General JRPG topic

Has anyone here ever played Adventure Bar Story?

I have realized that farming for TP-recovery materials in EO IV is really demanding (you need three Eerie Scales from a FOE located in the last floor of the Bonus Dungeon. And those scales are conditional drops, meaning that even if you nail the necessary ciscumstances under which they might appear,.... they still might not. You could farm Formaldehyde to guarantee their appearance, but for that you have to farm the Horrific Breath material from another FOE from this dungeon. Seriously, all of this is a damn mess).

Soooooo I decided to just man up and keep leveling up my party to naturally increase the base amount of TP, which as always is a painful, boring process. My lovely Imperial lady is already at Level 99, while the Fortress, Medic and Runemaster are all Level 98. The problem will come with the Arcanist: Still only at Level 87. I gave the Runemaster a ring that drastically increases her TP, which right now clocks at 959. These are my current stats:

• Imperial, Level 99 - 576 HP, 217 TP, Attack 543, Defense 421.
• Arcanist, Level 87 - 495 HP, 360 TP, Attack 503, Defense 370.
• Runemaster, Level 98 - 363 HP, 959 TP, Attack 457, Defense 319
• Fortress, Level 98 - 999 HP, 234 TP, Attack 500, Defense 482
• Medic, Level 98 - 529 HP, 530 TP, Attack 508, Defense 307

Now, I have heard that the material you get from the Warped Savior can be used to craft "the ultimate weapon" (the EO wiki is vague on this), but that defeating the Fallen One gives you a very powerful Burst skill. Is it easier to defeat the FO to use its burst against WS, or is it easier to defeat WS to use the powerful weapon from it against the FO? Both monsters kicked my ass back when most of my party was Level 90.

EDIT: Also, whenever I finish a battle, will the experience points be distributed only among the explorer who are under Level 99? Or will the Level 99 Imperial receive points as well, only to put them into waste? If it's the latter, I'll have to drop the Imperial until the other explorers reach Level 99, which will only drag even further the process as the game is already hard enough with five explorers, and more so with fewer than that.

edited 8th Sep '17 4:00:39 PM by MyFinalEdits

I have it. I've gotten pretty far in it, but I am getting bored with it because I've plateaued in cooking contests and always place last, which makes for a real slog.

Found out just now that you can turn off the voices in Arc Rise Fantasia. I'll have to remember that when I finally get around to finishing it. Or maybe not, since it's still good for a laugh. Nice to know I have the option, though.

...Anyone know if it affects voice clips during battles, though? I remember that sometimes, if certain characters ended up silenced, I'd just leave them that way so I wouldn't have to listen to them. And by "certain characters," I mean Niko.

One other thing: that game was trying really, really hard to be like a Tales game, wasn't it? Not gameplay-wise, but a lot of other aspects definitely give off that vibe. I didn't know it at the time, since I hadn't gotten into the Tales series when I was last playing it, but it's really obvious in retrospect.

edited 8th Sep '17 9:09:01 PM by SapphireBlue

Yeah, it's pretty much a Tales game with the battle system switched out.

It's not at all a bad game, it was just handled by Ignition, who really didn't make a good case for themselves as localizers while they were still active. Arc Rise Fantasia: Script was fine, but with ghastly voice acting. (I'm still annoyed that Xseed was originally going to translate it, but it got handled by Ignition instead) Nostalgia: Again, the script was fine, but they introduced a game breaking bug that was in a third of the game carts. Lux-Pain: Probably not translated by a native english speaker, considering all the weird word fusions scattered through the script. (I don't think "slunched" is a word) Muramasa: Way stripped down script that removed basically all the personality. That wasn't entirely their fault, more technical limitations, but the weird over-formal writing didn't help. Oh, and El Shaddai which is weird enough that it's really hard to figure out how good the translation even is.

That reminds me about Ys 8 which will be coming out in a week. Xseed didn't get the license this time, Nisa has it instead. Nisa's style can definitely work, especially with comedic games, but Ys though not the most story-heavy action RPG series around, still has built up a substantial number of characters and terms that need to be consistent.

Some fans I've seen seem to be thinking it's why Xseed's doubled down on the Trails of Cold Steel PC releases instead.

NISA has been really hurting for franchises to translate ever since they lost Neptunia thus the hijacking of Ys.

Rumor had it that NISA was trying to get the license for a PC version of Cold Steel and Sky 3rd under X Seed's noses but X Seed doubled down and did it themselves. Good thing too since NISA would have censored Sky 3 like they censor everything else.

One hopes that they try for Ao and Zero then it would force X Seed to double down again but that would be a huge undertaking for who ever got it as the pair's script is 8x the size of FFVII's. [1]

edited 9th Sep '17 7:55:23 AM by Memers

Uh, I don't think NISA is really that censor-happy. There's Criminal Girls 2 (technically 1 as well, but that's a lot less...overt about it) and Mugen Souls. That's pretty much it. And while they jumped the gun on Criminal Girls 2, I totally get why they did it for Mugen Souls.

What the hell would they even have censored in Sky 3? Last time I checked, Falcom doesn't generally release games with incredibly blunt BDSM or way too explicit underage bathing scenes. If your talking about dialogue or content, they released the Witch and the Thousand Knight and while the translation wasn't great, they didn't shy away from the horrifying fate of one of the enemies.

Now, if you're bringing up their track record of introducing annoying bugs, then I could get it, or their habit of inserting jokes (which is a thing, just not nearly as major as people make it out to be) then I get it, but try not to overstate a thing that isn't nearly as widespread as some make it seem.

Well Sky 3 was censored on the PSP and Vita in Japan, the scene has not been in any version of the game except for the original Japanese PC version. X Seed explicitly left the scene intact, despite how disturbing it is, which is good considering how much it adds to the character and the resolution to the plot in the Crossbell duology.

Major MAJOR Sky 3 spoilers.... it involves a 5 year old getting sold to a brothel by her parents and seeing her sanity slip as she invents multiple personalities to deal with what they do to her and watch as they slowly die off one by one. Then being 'rescued' and taken by an evil organization and experimented on further and turned into a precocious killing machine with a giant mech and has doctorates in Science, Mathematics, and Information Theory... all at the age of 11.

It's fucked up but it really only adds to how important the MC's attempts at befriending of her is, how much she just can not understand, and the payoff in the Crossbell duology is. The only CG is her sprawled out on the ground covered in cuts she did to herself to not lose herself completely.

edited 9th Sep '17 9:05:50 AM by Memers

Oh, okay. That makes more sense then.

Yeah it was so disturbing and gripping at the same time, it turned one of the more annoying characters in the game into one of my favorites as everything now made sense. Without that scene I still would probably still hate the character.

-*Major annoyance how spoiler tags don't seem to cover multiple paragraphs....*

Re: ARF

I should probably clarify that I got most of the way through during the last time I was playing it. I just didn't finish.

And no, it's not a bad game at all. It's quite good. The voice acting is the only thing that's bad about it.

The voice acting is actually weirdly bad. Everything about it is weird. Strange unplaceable accents, the one guy who seems to know what he's doing sounding inexplicably similar to Adam West, really weird pauses like the actors are trying to match lipsync in scenes without any and so on. It actually gets better as the game goes on, so what I think happened is that Ignition hired a bunch of English-speaking ex-pats in Japan (which happens sometimes. It's how the voice acting for the lead in Silent Hill 2 was done) and had as the voice director a new person who doesn't really speak English very well and who was picking up how to do the job as time went on.

A high-profile example of that is Final Fantasy X. The voice director, by all accounts, was completely useless and barely gave any directions. It's why half the voice acting in that game has so many weird hang-ups...and all the hang-ups are completely different between actors. The difference with X is that most of the cast were experienced voice actors, so they could get around the bad director to a degree but in Arc Rise Fantasia, they couldn't due to inexperience.

That is something to remember. Much of the time, bad voice acting is the result of the director. A really good voice director can get a good performance out of someone who usually isn't very good, but a bad voice director can ruin a good performance, if only by not doing enough takes or by listening to the wrong person.

A good example of the latter is Revolutionary Girl Utena. (Not a game, but the idea holds up.) That show has a pretty awful dub. It's incredibly stilted and the actors do this weird thing where they sound like really hammy wooden boards. The first arc of the show was dubbed on its own, and that was probably just inexperience all around. The rest of the show and the movie should have been a road to improvement, through experience if nothing else, but Central Park Media got Kunihiko Ikuhara, creator of the show, to sit in on the dubbing and give his advice...and he doesn't really speak English. So his advice usually revolved around sounding like actors in a really experimental type of theatre popular at the time, almost exclusively in Tokyo. It sounds really bad in English because the voice cadences are completely wrong. (My source: the interview booklets that came with the Nozomi release of the show.)

I didn't realize that the directing was the major issue, but I'm not surprised. Most of the voices themselves were OK - it's the acting that was awful. Some of the actors seemed to get a little better as the game went on, and a few of them (Serge, Leslie, and Alf come to mind) weren't all that bad in the first place.

I'd have gotten Arc Rise Fantasia if I'd had the patience to deal with the voices to be honest.

It seems like it's a game that needed a good dub, since there weren't many JRPG's at all for the Wii.

Well, I was just asking. I guess I'm alone in this.

I just remembered another game that clearly had almost the exact same problem. Baten Kaitos. It's a really good game, but the voice acting is awful and, unless you set the sound to surround, everyone sounds like they're speaking through a tube. The tube part was apparently intentional (something about you listening in from another dimensional plane or something) but the rest is really similar.

I was thinking the same thing, actually - I'm a huge fan of Baten Kaitos. Almost brought it up in my last post, but decided against it.

And yeah, the voice acting in the first one is about the same level of bad, for very similar reasons. Varying levels of bad, mind you, but still not more than average at best. The rest of the game is fantastic, though, and it's worth mentioning that its prequel had much better voice acting.

@MyFinalEdits: I'm afraid I've never played Etrian Oddyssey, so I can't really help you.

edited 9th Sep '17 8:13:24 PM by SapphireBlue

A couple weeks late, but I wanted to say something about the voice acting in Kingdom Hearts mentioned a page or two ago.

The VA work is honestly fine-to-good for the most part, with the only real jank coming from some awkward dialogue/scripting and thus not really the VAs' fault. Only two characters (Aqua and Terra) actually have consistently terrible delivery, though them being playable characters and leads is kind of damning.

edited 9th Sep '17 9:53:20 PM by Karxrida

They got much better in 0.2, IMO.

This is something I've noticed in a lot of Japanese fan games. Even when they somehow manage to get A-list voice actors, the performances end up all weird because they're being directed by complete amateurs. I find this especially ironic because I'm sure they were big fans of the voice actors, but they overlooked a key component of the process.

See Final Fantasy 13 as a good example. There's talent in that English cast, but the direction from Japan pretty much shot themselves in the foot through no fault of the actors. Or P5 where a lot of strange demands from Japan still couldn't get in the way of good voice direction.

So, I've managed to buy Tales of Xillia and Legend of Mana from the Playstation store. I can't wait to try them out but I still have to finish Drakengard 3 and Persona 4.

So apparently The Last Story is XSEED's best selling game. Any plan to make it an Artifact Title yet?

What, "Final Fantasy" ain't enough for ya?