Does it have to specifically be semi-realistic, have old guns, be military themed and in first person? Cuz I know some fine twin-stick sci-fi co-op shooters that can fill the same “shoot everything that moves with minimal effort” itch but they aren’t realistic, military themed or first person.
Like Synthetic 1 and 2 or The Ascent. I know of a couple WW2 games also similar but they completely lack co-op (or any kind of multiplayer for that matter) except for Jagged Alliance. And those games are old (except for the F2P thing that might not even be around anymore).
I asked my brother this who’s a huge fina fantasy fan and he says it’s the best story wise since 10. 13 is just boring, 15 is so convoluted and bloated. 12 is pretty good but the retread in Ivaice always felt like a cop out. 16 is the most consice FF story wise in years.
Take a look at the Sniper Elite series. It’s third-person and plays a lot slower than a COD game, but it is full co-op and takes place in WW2. The newer entries also look pretty nice.
Thanks, we tried this earlier but me and my buddies can’t seem to do stealth no matter how much we try. Now if it can be a viable strategy to go guns blazing then that’d be a different story.
I was initially saddened to hear it was going to follow in the steps of 15 and be an action based rpg, and I thought 15 was brain dead “warp strike simulator” with horrible story pacing and poor characters (until last 5% of the game).
This game though has simple but effective action combat with enough variety to be fun and the characters and pacing are a joy.
I still wish we could get some FF games like 7 or 9 where there is depth to equipment, magic and turn based combat, but jrpgs have been iterating away from complex battle systems and sell well so can’t see them going back.
I still think FF7 was the pinnacle as material mixing and matching with equipment was really simple and super fun.
It has native screenshot functions, yes, but they are highly compressed. Iirc, there’s a tool for taking uncompressed screenshots, but given the watermark in the screenshot, it’s most likely the native function.
It’s not emulated. This is from recent gameplay on my still working 2012 original Vita. You press the PS and Start button at the same time on Vita to take a screenshot.
Yes I always loved the graphics on most Vita games. I also play this same game on Steam, but the Vita version has a charm that can’t be beat.
I also used to feel the same way about Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. The original PSP graphics on an actual PSP screen were in my opinion better than the HD remake.
Awesome, thanks for all the info. I was trying to own and play a game for every letter of the alphabet, and that is how I stumbled across the Ys series personally. I didn’t end up playing a whole lot, but that was because of life, not a lack of enjoyment. Eventually I’d love to get a Vita. Been wanting one for a while
That’s a neat idea, owning and playing every letter. Most Ys games are on a lot of platforms and great stories, so I wouldn’t think a Vita is necessary unless you really want to. Because they were low production and pricey memory cards.
But the Vita was an amazing piece of hardware for its time, and likely very ahead of its time, and so it holds a special place for me. If only Sony had truly supported it.
I really went and started looking up the hard letters thinking what you could have played if it was this letter. I quickly realized even the harder letters all have at least 2 big game series belonging to them, so it’s not very hard. Even when looking at Y, you also have the Yakuza series.
It was a little more difficult 10 or so years ago when I started. I think Yakuza was still Sony exclusive. I’m 99% sure I started Zero on PS4, and I only play exclusives on it. These days it isn’t difficult at all for the owning part, but I think playing an A-Z challenge would still be fun
Random encounters tend to be trash mobs, and I hate trash mobs. I know even in the late 90s, there were some prehistoric internet memes about FF7, and having just played it recently, I remember why. There were so many of them. You’d easily forget where you were going and what you were doing because you’d be interrupted by random encounter trash mobs every couple of seconds. They weren’t too hard, so you didn’t have to think very much to get through them, which made them uninteresting, and they also, like you said, just kind of screwed with the flow of the game. So generally, I don’t like them.
That’s a good point. Trivial encounters feel like a grindy and annoying waste of time. I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way though.
I also think Final Fantasy falls too much on the old turn based choose from a menu, watch a cut scene system, when there was room for something more interesting. That’s just taste though I guess. I haven’t even played any other than Final Fantasy I and Tactics Advance maybe they changed.
The annoying thing is, the problem with this from a design perspective was well known and there were already some efforts to improve upon matters as early as the SNES era. Both Chrono Trigger and Earthbound leap to mind. It’s just that following this, most developers forgot to learn a lesson from these for another decade or two.
In Earthbound, all non-story, non-boss encounters are visible on the overworld and you can either:
Avoid them entirely with some foresight and skill
Get a backstab advantage if you manage to maneuver yourself behind the enemy, or
Instantly win the battle if your level significantly exceeds that of the enemy
Battles can be auto-fought with the computer controlling your party if you are e.g. trying to eat a sandwich at the same time or something
In Chrono Trigger, most trivial encounters can be avoided, with some scripted exceptions that always initiate when you cross a certain area presumably to prevent players from completely avoiding all combat entirely and subsequently getting their asses stomped by the bosses. Chrono Trigger’s overworld map also features no random encounters whatsoever. You can wander the world freely and will only encounter monsters if you actually enter a location.
I harp on this a lot, but only because it’s true. Despite its faults, some of which it definitely has, Chrono Trigger had some incredible design innovations and was easily the high water mark for JRPG design not only for its time, but even compared to subsequent games for a long time – maybe even still to this day.
Many trash mob encounters can simply be avoided if you can’t be bothered or are low on resources
Those that can’t can usually be wiped in a single move if the enemy is far beneath you via double/triple techs
Encounters happen on the screen you’re already on, so you don’t get disoriented after the battle ends
Positioning on the battlefield matters for techs, making fights more interesting than the usual you line up on one side/they line up on the other side method…
…However, positioning on the battlefield absolutely does not matter for single magic spells or melee attacks, meaning you never get completely screwed by how the chessboard is laid out
You can walk diagonally (seriously, the inability in even much later games to do this bugs me to no end – Pokémon, I’m lookin’ at you)
If a non-story-critical NPC is yammering at you and you can’t be bothered, you can just walk away even when the text box is still open
Not only can you rearrange your party however you want including not putting the protagonist at the head of the conga line (and even being able to remove him fully, after a certain plot event), but which combination of party members you have actually matters for techs and not just a perpetual case of, “I need one tank, one caster, and one healer” like prior/later games
The entire concept of the New Game+ is called what it is and works how it does because of how Chrono Trigger did it
You can fight the final boss pretty much any time as soon as you learn about him, and if you get your ass whooped trying that’s on you
Etc.
Apparently the Chrono Trigger devs originally planned to give the player even more freedom but several additional concepts such as being able to freely position your fighters on the field were cut due to time constraints and not being able to figure out a sufficiently elegant way to do it on the SNES hardware and controller.
It’s worth noting too that trash mobs aren’t limited to random encounters. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are littered with trash mobs, and none of them are random except for maybe traversing between towns.
If what's supposed to be the core gameplay feels like an unwanted interruption, I don't think the random enounters themselves are the problem. I think the reason random encounters get a bad rap is because some games don't make basic fights feel engaging enough. But when done right, they should be the fun part!
Not every design choice fits every game (obviously). With that in mind, rarely is any specific design choice always 100% good or bad.
I think rather than just taking a vote, it is more useful to think about what makes a good random encounter, and what kinds of game designs work well with them.
I enjoy CRPG styled games. Often in these random encounters happen when moving through an overworld. This kind of design doesn’t disrupt exploration, since once it is over, you continue on your way. It does disrupt when you are going between known points and just trying to tie something up. That can be annoying. Ways that I think can make random encounters enjoyable for CRPG styled games:
Not every random encounter has to be combat. Some can be combat, some can be social, some can be vendors, and some can just be flavor. Non-combat encounters can be used as sort of optional bonus content for players to learn about the lore or explore, and they might even feel special since it is a random occurrence the player gets.
The ability to put points into some kind of skill that gives the player the option to avoid a random encounter and/or start a combat encounter with a bonus.
Encounters should be tied with regions of the overworld in a way that makes sense. Put tougher encounters in endgame areas to discourage players from poking around too early. Make encounters in certain areas tied to the main faction or location in that area.
Ease up on certain kinds of encounters as the game goes on, so they don’t outstay their welcome. For example, in the early game if there are lots of low level bandits attacking in random encounters, it can be fun, but it gets old once you are powerful enough to rip through them and are just trying to get bigger things done. Solve this by, for example saying that routes between major hubs are secured thanks to player actions. Now the player can travel between main routes without getting hassled.
Be very thoughtful about combat random encounters triggered by NPCs after the player due to player actions. These tend to be more annoying since these are usually higher level NPCs that pack more punch. Making their appearance totally random can be very annoying. It also often feels like a grind if the encounter happens repeatedly. I would prefer the consequences of player actions to firstly always be telegraphed so they know a certain action means a revenge squad is after them. Second, I would prefer this encounter to be scripted- either concretely in a specific location where the game knows the player hasn’t yet been by virtue of the trigger happening while certain areas are still locked by the main story, or in a floating fashion where one of various possibilities is chosen by the game based on whatever triggers first. Once the player defeats whoever is after them, they should never be chased by an identical kind of threat.
These are all CRPG ideas, but I think mostly translate to action RPGs conceptually.
I haven’t played any CRPGs and I’m not familiar with them. Any recommendation of an intro to the genre?
But many of your points are still familiar. Trivial encounters feeling like an annoying waste of time, items or abilities that control the encounter rates, etc.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
Wasteland 3 is a good CRPG style game with modern presentation. There is backstory from the first two games, but the third one is self contained enough that you won’t be confused by the story.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
That’s one way to tackle it. The point is that there is something to prevent the experience of being super high level and getting mugged by guys with rusty shivs. I’m throwing out many ideas, which could be refined by specific games.
When it comes to random mobs, a game which relies on them is Kenshi, as an example. Without wandering random mobs to encounter, the game loses a lot of flavor. Kenshi does a few things uniquely, with the main one being that many random encounters that end in defeat don’t end in death. Rather than it being a case where a random mob annoyingly forces a start from a previous save, Kenshi can often be played past the defeat with the player now enslaved, in jail, or injured. The emergent story telling from those fights is what makes the game.
Random combat is the number one thing that makes me drop a game.
Its annoying, it happens too often, it always interrupts me when I want to do something else, and it is too repetitive.
This is why I stopped playing a lot of JRPGs. The other thing I drop them for is when combat only has a single song and always starts with the exact same intro, like what happened with Dragon Quest 11 or whatever it was that I played.
I hate grinding. Its repetitive and boring. Its not fun. If a games story missions are not paced properly with level such that I can do only the story missions and never be underleveled, then I will drop that game immediately.
I also hate grinding but sometimes I get addicted to it. Like my lizard brain likes watching the numbers go up. I recently loaded an old save in final fantasy and saw my level at 99, health at 999/999 and gold at 999999 and was like “I don’t remember grinding any of this”. It happens in a trance.
This is actually a few different design paradigms you are talking about.
The first is the exploration map transitioning into a battle map during encounters. The second is randomly spawning encounters. The third is forcing players to fight those encounters. Games like Zelda 2 had a exploration map transition into a battlemap, but the encounters are visible on the exploration map and could be avoided if you want so they were never forced or random. On the other hand games like Shining in the Darkness had exploration and battle on the same map; there was no transitions and the view perspective did not change, the game just randomly forced you to fight encounters while you walked around. Then you have something like Vermintide 2 which is a realtime first person action rpg/shooter where random monsters are spawned in at random times on random places on the map to attack you, but the monsters only spawn out of sight in places you are not looking at, and you are not forced to fight them.
IMO battle transitions and forced encounters are outdated mechanics designed around the technical limitations of 8 bit era systems, while random encounters are a great way to improve exploration and overall replay value of a game.
Good point. I guess it is 2 things I’m talking about.
I think battle transitions are a tradeoff. They free combat but at the cost of interrupting flow. If you don’t do anything with the freedom they give you and you just make the same tired pokemon style choose from a menu combat it’s not worth it.
Aye. Like all design paradigms, there are places where they can be useful or can be used to achieve a certain feel.
I actually hate “choose from a menu combat” but have thought of a few cases where it would make sense - for example a Legend of Galactic Heroes style space warfare game based on hyper-realistic combat between massive fleets of 20,000+ ships each, which according to lore, line up in nice neat firing lines and shoot at each other for 12+ hours until one side has won via attrition. There is no way to simulate that in real time and be fun, and the ranges at which combat happens in deep space means that there is basically literally no room for maneuvering once the battle has began…
I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.
Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.
For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.
I agree these games made big improvements but I still see them as bandages to the inevitable problems that came with random encounters. There’s no undoing the interruption of flow you know.
I think it’s a tradeoff though like I said. Because I don’t know how you can have a combat system as cool and creative as say Undertale (blending turn based and realtime bullet hell) or battle network (blending turn based, real time and card game) without it being completely separate from the overworld.
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