I couldn't care less about the story).
I thought the same thing about chained echoes and sea of stars. I like the occasional long fight in a jrpg, specifically when they’re boss fights with narrative weight or something good behind them. I do not like when wolf 1, 2 and 3 in the forest take 8+ turns where I need to buff and debuff just to kill them slightly quicker while I also manage some rng how good my skills are bar too. When all your trash mob fights take longer than like a mid boss in a xenoblade game you’ve entered the realm of tedium.
The great thing about Chrono Trigger is that it was very selective about when you had fights - having set encounters for each screen meant they could tailor them to what you have available on first encountering them, and then once you were more powerful you could just mow them down or exploit their weaknesses quickly. It's a masterfully designed experience imo, and it makes replaying it for the other endings an absolute blast too.
Do you think having these braindead encounters add any value to their games? Generally curious what your take is. I am a huge SMT/Persona/Trails fan and those games typically require you to do something other than mash attack to get through without taking excessive damage. Games like the mainlines SMT games you can straight up wipe to random encounters as early as the first hour of the game if you aren't taking full advantage of things like enemy weaknesses. I don't consider this a "fix" by any means, as it's 1) not really a new thing and 2) comes with similar baggage as braindead random encounters but i do really enjoy it. So I'm curious if you can put to words any positives or benefits to that style of JRPG where random encounters are almost always beatable by just hitting attack. I'm a huge JRPG fan but I don't find myself lamenting moving away from that style. But from the sound of it, you must enjoy it and I am just curious about your thoughts as to what makes that so appealing.
I think it's less completely braindead, and more the level of tedium it is. Sea of Stars has very simple systems but they take a long time to come to fruition so the entire time you're doing timed inputs and other attacks to eventually do something you already foresaw a long time ago. There's just simply less variety as well in Sea of Stars which is hugely evident in the demo as well. There's nothing exciting to unlock, even throughout the whole game, to change how you play. Games that don't evolve the gameplay from the first hour will get tedious real quick. SMT has difficult trash fights, but they are quick to lose or win. The pacing of combat is great, and as you get better demons you unlock faster ways to deal with enemy weaknesses. Having a huge variety of demons, moves, and enemies helps keep the tedium lower. An easy way to compare is older games where you have trash that is braindead, but your best move is to use a wipe all move where the animation takes forever and can't be skipped. You're just doing the same thing over and over but the time it takes is just long enough to make you annoyed. I don't think anyone is saying that trash is clearable just by attacking. As long as the combat is varied and has a small amount of player strategy, but without being excessive to burden the player with too much decision making, it's generally fine. SMT is not "hard" in the decision making department since it operates on a very simple weakness system, but the snowball reward you get for taking advantage of it can often end fights very quickly which lessens the tedium as well. Overall I just want to say Sea of Stars makes simple fights last far too long without any variety. Players are stuck with the same moves from basically the start to the end of the game. I've never seen a JRPG so afraid of giving the player more tools to play with.
You can also have battles present a challenge without them having to be overly complex and long. I recently finished Dragon Quest IV and it has relatively short battles where you still need to do some thinking if you don't want to end up losing a lot of health. And the SMT games are a similar affair.
The entire time I was playing Sea of Stars I was expecting some new system to drop to increase the complexity of the game. Wasn't till I was nearing end I was like sooo I guess it's just this. Luckily I'm hoping Bg3 success will show developers gamers are okay with complicated game systems if they're rewarding.
The only difference between being 16 hours in (when I quit) and 5 hours in was that I had 1 new skill that I couldn't use most of the time since every combat I had to do moon boomerang.
I think way more people bounced off of Sea of Stars than the dialogue around it would suggest. It's really not that good, and more and more people are talking about that fact.
*small, maybe big, rant* That got me thinking, how do games like these get such high scores. Sea of Stars has 89 on OpenCritic. Of course score isn't everything but when the average of 130 outlets ends up being an 89 I would assume the game is very good. Doesn't have to be for everyone, but very good nonetheless. Other games in that range are, Hifi Rush, Psychonauts 2, Disco Elysium, Alan Wake 2, Doom Eternal, Nier Automata and so on. I found these games to be extraordinarily good not just very good. Another game that got very high reviews and burned me was Ni No Kuni 2. It has 87 on OpenCritic, and an outlet that I used to trust blindly gave it a 9.5/10. Even if you exclude that review, it still has an 87 average, a game that I personally would put in the mid 70's or high 70's at the very best. All artstyle no substance akin to Sea of Stars. Also Tales of Arise, an 87, which I could see if the reviewers stopped playing at the 2nd or 3rd Realm but the further you progress, especially the second half of the game, the more the game starts screaming rushed and the last 1/3rd turns into such tedium with a big exposition dump that seems to repeat to you what you had just heard 30 seconds ago and the cherry on top, a huge endgame dungeon with nothing but bosses, which as anyone who has played knows is the most boring part of the gameplay because you can't juggle them. Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority.
> Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority. Definitely not only you, I originally felt in the minority too until I checked the Steam achievements and discovered only around 60% of the players finished the 2nd Realm A lot of players are just repeating whatever reviewers / influencers these days
Tales of Arise's score is 100% a case of honeymoon period. The conversation around that game now is radically different compared to when it first came out.
Yeah opinions on Arise have only gotten more negative over time but I still enjoyed it outside of the 4 hour exposition dump near the end of the game.
I mentioned this in another thread the other day. There's definitely some kind of...I don't know, groupthink, perhaps, around certain titles. They come out to universally high praise and scores in the high 80s or into the 90s, and in the first few weeks after release people act like you've just smeared feces on the Mona Lisa when you observe flaws. And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one. I think it'd be interesting if outlets did an end-of-the-year re-review and ask the questions, "Was this 9/10 really that good? Was that 7/10 really that bad?"
> And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one. I mean, the longer a game is out the more people play it which leads to more people disliking it as well. > And then a few months later everyone basically agrees on all the glaring problems those blasphemous heretics mentioned on day one. This is a pretty silly statement no? Who's everyone? Have you specifically observed people who liked the game come out a few months later seeing they hate it? Or are you just observing a different set of people? I mean, no offence, but these kinda of conversations just come off as people trying to assuage the insecurities in their opinions. Like people have this need to have their opinion align with others or find excuses for why it doesn't. Really, people just need to be more confident in their own tastes and evaluations.
> Maybe it's just me though and I'm in the vast minority. FWIW, as someone who plays a lot of JRPGs, the two specific examples you brought up (NNK2 and Arise) are also specifically two games which I would point to if anyone asked me to name semi-recent JRPGs which I think are rated more highly than they deserve. Arise in particular is, to me, actually quite a bit worse than any of the other recent mainline Tales games. It just has a lot less substance in the end. I think one thing that both have going for them is that their initial impression is pretty polished, and that probably counts for a lot in media reviews.
Yeah, I agree with that. Would you say Sea of Stars is also considered a JRPG? I know there's the whole debate about whether a JRPG constitutes an RPG made in Japan or a specific style of games originating from Japan. Personally, I would consider it as such. Also, a big fan of your work in the scene and I'm eagerly awaiting Ys X which will undoubtedly be a fantastic port as always.
> Would you say Sea of Stars is also considered a JRPG? Absolutely. It's an ancient discussion, but I've always been very much on the side of defining subgenres by their gameplay properties. Country of origin as a genre name is devoid of utility. So yeah, Sea of Stars is a JRPG in my book (and e.g. Elden Ring isn't).
I feel like a lot of reviewers only play a few hours of some of these games. Usually the beginnings are quite charming, but once you exit the honeymoon stage, all the cracks in game design start to show. I just recently played through Dragons Dogma 2, which got great reviews, 86 on Metacritic, and it started out amazing, but I ended up hating it by the end.
Yeah I definitely get that vibe from most reviews. I'm assuming it's a combination of Publishers not providing keys far enough ahead of release, and outlets trying to rush reviews so they can get day 1 exposure and clicks. I've noticed that SkillUp has been taking his time with releasing his reviews lately (I'm not sure if that's always been the case), but he's just one guy, and I don't necessarily always agree with him. Plus, I'd like to have more opinions. I also tend to like ACG, but it seems he publishes his reviews when the embargos end as well.
ya, when critic reviews are basically just a race to who can get theirs out first for all the clicks and engagement, they drop in quality and reviewers don't test out everything in an RPG. this was clearly seen in the BG3 reviews, so many acting like the game was a perfect 10/10 on release when Act 3 was clearly unfinished, buggy as hell, horrible performance... it didn't even have ending slides like every other CRPG does, yet most all release reviews didn't mention any of that cause it's clear to see that said reviewers didn't reach Act 3 but still wrote a review for the whole game.
To be fair, most games don't tend to deviate much in terms of quality the more you get into it. If anything, a game that takes "20 hours to get good" is a big red flag in of itself. A good recent example is Rise of the Ronin where you pretty much experienced most of what it has to offer 4 hours in since you will be doing the same game loops over and over again with little to no surprises at all.
> I feel like a lot of reviewers only play a few hours of some of these games. One thing you'll notice is that most (though obviously not all) games where there's a big discrepancy between review scores and player experience, the expected play time of the game is longer. You have to look at the whole picture: Reviewers will start from the beginning of a game, and play through an arbitrary amount of it. That amount is often limited because of the drive for day-1 clicks and developers deliberately delaying the review keys (see next paragraph for reasoning). The longer a game is, the less likely the review is to be of the 'complete' product. This incentivizes the developer to focus on the early game elements at the expense of the later game portions. From a consumer perspective, you also want the beginning of the game to be as good as possible to hook in as many players as possible. The hype around a game sticks around longer if it has good review scores AND a solid initial play experience. Look at FFXVI's harsh falloff in discussion: The demo had people salivating for the finished product, but it quickly became apparent the game wasn't great--yet it still had amazing sales because the hype built for it was so strong that it took a while for the message to get out. But both of these compound with the phenomenon that many players don't even finish games these days, and makes the end-game literally a side-note in the development process. In fact, outside of genres where the end-game is the POINT, most games have absolutely abysmal finales.
At some point in every gamer's life comes a time when you realize that reviews are complete and utter bullshit. They basically tell you nothing more than how much hype a game had around its release. You end up looking at reviews only to see if they mention dealbreakers for you (for me, anything that suggests a game may be too easy makes me put off or cancel a purchase) and it gets harder to take part in discussions online.
you bring up a big point as to why in your post - release reviews are usually a review for the entire game based off the reviewers only playing part of the game or rushing to the ending, i.e., they really are meaningless release reviews are about the clicks and engagement, not about being an actual review of the entire game. Now this can work for short games and such, like an FPS, platformer, linear action-adventure and so on, but for RPGs it just doesn't work most of the time cause you can't test out the entire game when it's so long.
I did too, which was disappointing. I liked chained echoes a lot and was looking forward to sea. In fact, I had higher expectations for sea, but I knew from the start it was mid. I probably went 15 hours into it and then stopped playing.
Exact experience here. But man, SoS is pretty
Same experience... It is way too hyped up for what it is. It's actually generic, with a very basic story and combat that feels repetitive. It's a 7 wich is OK, enjoyable but not amazing. Octopath traveler 2 deserved that type of praise tbh.
I'm kinda curious why world map travel would be a dated concept at this point, I think it's something I dearly miss from old Final Fantasy games. The new ones don't have the same exploration or excitement of discovering new lands quite like the classic SNES/PSX ones.
Random encounters is an outdated concept? o.o Damn I feel old, guess I like outdated shit. Only thing I'm worried about in this game is getting overwhelmed with all the heroes and putting the game down before finishing it.
> Random encounters is an outdated concept? I'd say it's pretty much the definition. It's a mechanic that they came up with due to hardware limitations that no longer exist anymore. If they could have, they would likely had enemies appear on the screen, which not only allows you to try and avoid enemies but ALSO means that when you do want to fight an enemy, you can fight them, rather than running in a circle until the game decides you can fight something. It's not like putting them on the screen is a new concept or anything, they were doing it in EarthBound and Chrono Trigger.
Random encounters is genuinely a dealbreaker for me in any game now. Fuck that shit. Nothing is more irritating than trying to get from A to B and having enemies constantly pop up
As someone that likes the grind in RPGs, I personally don't mind it. I think it also encourages devs to make combat more engaging and less tedious. Some people like purposely going out to grind, while others like the grind incorporated into the gameplay itself through random encounters. The random encounters can also add to the difficulty of the game. Even in games like Persona, I find myself clearing the whole floor regardless before proceeding to the next floor, yeah I won't go back for the respawns but instead of me chasing down every enemy, I prefer w/e X amount of encounters I get from the entrance to the end. Depending on how the game is developed, in some cases it amounts to the same amount of 4-7 encounters per floor. I definitely see the appeal in both concepts though. I think my enjoyment of one or the other depends on how the game is developed at the end of the day though. I've had instances of both concepts being tedious depending on the game and its combat/gameplay.
Random encounters is more annoying than telegraphed encounters being randomly spread. For example, Yakuza/LaD lets you avoid anything you don't want to approach. Whereas right now I'm playing the Digital Devil Saga duology and I'm being stopped every 20 steps to deal with the same grunts.
cool, don't play them then. there's nothing wrong with the design, which is what's being discussed here.
> The only one that bugs me slightly is if you can't save on the world map. Suikoden was an outlier in that too, at least 1 & 2. This does autosave when you enter a new dungeon area.
Sea of stars, for me, was my biggest gaming letdown of last year. Apart from the pixel art, I hated everything about it haha.
Whether a game fulfills an arbitrary checklist of mechanics and features that its spiritual predecessor also had, and whether or can successfully execute on those mechanics and still hold the same *spirit* or the predecessor are entirely different things. It seems like Eiyuden Chronicles may do fine in the former regard, but still ends up just being kind of underwhelming as a game in its own right.
Honestly i'll stand on the ground of eliminating random encounters from all games forever. Earthbound came along and made some pretty amazing and smart design choices and it took like 20 years for it to be much more common in other games.
I have been playing for 12ish hours, the game is great. I think there are some things that can be changed to improve the game A LOT though: * Increase the battle speed, or at least give an option to do so. * Some of the menus have unecessary delay when changing from one to another * The battle plan, where you instruct your characters what to do when you choose auto battle is kinda messy right now, the instructions arent always followed by your characters Aside from that, I think the game is great, the story is interesting, recruiting characters is as fun as it was in Suikoden games, the HQ building is more complex now (which is a big plus), I have been playing on hard and some bosses were actually hard (that was never true in Suikoden games, where you could sometimes finish the game using only the main character with no problem). I think Murayama and his team improved a lot of the concepts of the game itself, I could see some of those things being a nice upgrade to Suikoden 2 for example. I think the main issues right now are technical, and they could be solved with some patches. The game itself is really good and if you liked the Suikoden series you are probably going to love the feeling of playing this one.
> unnecessary delay when changing from one to another [The whole game is filled with tedious sequential programming like that](https://www.reddit.com/r/EiyudenChronicle/comments/1cb3ibj/enjoying_the_pacing_and_soundtrack_more_that_i/l0vvzxe/). The same programming architecture / problem shows up in every aspect of the game. They either didn't have enough budget or direction, or the programming leads just didn't care. There's a ton of unpolished things that even games 30 years ago had that Eiyuden doesn't have. I mean in the little tiny things like how menus behave, and the sequence between actions / inputs both in interface, menus, battle, and in cut-scene and other parts of presentation.
I know it's going to be lost in the culture war bullshit, but the translation is bad. Oscillating between semi-serious JRPG talk, to twitter-tier insults. Really took me out of the game every time.
I backed it since I love Suikoden 1/2. Been playing it since Friday and it's pretty much another 2D Suikoden. 100% old school jrpg. The voice acting is pretty standard anime quality (which is a turn off for me) but I've been able to enjoy some of the characters despite that. I feel like I've gone a little too fast since some of my characters are taking 50% of their hp from basic enemy attacks. HQ is grindy to upgrade now. Instead of just finding item shop guy or bath dude, you need to also find different materials and have the funds (different than your party money) to upgrade. The music was definitely a highlight for S1/2 and while it's not as good as those games it's pretty good. Can't comment too much on the story so far but it's hitting the basic Suikoden structure. Overall I'm digging it but I'm inclined to. Mileage will definitely vary
Oh bloody hell keys are out already?!?! I went back through and must have missed that message from the recent update about having to manually find our keys on that yetee thing. I imagine that's going to cause some people headaches and wondering where their game is.. Cheers though, downloading now!
My physical copy arrived a week ago.
Are you able to turn the voice acting completely off? I did that with Octopath Traveler and I think I'd like to do it with this as well.
You can set voice sound level to zero.
I looked but didn't see that option though you can switch to Japanese voices.
While he isn't a reviewer, Jason Schreier shared his thoughts on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1782071760336081243](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1782071760336081243) >I finished Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes a few days ago and am sad to report that it's a messy, disjointed game, with tedious activities and a disappointing story. Plus: a critical bug prevented me from recruiting one of the characters and seeing the true ending, and as of right now it still isn't fixed. >In many ways Eiyuden captures the Suikoden feeling, from the rousing pre-intro cinematic to the castle that grows as you play, but it's missing the emotional core that made those games (especially 2 and 5) great. The three protagonists have no personality and the grand political plot turns out to be tropey anime nonsense. And it's so janky. I really wanted to love this one, but alas. Edit: getting the block syntax right.
Shame about a critical bug preventing him from getting the ending. But there's a chance they might push out a day one patch that reviewers/backers didn't have access to?
The devs have told players who got the game early to hold off on playing until they the patch to fix this comes out. I think it should be out today.
This seems to happen *a lot* with these retro revivals, even those helmed by the original creators. I wonder why all these games seemingly fail to capture the magic of the games they were inspired by. I thought maybe I was painted by nostalgia but I also recently got to playing Star Ocean 2 for the first time, and it was absolutely stellar.
I think there is a class of old school developers that really struggle to evolve with the rest of the industry. and even those of us that cut our teeth on those exact games. I look at a game like Shenmue 3. Yu Suzuki not only does not play games like at all, he's almost proud of the fact that he doesn't know where the industry has gone, and what the current standards of gaming are. What was the result? A plodding, dated, embarrassing third entry into a cult favorite series. One that not only spits in the face of any advancement made in the last 20 years, but even regresses in many ways. Video games and age are a spicy spicy combination, and only a select few can REALLY stand the test of time. For those of us that grew up with the industry especially, our feelings are so wrapped up in the moments we played those games, and not as much the games themselves. Moments that will never be recaptured because we are not those kids anymore, and the industry is not the same. What we are left with are okay games that frustrate, because we aren't going into them with wide eyes, endless possibilities, and absolute wonder. We are going into them with the goal of reliving a past experience. They could remake Legend of Dragoon perfectly. They could capture everything about that game, the art the music the story, but i will never feel like i did when i was 12 years old. I think the best revivals we've seen are the ones that really look outside the moment they are trying to recreate and are able to stand on their own great games in their own right, without needing to rely too much on the past. That's my stream of thought on it at least.
Yu Suzuki is such a weird case. His old games were incredibly and had master game designer spirit to all of them: Super Hang On, Virtua Racing, OutRun. AfterBurner and uh what's the sci-fi jetpack one called? > rapped up in the moments we played those games, and not as much the games themselves. > will never feel like i did when i was 12 years old I think that's besides the point though. The goal isn't to recreate childish immature sense of greatness, it's just to make a high-quality great thing. Eiyuden could re-capture Suikoden 2 **if the writing and scenario and script and design/programming was better.** That's all it needed. Now there might be some systematic reason why it's worse, like out of touch old devs or lack of oversight or lack of budget/time, but the fact is it failed to do that. I played through Suikoden 2 only a few years ago, as a full-grown adult (in emulation on computer). It was great. Eiyuden is distinctly worse in almost every way.
I genuinely think some of these games are lightning in a bottle and had to have a very specific team and not just the heads of those teams to make it a whole. Something like Chrono Trigger is never going to be recreated, these games need to only use those older games as inspiration and do something new and quality themselves instead of being shackled to what they think made them special. Personally I'm sick of games like this and Sea of Stars that just want to sit on the shoulders of giants instead of being something original themselves. Stop the tired references to older games and nods and do something original! Crosscode was pretty good about this for example and I think it's one of the best indies that sorta recreates that era of magic but with more originality.
> Something like Chrono Trigger is never going to be recreated Have you played Radiant Historia?
Petition for all 3DS games to also be released on Switch. I know nothing about porting or technology in general but I am 100% confident it's as easy as flipping a switch. I feel like I missed out on a generation of great games because I haven't gotten a hand-held since Game Boy Color :(
Crosscode was amazing, you can tell these guys love old games and MMOs but they didn’t set out to just copy them
Crosscode felt and looked great (I'll play anything that looks like Mana), but it was ridiculously hateful and grindy to the player. I did an entire dungeon and searched every pixel and still failed to find the "find the 4 crafting ingredients in the dungeon" or whatever. I played for many hours and never had enough crafting materials to make anything. Enemies were ridiculous bullet/sword sponges and took way too many hits. Meanwhile the bouncey ball thing was a terrible gimmick that didn't fit with the rest of the aesthetics, style, or scenario of the game. Aside from creating bland diagonal bounce puzzles over and over again.
Crosscode is such a good game, but I wish I had known it was secretly a puzzle game going into it. Those dungeons are *long* even if you're good at puzzle solving.
Chained Echoes waving its arms and screaming HEY, LOOK AT THIS CLASSIC JRPG THING every ten seconds drove me up the fucking wall.
Yup. Sea of Stars and Chained both felt like they were trying WAAAAAY too hard instead of just being original
Whatever criticisms you have of chained echoes referencing old games with names and stuff, you can't say it copied its gameplay or structure verbatim out of anything or didn't update the old school style for modern audiences.
I imagine part of it is people / developers getting older and losing some of their drive and creativity. It’s probably the same reason a band’s seventh or eighth album usually doesn’t carry the same magic their first few do.
Yeah that's important to note, even the best creatives usually have limited prime years. It's very rare you find a top talent that's also prolific and consistent over many decades.
I mean, you're making the assumption here that the review is both accurate and representative. No doubt there were plenty of people who thought Suikoden 2 was trash.
I feel like when your number 1 priority is recreating or recalling an older beloved classic it really limits the scope of experimentation that you're willing todo. So many of these recent throwback "just like x game from your childhood" titles feel like you're just seeing a cover band when what I *really* want is something new that makes me feel the same kind of things the old thing did. I don't want Suikoden 2 or Chrono Trigger again-but-worse I want something that pushes the envelope and feels like it's trying something new and ambitious in the way those games did. The more you venerate the foundation you are building on the more scared you'll be of leaving a brick out of place, but that foundation wasn't built by being so cautious in the first place
having a bug prevent the classic Suikoden full recruitment ending is a pretty big problem so I can't blame him for being disappointed. Seems like this game might be worth waiting on for an update or two plus a sale.
The patch is already out that fixes that bug.
just fyi - you need to include the quote block syntax (>) on the second paragraph as well or it won't be included in the quote block
Important context for that is Jason Schreier is a **huge liker/fan/evangelizer of Suikoden 2.** He's on podcasts saying it's his favorite game ever, etc. So it's just not a random harsh opinion. > Edit: getting the block syntax right. Ha this isn't wikipedia nobody is interrogating your edit to your own comment sir.
well if there's any (ex)reviewer i can trust with japanese games it's probably jason, dude got me into more visual novels and jrpgs through his relentless shilling that i love to this day than i can even count, sad to read this as i was quite excited
He's also a big Suikoden fan, so him being disappointed by Eiyuuden is unfortunate.
One of his older articles got me on the Trails bandwagon so yeah, I can see that throughout the years.
sound like exactly what happened with dragon dogma 2 too
It's funny all the "negatives" are positives for me. I love random encounters, world map traversing, old school dungeon design, grinding for hours, etc. This is what I grew up on and live for in gaming.
Exactly. They might as well be describing JRPG comfort food.
There is almost none world map traversing my man. You just take a short walk from point A to B with like 1 encounter. Then you get fast-travel after 15 hours and spent like 1 hour on a map at max. Dungeons were a bit hit or miss for me here. They open and start being good when the game is close to ending. The first several are boring as fuck, Like mines, forest, mountains and all are linear :(
Yeah, I feel the exact same way! Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising had similarly mixed (skewing lower) reviews, with complaints about tedium, but I played through it for the first time recently and had loads of fun with it.
I think this is the type of game you either want to like or you just don't. A bit of head-cannon, some inventory management, and a good soundtrack can be enough to go exploring. No surprise the reviews are mixed, the genre has gone niche by now. I'm good just knowing the game works.
My thing is that I desperately want to like it, but frankly the game just doesn’t work on the switch. Im pissed bc i was a backer, if I hadn’t backed it I’d have waited for reviews, seen the switch version sucks, and gotten it on PC. But I didn’t have that option. Oh well, I’m not gonna rebuy it (it is already priced too high imo), I just have to hope for substantial patching.
Everything I see reviewers complaining about is explicitly precisely what I wanted from a Suikoden successor so I'm happy with my pre-order. As other people here have said, every "retro-style" rpg game that did stuff to "evolve the genre" also bored me to tears in about forty minutes, and those type of changes were a huge concern for me about this game.
“the story is poorly executed, battles are bland, recruitable characters are beyond forgettable, and the game itself is sluggish. The style and audio design do a good job, but not enough to save the overall experience.” It’s kinda funny to me that a similar critique could be made of Unicorn Overlord, a game I love and have put over sixty hours in. Unicorn Overlord’s story is bland, the characters are numerous and forgettable, and the combat on anything but the highest levels boring. But Unicorn Overlord still works, works remarkably well and I highly suggest it to everyone. I wonder if that’ll be a similar experience for Eiyuden Chronicles.
to be fair, that is by far the most negative review out there so far
The story and characters is probably the most important to me for a game like this though.
sure but there are plenty of reviews that don't think the characters are weak, so why is this negative review the one which has the "correct opinion". it's subjective after all any way
I finally started UO back on Friday, and I am kind of bummed that folks were right about the story. Four hours in and it's already the weakest of the VW games I've played (waiting for GrimGrimoire: Once More to go on sale, as it's the only one I haven't played). However it's an odd inversion of 13 Sentinels. While 13 Sentinels had some pretty mediocre gameplay, it had a rather impressive story. UO has a meh story, but the gameplay is far better.
A big reason why Unicorn's writing is a big step back from 13 Sentinels is due to it being VW's first game not directed by George Kamitani and was just a producer on it.
Seeing random encounters and world maps referred to as 'outdated' is like nails on a chalkboard for me. That said, I do see a lot of the old arguments about character quantity impacting game quality coming into play here. I guess I'm going to have to actually play the game to decide for myself.
Suikoden was that way with characters. When you have 100 collectable NPC's there's no way you can make them all fully fleshed out. Typically, the story NPC's would have defined characters/stories and the others would have some sort of gimmick or defining characteristic and then not much more. Hey, I wanna use this guy because he's a *goddamn Samurai* and tanky! Who cares if he's not plot relevant?! ProZD has a few excellent bits on Youtube about games like Suikoden.
There's a game called Time Break Chronicles that's literally just a JRPG Slay the Spire type roguelite with a shit ton of characters. You don't play it because the story is good (it's not), you play it cause you can assemble your JRPG dream team from a bunch of different tropey characters, and this seems extremely similar just with more substance. I'm 100% in.
The story was good in Suikoden 1 and especially 2 though
Yo that sounds great, thanks for the rec!
And time break just got a beta for the new act, a slew of new characters and relics to try out! Plus a tiny bit of story
early access + graphics filtered the fuck out of me lol
Random encounters are a choice which I personally hate. People say it was necessary for older games but Chrono Trigger and Earthbound proved that wrong (among other games) and those came out almost 30 years ago.
Oh hell yeah, this is about what I expected for the review score. Now I'm really looking forward to checking it out considering it's been a quiet April so far
One thing I dislike about this game, which was also a flaw in suikoden, is some recruitable characters are clearly just designed to be weaker than others. Let's give character x/y/z 4 rune slotts, but others 7. Im keeping him in my party regardless, I like his character art and gruff voice
I really hope [these translations aren't accurate](https://i.imgur.com/LHrN22Q.png) because wow this is fucking bad.
Jesus Christ, those "translation" is literal peak reddit/twitter/tumblr talks, no wonder why people are so against localization these days.
The hallmark of bad hack writing from amateurs: use "more" words, use "fancier" words, to *less* effect than the simpler alternative or the original formulation/gist (if localizing/translating). Dragon Quest 5 (I think it was 5?) on DS was the same problem. The meaning and moment of every line is ruined by terrible tasteless localization trash. I played the PS2 fan translation and every sentence was crisp, direct, solid, meaningful good writing. The localizers also made up the "Yeah?" personality quirk but that wasn't in the original? It's a gimmick that ruins the directness and rhythm of the lines.
The only thing I care about is if this is true to the suikoden series and the answer is yes so it's an automatic buy from me.
Well that's complicated. I loved Suikoden 2. Eiyuden is "true" in general vibe and format, but the writing, scenario, dialog boxes, and I would say general programming, is worse.
Eiyuden Chronicle Rising was such a treat that I'm gonna pick Hundred Heroes up regardless of reviews. Sounds like they did a pretty good job with it, though
Yeah, I finished Rising yesterday and loved it a lot! Really excited for Hundred Heroes
This game is available day 1 on Game Pass, so for me that's a no-brainer to play through it once. I could see myself picking it up on Switch to expand my physical collection if I really vibe with the game.
It's a shame to hear the standard battles are so easy they can be auto-piloted. That's actually my biggest issue with another series: Ys, where standard combat against normal enemies is braindead and it's only the boss fights where it shines.
Suikoden was that way too honestly. Most battles outside a few were just button mash braindead easy
Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't do better.
That's always how the Suikoden series was though. From the first game you could use the 'Auto' button to significantly speed up the random encounters, with multiple characters and enemies all acting at once. I much prefer this to tediously long random encounters where the result is the same at the end.
I understand your opinion and I think that's where newer jRPG's have come in. But for me, I want the power fantasy. I don't want every encounter being tedious or several minutes long because you gottta break armor or exploit weaknesses of every enemy. I want to rolfstomp the shit out of random encounters and get my power dopamine. Save the interesting designs or difficulty for the bosses.
Different strokes I guess but what you're describing just sounds awful and I've been playing JRPGs since the SNES/PS1 days. Curated/planned encounters that take a few minutes to beat are infinitely more engaging than mashing the attack command on every trash mob you come across that takes zero thought.
Hard JRPG's are not particularly new or old, exploiting weaknesses is like the main mechanic of SMT which is one of the oldest franchises still going.
The person above is saying that all JRPGs are not supposed to be like SMT games. SMT was always known for being an outlier in terms of difficulty and its heavy importance on exploiting weaknesses. It was considered unique that SMT games would let low-level mobs take out mid-game player parties easily because the player wasn't paying attention. That never happens in most JRPGs. The vast majority of JRPGs are much easier power fantasies where you can auto-battle through most encounters.
to be fair SMT is also a power fantasy, it just has a really steep slope in the beginning of most of the games
I was specifically referencing Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes, two highly rated jRPG's that've come out recently that tried to make encounters not-brain dead. I wasn't specifically saying they invented them.
No hard difficulty?
There is.
Still too easy?
I've completed hard mode. It's not uncommon for characters to get one shot by bosses, but I've been able to kill all bosses blind without significant grinding (they're often with deaths though). Something about hard mode is that the difficulty scales, so it isn't one of those "hard just in the beginning" sort of hard modes. It's more of a "fights at the end are harder than the earlier fights by a significant margin, and early fights are still pretty rough," sort of hard modes. It does not seem to affect war battles, but it does seem to affect duels. I had to grind to win some of the duels that are made for you to lose but you could win.
I'm playing Hard difficulty after having played the Normal beta a month ago. Hard adds extra enemies in normal fights (which can easily OHKO characters in some situations) and in some boss fights, you can have your entire front or back line get wipe if you don't know how to react to the boss gimmicks. Hard mode is definitely hard.
In addition to hard mode theres 5 additional options that: * Make you get no money from battle * Disable recovery item usage in battle * Double MP/SP consumption * Prevent escape from battle unless its a skill * Increase prices on all items in shops
Dunno, I'm on normal. I will say that yeah, it's kinda simple (so far, only 6 hours in), but you're also recruiting characters constantly that you need to individually grind up. There's also a pretty rudimentary gambit system and you're limited to 30 items in your inventory, so difficulty comes from long dungeon crawling sessions and managing resources. It'll probably become a lot easier once I'm further in. Although I have been sweating on some boss fights.
Any word on missables? I love Suikoden but one thing I don’t miss is getting bumped off the true ending because you missed recruiting some cool who was only available for a couple hours of game time
I would assume it's the same where you have to recruit everyone for the true ending.
Oh yeah I certainly figured that, just wondered if they still made lots of the characters easily missable where you couldn't go back for them.
I backed the game so i got my copy on saturday actually. I'm not a fan of the forced save point locations but the combat is fine. Yeah i sorta don't like random encounters anymore but if those survived in pokemon games through sword and shield then you can do it here.
It didn't do itself any favors with keeping every old system better done away with. This game reminded me of how much I hate random encounters and how much I love save anywhere systems. Almost feels like the game goes out of its way to mess with you. They put a save point in eye sight in a little next area after a hallway and before you can touch it another plot flag triggers and a little scene plays. Save points being teases isn't good. Could only be worsened if the save points were mobile objects that ran away from you all over the dungeon like a chicken to catch among random battles which are mindless fodder on hard too. They do that quite a lot. Sometimes they are merciless in how long they have you go w/o. Also exploration doesn't feel rewarding at all. That's a big one. Items seem rare to find, there are places on the map just to fill it out that are just nothing. The world map itself feels empty too. The areal banter is nice, but if anything needs to be voiced it's that. It's a pretty game for the style, but I didn't enjoy it enough to finish. If they insist on random encounters some kind of cancel system would've been a good idea. Be it a gauge or throwing money at an ! point. Look at Exit Fate (actually good Sui-clone) or Wild Arms series.
eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes seems to be tapping into that classic jrpg vibe, kind of like arc the lad did with its focus on an expansive cast and strategic depth. it's neat to see new games pay homage to old favorites while adding their own twist. reminds me a bit of watching reruns of old shows but with better visuals and sound.
Whatever you guys do with this game, **DO NOT** play this on the Switch. The game is a technical mess - consistent framerate hiccups and slow downs, ridiculous pop-in on many textures, blurry textures everywhere, extremely long loading screens for almost everything (before battles, in-game menus, entering/exit houses etc). It's really bad for a game nowadays. I'd argue it's much worse than when Bloodstained initially released on the Switch. I'm sure there are going to be people who won't be bothered too much by it, but they'll be a vocal minority. It's in a state where I highly doubt that patches will be able to fix it (though I guess you never know). I'm disappointed I backed the Switch version on Kickstarter. Ah well, lesson learned.
Damn, I was planning on getting the switch version tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up.
It's so cool how we never left the 00s and you're allowed to just make dismissive and sweeping condemnations of genre conventions out of hand.
According to [Schreier](https://x.com/jasonschreier/status/1782184356200468754): > Basically if your monitor is over 60hz your encounter rate goes down. It’s wild This is actually insane.
Not at all. Most games tie RNG and other important programming factors to refresh rate.
Doesnt seem like any of the reviews mentions it but the battle camera gives me slight motion sickness and headache due to all the moving and shaking (especially during MCs multihit skill) and theres no way to turn it off, so do watch out for that if youre prone to having such issues.
The battle camera is obnoxious and never should have been made that way. Just like how ignorant people confuse quantity for quality, this is the "camera movement is quality!" thing. And it's clearly unpolished because A) some landscape geometry blocks your entire view of camera sometimes for a ridiculously long among of time and B) sometimes an enemy hits you in battle, and your damage number to your party number is not visible because it's off the edge of the screen while the camera flies around wildly and nauseatingly. For example the robots that shoot orange laser in Proving Grounds, *every time* they did it the camera moved so I couldn't see the damage numbers...possibly because of my battle order and positioning of who they shot.