Omegaprism

So much love for Xenogears in this thread, I love it! I should have saved the word-vomit I did in Armagon's Xenogears review for this thread. Oh well. Xenogears will always be my first or second choice for a remake. The only other title that rivals it is another ps1 JRPG, called Legend of Legaia. The setting was great, the combat system was fun (if time-consuming by the end), and the characters were generally fun and easy to understand. Plus, it was a game that, like BK: Origins, had a playable cast of only three characters, and as a result all three of them got character development and story relevance basically throughout the whole of the game. I really love this game, and the fact that the North American version has a progress-killing bug in emulation kills me on the inside. Once the last playstation dies I may never get to enjoy this game again. The only ting that would need revamping are the incredibly dated graphics. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend playing it, but if you're an English speaker, get the European version. Supposedly it doesn't have the game-breaking bug when you play it on PS3 or emulator.

I saw your avatar change to Bart and thought, "Does that mean he played Xenogears recently?" I am pleased by this news! Many people had their first foray into JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII, but for me Xenogears was my most formative experience with PS1 RPGs. That Christmas (I think it was 1997? 1998?) I got a bunch of cash, and my dad drove my brother and I to the local Gamestop (or maybe it was still Software etc. at the time), and having read some gaming magazines I knew I was going in with the express purpose of buying games for our shiny new playstation that had the word, "gear," in the title. I got Guilty Gear, Metal Gear Solid, and Xenogears. I have never been given reason to regret those choices. Anyway, on to discussion of the game! Every two or three years I get a weird seasonal urge to play Xenogears again, to the point that I've convinced my wife to try it out while I watch and coach her through the more obtuse parts (also she hated the platforming segments, including the escape from the sinking sand cruiser towards the beginning). If ever there was a magic videogame wish granting genie, My first or second wish would be for Xenogears to get the kind of remake treatment that Square-Enix is currently attempting with Final Fantasy 7. The story of the game's development just makes me long for that what if scenario. Gears was originally going to be Final Fantasy 8, before Square decided they needed Final Fantasy to be way more generic for mass appeal. Then, roughly halfway through the development cycle, the bigwigs decided to cancel the project in favor of what would become what we know as Final Fantasy 8. Having poured months of their lives into this abandoned game, the dev team implored their bosses to let them release the game, on the condition that they turn in a finished game with minimal extra funding and time. They did, and it really shows in Disc 2. It should come as little surprise that Takahashi left Squaresoft not long after and started his own company with his wife and a few other former Square employees. In my imagination, a remake of Xenogears would not necessarily have to have the most polygons, the highest resolution, or the most detailed models (though, realistically, most people say if a remake doesn't have those things, what's the point?), but would clean up the muddier backgrounds to make them easier to navigate, improve the UI, and fill out the massive swath of game that had to be cut. The abandoned subplot with Rico, Emeralda's character development, the two other anima dungeons, the other omnigears, the character never got to be playable but was planned to do so, the whole portions of game that turned into people sitting in chairs on a black background, all of that stuff deserves to be restored. I might personally prefer some minor rebalances of character and gear abilities, but that would be a low rung on the remake priorities ladder. The heartbreaking reality is that Squeenix will never relenquish the rights to any of Xenogears, and nobody in that company is interested in rehashing Xenogears. I don't even think Mr. Takahashi himself, now with a successful development studio that has proven that they can make JRPGs with positively ENORMOUS worlds to explore, would want to go revisit his old pet project, and would prefer to move forward . But I continue to hold a torch for it. I got a little sidetracked there. Let me try again. After several playthroughs I tend to think of Fei more as a playable MacGuffin than the real protagonist. The real main character is, uh, somebody else [I forgot how to spoiler]. You may have noticed that Fei lacks any real agency for most of the game, just reacting to the increasingly crazy events that surround him rather than taking the initiative. From a certain point of view that's the point of his character, and he has a very convincing reason for such passivity, but the in-game result is that you have several long conversations about some pretty important stuff where Fei, our erstwhile hero, literally says and does nothing. He just stands (or sits) around in the same room while Bart or Citan or somebody else makes all the decisions and does all the talking (and man oh man, Citan talks a lot). Believe it or not, this doesn't even bother me that much. It's just an observation I've had after playing one of my favorite games like, ten times in as many years. On a gameplay related note, I actually really liked the way gear combat worked in relation to on-foot battles. It was a nice balance that I haven't seen in a Xeno game since. Make no mistake, I love Xenoblade X, but I found myself missing the mecha combat in Xenogears. I'm not a fan of cooldown-based specials, and combining that with fuel consumption in XCX's skells just seemed unnecessary. I'm really hoping they develop the skells more in general in a hypothetical XCX2, and it wouldn't hurt to have a look at Xenogears for inspiration.

When I was a kid I was really into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If I could have, I would have themed my entire life around those green boys and their colorful masks. Instead of getting a SNES for Christmas one year, I got a Sega Genesis, and that was fine. It had a few TMNT games, such as the Hyperstone Heist. One of these Genesis turtles games was TMNT: Tournament Fighters. I loved it with all of my being, and I played the hell out of that cart just trying to beat the final bosses. While many people got into fighting games because of Street Fighter, I learned to be a fighting games guy from the ninja turtles. Decades later I found another copy and, afloat on nostalgia, booted it up to see how it had aged. The verdict: terrible. Everything I had learned about fighting games in the intervening years bashed against the incredibly stiff controls and harsh design decisions, and I suffered that fate that all people who grow up and develop taste know: I knew I could never recapture those good times as a boy in the early nineties, and I knew that it was because I was a dumb kid, and ignorance is bliss.

Ugh, yeah, I know I should do that, but I brought my switch with me to Hawaii, and I was up late one night, and then the ball just started rolling and now 2 is getting really fun and... I'm just making excuses at this point. In 1 I am making my way up through the mechonis after having met the machina and talked about confronting Egil (I think that was his name). I wanna say it feels like I'm about two thirds through the story. I recall having some difficulty deciding on arts for the 7th party member. It's like they have a sampler plate from the rest of the group, but not quite enough to pick a role in combat and focus on it.

I'll join in the love train and say that I got this game for Xmas, and when I haven't been able to play it (at work mostly) I've been thinking about playing it, which is a feeling I have missed. I feel kinda bad, though, because I didn't have time to finish Xenoblade 1 before I got 2, and to be honest after beating XCX the gameplay felt rough and stiff in 1 by comparison. And now that I've jumped feet first into 2, I don't know if I'll be able to go back. I still want to beat Xenoblade 1, but man, I've got some obstacles of my own making in my path.

A list of what Omegaprism doesn't want to see in the next Fire Emblem, the short version: -Fates' awfully balanced weapon system -Lolis -Shotas -3DS skill system -Reclassing -Eugenics The End

As a high school teacher in Japan I can safely say that no, they are not. Their tolerance for mobile game bullshit is much higher because as long as they can play it while waiting at the bus stop or on the train then it gives them an alternative to the living nightmare that is looking at or talking to each other. The most popular genres among young gamers (the biggest audience in this country due to its inability to shake off the outdated notion that videogames are in the same category as gambling, drugs, and prostitution) are actually FIFA and first-person shooters. While I'm sure there is some grinding aspect to modern FIFA, it has much more to do with managing statistics. Most Japanese gamers don't have time to sit at home and grind levels in a JRPG, and the customer base for this genre tends to be a fixed number year after year (somewhere in the region of 50,000 to 90,000 sales in the first two weeks of a release, and then a very sharp drop-off), indicating that the ones who do play JRPGs tend to be single adults with a stable source of income that get a little bit older each year. In case you couldn't tell, I have downtime at work that I often use to do research that will almost never prove useful in meatspace. I now realize this might be a teachable moment, but not in the way I originally thought when I started typing. O_o; Sorry for the brusque "actually..." I just pulled. I'm still posting this because then I won't feel like I wasted my time typing a post only to delete it (I do that a lot).

Wait, Bayo1 outsold Metal Gear Rising? I thought MGR:R was their bestseller before Nier. Hot diggity! Anyway, yeah, Nier deserved every sale it got, just like most of Platinum's work. My big fear is that Squeenix won't leave well enough alone and will try and micromanage Yoko Taro's next game into oblivion. He's the kind of guy whose ideas just need some space to breathe, and in today's anti-risk industry it can be really easy for the gifted weirdos to keep making stuff with that creative spark that made us love them in the first place.

Fingers crossed that Bayonetta 3 is the best-selling title Platinum has ever produced. At this point she's their only original, main title character to have a series longer than one game, and those boys in the Kamiya Krew deserve some more financial success on their own IP. Bayo2 was bloody awesome, and it (like almost every Wii U exclusive that wasn't Zelda or Smash) undersold due to the Wii U install base (or lack thereof). Now, onto hard-hitting speculation: New hairstyle! What will it be?! I don't know that it can get better than the short cut from 2, but who knows?

So I guess I'll just put on my pariah pants and say I actually really enjoyed X6, BS level design and all, and to this day I don't understand why people like X5. It had level design that, while not as bad as X6, was still terrible. The bosses, while initially interesting to look at in their concept art, looked flat and lifeless as sprites. It had a truly awful boss level system that was linked to its ill-conceived time mechanic, and overall it just felt like a hangover after the high-octane romp that was X4. I'm not mad at anyone for liking X5, and in fact I wish I could like it like so many others, but I can go back to X6 over and over, and I will probably play X5 once as X and once as Zero, and then avoid it until the next time Capcom cashes in on its great legacy of games from before 2004, and releases another X collection on the Nintendo Butte, or the Playstation 5. I can firmly agree that X7 is the undisputed low point of the series, and yes that includes the two surprisingly fun Game Boy releases. Unless there's some cool unlock I can only get by completing it I'm not touching that one. I don't even play it when I do mmx marathons.

I would absolutely double dip. Yes please. In fact, I talked about having finally jumped back in and beaten the story a while ago, and I actually just stopped playing the postgame the day before yesterday. I just couldn't put it down. The thing is, nobody bought a Wii U. I own one, and I got to play some truly great games on it. But Nintendo have been infuriating about being able to buy replacements for such crucial things as your gamepad. Policies like this, combined with the generally cheap construction of the console, mean that in a few years, when the last Wii U dies, so will every game that you could only play on it. And even worse, there are some great games that never got a chance at success because the Wii U sold like a flaming bag of manure. One such game was Xenoblade X. If Sony and Microsoft can get away with "remastering" half of the previous generation's releases on their new hardware, I see no reason why the likes of Bayonetta 2 and XCX couldn't get a second chance on the hot new hardware. This would also allow me a sigh of relief from a future-proofing standpoint. Monolithsoft has earned me as a customer, and I would love for the online XCX community to get a second wind. Maybe then we could finally knock out the Telethia Plume and get Yggralith Zero to appear again. :/

Well, certainly not I, but there is a very vocal group on serenes who say Eliwood gaining a horse is a huge boon and that Lyn is hot garbage as a unit not worth deploying. Philistines, the lot of them.

Binding Blade: Sadly, haven't played it yet. It's on the list, just as soon as everybody agrees to stop making videogames for, like, five years so I can catch up. Blazing Sword: Does Dart count? :^P Lyn, no contest. GBA is the era of the dodgetank dream, and Lyn is the dodgetank lord. My favoritism usually gives her the angel robe and the strength potion, so she ends up being pretty frickin' durable through midgame, and always gets the first Heaven Seal. Combined with her crit-machine prf sword, if there is a forest tile nearby I can plop her on top of it and almost forget about her while I sweat bullets trying to position whichever squishy magic user I feel like babying that day. Sacred Stones: Joshua. Aside from having an actual personality (if kinda two-dimensional) he boasts an actual strength growth, and his support options skew towards characters I actually like using. I like to pair him with Gerik, and then pretend the whole game is actually a buddy cop movie with these two chuckleheads as the leads. Tethys is the long-suffering secretary who makes barbed quips about them being a little too chummy to be 'just friends.' There is an imaginary cut sequence from the middle act where they have to outrun a giant Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder while wearing the two halves of a horse costume that was from a subplot that the studio thought was too cerebral for a summer action comedy. The special edition commentary with Joshua, Gerik, and the director has a great story about filming in Tunisia and how a sandstorm ruined a whole week's worth of footage and they didn't have time to re-shoot the sword fight while running atop a stampeding herd of camels, so they ultimately settled for what became Chapter 15.

I can't help but ask, who falls into "Yeah no" territory?

So this game coming soon finally pushed me to stop putting it off and beat Xenoblade Chronicle X. I love that game, and I don't know why I stopped playing it in the first place. That said, I am mildly annoyed that all of the lvl 60 skells and the coolest weapons only unlock after you beat the story. Now I've got the slightly more daunting task of finishing Xenoblade 1's story. I only made it to sword valley. I envy the lot of you who can play Xenoblade 2 on December 1st. I promised my wife I would stop buying myself videogames until after Christmas, because I keep ruining her shopping plans. I want it soooooo bad!

*Looks at Special Maps* I'm dumb. In other news, I pulled it off. My successful team (no merges, all 5 stars) was Minerva (SI: Reposition, Desperation 3, and Night Sky), Hinoka (SI: Reposition), Blue Azura (SI: Renewal 2), and Hector (SI: Ignis, Swap, Seal: Distant Def). Night Sky and Hone Flyers were the key to victory here, because I almost had it, and then the green armor came and kicked poor Hector's butt, and neither he nor Minerva were able to crush him without dying. Ways I made this harder than it needed to be: I could have easily replaced Hector with Xander, who could already do Hector's job of baiting the thieves, and/or Azura with Olivia, since she didn't have any combat. Either one of them could have taken out the green armor after Minerva killed all three horses. Also, I meant to inherit Glimmer and not Night Sky, but I accidentally clicked through after only highlighting one skill. Thankfully, all I needed was that tiny boost at the end, and the timing ended up working in spite of my incompetence. As a final note, wow! Minerva really got to show off here. One well placed song and she laid waste to the bottom half of the map. Not even the sword cavalier could stand against her! Thanks for the encouragement and tips, everyone. Now I can just feel dumb for thinking the GHB ended today, instead of not being able to beat it.

Hrm, I don't have a green dancer, but maybe I can fiddle around with Anna or something. Anyway, thanks. I'm off to bash my head against this map a few more times.

It's +atk/-res, and dang it, I just realized that this is one of the rare situations where that's not a good nature to have, isn't it?

How are you all doing infernal so easily with Hector? Every time I try with him he gets beaten up by the green cav, then doesn't do enough damage with Ignis to kill Ursula before she finishes him off. I even slapped my maxed out Distant Def seal on him and had Azura (original recipe) lend her Res boost at the beginning of the phase when the sh!t hits the fan. He always ends up with, at best, 8 HP before Ursula's followup, which does 14. I feel like the biggest dummy right now, because I haven't been able to crack this nut, and it's the last few hours before it goes away. What is the secret to the mystical Hector that magically survives getting double-teamed by the green cav and Ursula?

After months of focusing on summoning green (many orbs were wasted on other colors because green is a shy color I guess) I have at last obtained a second Hector! His nature is not as good as my first, so I now have an opportunity to inherit away some very desirable and rare skills, especially the delicious Distant Counter. My question is, who makes a great candidate for Distant Counter? All the units with DC weapons tend to be more physically oriented, so I'd like to know who could become a good hi-res mage counter-killer. The other thing to consider is that Hector is the sole source of Goad Armor. Assuming this is the last Hector I get for the foreseeable future, would it not be a better idea to try and inherit both DC and Goad Armor onto another armor? Maybe Sheena? She can tank magic better than Gwendolyn, Draug, Effie, or Zephiel, but her attack is hard to work with. Right now, my short list for candidates is as follows: -Titania (pretty good anti-blue res-tank) -Lloyd (I already have 4 DC sword units, but all of them have crappy res) -Sheena -Camilla (an expensive pet project) -I'm open to other suggestions To those of you fortunate enough to have used Hector for DC fodder before, who'd you feed him to? How has it worked out for you?

Well, that was a journey. I enjoyed this playthrough, though I can't say it sold me on ever playing maniac mode again. Just as tedious as I remember. Anyway, thanks again for all the trivia and informative bits! I will continue watching your stuff for the foreseeable future.

Sweet, thanks! I was looking for a good guide that talked about who gets special stuff traveling with the different armies, and this link could be just the thing I was looking for. I will also keep an eye on that strength score (I just hit chapter 9 and she's level 14 with a strength score of 8). I already gave her my first HP potion because, as you said, her HP was worrisome.

So after finally clearing a couple rpgs off of my backlog I finally sat down and started Tearring saga (thanks for the shiny translation work, @Aethin), and I know Julia is far from the best swordmaster in the game, but what can I say? I really like her official art, she's got some cool interactions with the Vega, Shigen, and Yoda, and I've got a soft spot for myrmidons. Assuming relatively average growth (maybe even a little bit of RNG screwage), what kind of minimum stat threshold should I aim for to expect her to start doing work, or maybe even snowballing? Who is a great support partner to stick her with? I am all too happy to engage in favoritism, but the first few maps before you recruit the big guns have kinda been the Raffin show, and I don't know when I'm going to get a STR potion to patch up that wimpy strength.

I friggin' love Legend of Legaia so much. The whole Seru creature design philosophy as a whole was so cool, and while I will admit that it was never the prettiest girl at school, something about the combat and the world and the music all just fit together in a way that charmed me. The fact that no one has been able to solve the emulation issue that causes a progress-halting bug at almost the end of the game is heartbreaking to me. I've heard that it's a problem exclusive to the US version, but I'm from the US, so that doesn't help me that much. I wish so hard that someone would do a rerelease just so that, when my ps1 finally kicks the bucket, I will still be able to play Legaia. Since this is not a Legaia remake thread, though, I'll get back on topic. I played the everloving pants off of Xenogears, and loved every minute of it except for the long, long scenes where other characters are doing a lot of talking, and Fei was just sitting there in silence. The combat was fun, especially once you learned a bunch of special combos with everyone and hopped into your gears. I wish Monolithsoft would stop trying to reinvent the wheel a little bit with mecha combat and take a page out of their old Xenogears playbook in that regard. As for the story, it is a song that will be sung for years to come about how Xenogears was planned to be Final Fantasy VIII, and then halfway through development Squaresoft changed their minds, cut funding, and reassigned a chunk of staff to what would go on to be the Final Fantasy VIII we all know. I know a Xenogears remake will probably not happen in my lifetime, but I dream that they will give it a chance, and not so much expand on the story as actually make the parts of the game that were reduced to characters sitting in chairs narrating what could have been some really engaging and intense events. Oh, and they could also stand to change Emeralda's in-game voice clips if you do her sidequest. Just sayin'. I beat Xenosaga 1, and wow was that a disappointment after Xenogears! If you skip all of the non-playable cutscenes, it's actually a very short game (somewhere in the realm of 4 hours if you do most of the sidequests, of which there are few). The story was positively opaque, and the game was just not that fun. It was kind of shallow. I will admit that I was one of the numerous consumers who got fooled by the marketing into thinking that it was a prequel to Gears. Years later, when some PR stooge said, "We only meant to say that it will share the style and themes of Xenogears," I was no less sad. The whole trilogy seemed to touch on these big ideas that then never got explored or even properly explained, and making things even worse was all the imagery and character designs cribbed directly from Xenogears. Someone was saying how watching someone else play Xenoblade doesn't do it justice. In the case of Xenosaga, the opposite is true. You're better off watching it. I haven't finished Xenoblade yet. I've twice fallen into the trap of trying to do a bunch of sidequests to build affinity with characters I haven't been using, and then burned out a little bit and switched to something else (Metal Gear Rising, maybe). Currently I'm in Sword Valley, I think. The main story is alright and the combat can be tense and exciting, or immensely frustrating as you get ambushed by some level 90-something supermonster while trying to explore a new area, get crushed, and sent all the way back to the last landmark that you found, which could be at the beginning of a pretty big zone. I think the main draw that keeps people invested is probably the charm of the main cast, and that includes the villains. By themselves the heroes are a little vanilla, but when pitted against the over-the-top evil of the antagonists it makes for a nice contrast. Speaking of not finishing Xeno games, I've been screwing around in Chapter 11 of Xenoblade Chronicles X for like eight months! My excuse this time is that my son started getting properly ambulatory, and I can't really use the TV while he's running around, throwing plastic dinosaurs and toy cars, and trying to take my controller because if daddy's doing it, he has to do it too. My opinion is thus: It has a lot in common with its predecessor, but several refinements of ideas presented in Xenoblade. The sidequest system is, like, a thousand times better, but the main plot barely exists. My tl;dr recommendation is thus: If you really liked XCX, try Xenoblade out, and give it a few hours to get started. The start is pretty slow. It will take about the entire first half of the game for you to finally get all the characters and unlock all of the different little systems you can use to make your game experience more enjoyable, but once you do, the sky is the limit. Find a youtube playlist or a Let's Play for Xenosaga. If you're lucky you can get one with some good commentary that'll make it less of a slog, because there is a lot of footage to watch, and most of it is non-playable. I love Xenogears, but I was 16 years old when it came out, and was taking my first steps into the PS1 era of JRPGs, which to this day I still consider their heyday. I say try it out, because there are a lot of ideas and concepts explored in Monolithsoft's modern games that were explored first in Xenogears. Be prepared for text dumps, though, especially in disc 2.

Did somebody already say Tearring/Berwick/Vestaria? Because that'd be DOPE!