June, 2020, Together Retro - Strategy RPGs!

[BoneSnapDeez]

Late to the party but..................

I'm playing Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. I've already beaten the DS version, but now I'm playing the PlayStation original. While the remake had traditional turn-based JRPG combat, the original game was grid-based.

But calling this a "strategy RPG" is charitable at best. Really, all that one needs to do is "move" a character close to an enemy before attacking. And that's it. The game's kinda fun though, and I like the vocalized songs.

Pretty weird to see a 20-yr-old game with box art consisting of nothing but a pretty anime girl. I wonder who bought this way back then.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I DID. I BOUGHT IT.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Absolutely based.

I feel like I'd be less embarrassed buying that type of game now because I can pull the "yeah.... I collect games, I buy 'em all" card. I dunno if I would have purchased that at age 17 tho.

[pook99]

@spacebooger: If you havent started already play warsong on genesis, it is probably my overall favorite SRPG

[PartridgeSenpai]

I'm on Mission 7 of Book 2 in FE 3. I'm kinda burning out on FE, I think, but I'm gonna try and see this thing through to the end. Perhaps not by the end of the month (in fact at this rate, with like 16 missions left, almost certainly not), but I'd like to see this game through to the end after putting 25 hours into it.

[SpaceBooger]

Appropriate for this month's TR: Bahamut Senki has been translated.

Bahamut Senki (Record of the Bahamut War) is a 1991 turn-based strategy game by Sega for the Mega Drive. In it, up to four players take control of one of eight rulers in the fantasy setting of Bahamut, raise armies, and battle AI opponents and each other until one faction emerges victorious. It's a very complex and advanced game for its time, featuring three rulesets of varying depth, adjustable difficulty, and three different levels of simulation: high-level political management, tactical battles (in both hex-based and simplified variants), and real-time action-based combat between individual units.

This patch fully translates into English both the game itself and its two accompanying instruction manuals, which are essential to understanding how to play. See the readme included in the download for more information.

Link: http://stargood.org/trans/bahamut.php

This looks awesome. It came with a manual and character catalog - check out the character catalog it is crazy detailed and awesome.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Yeah that looks rad. I'll be getting it eventually. Any game with "Bahamut" in the title is guaranteed to be awesome.

I've made a little more progress in Rhapsody. I guess I didn't give the battle system enough credit. There's a sliver more strategy to it than I thought; your lead character can "buff" those who are closest and then reap some stored rewards later. Though, the game's so easy that it almost doesn't matter. Overall, the battles get tedious. Enemies are killed without expending any effort, but you can't simply "mash A" to win, as you need to position and target. It gets old.

Also, the dungeon designs are atrocious. Just stunningly awful.

[BoneSnapDeez]

The pacing in Rhapsody sucks. There are these giant "cutscenes" (just sequences of pop-up dialogue) that go on and on forever. The game's also super-linear at the start, but then it "opens" up and just becomes a confusing mess. Lots of random arbitrary backtracking. Like, at one point you need a key. You get it by visiting a restaurant seen earlier in the game and some NPC is just chilling there and he hands it over. Why?? There's no context.

I ended up consulting some help online. According to le walkthroughs, I've actually been doing some things out-of-order. Like, I played the "hard" parts of the game before the "easier" parts. Could have fooled me.

Hope to have this one wrapped up this evening. I'm ten hours in.

[Ack]

I never did play Rhapsody. I had seen it for sale a few times but never had the money or was spending it on something else I wanted (Star Ocean: Second Story...), so I never got to check it out. How does the PS1 version compare to the later port/remake?

[BoneSnapDeez]

I wouldn't recommend either version, unless you're purposefully looking for a "mindless" 6/10 RPG.

NIS apparently realized how rudimentary the grid-based battles were, as they're stripped out of the DS port and replaced by traditional mash-A affairs. It makes fights go by quicker, but they're even more boring. The DS version is also rather buggy.

I like the story (just finished the PSX original, btw) and the songs with vocals, but the game feels like it has an identity crisis. It's narrative-focused, but the SRPG gameplay doesn't really enhance the story much, it just kind of clutters everything.