-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Resetera's Top 101 Essential RPGs - Final Update. Top 101 up plus many extras.
- Thread starter kswiston
- Start date
SMT fans when a character is friendly towards them or it's suggested that friendship is beneficial.
So action-RPGs don't exist at all for you? All RPGs are turn-based? Serious question.
That's a fair point, but you still haven't explained what IS an RPG to you. You're just saying "action games with progression elements aren't enough to be RPGs". OK. So, what is? And to be clear, I know people are sick of those "what is a true RPG and what isn't" discussions sometimes, but, if you go as far as saying Bloodborne isn't an RPG, I'm legitimately confused.
I played FFVI for the first time a couple of years ago and honestly I don't think I'll ever understand the love for it. It was fine, but I'd put it near the bottom of my personal FF rankings. Definitely better than XIII and VIII, but I'd point to VII and IX over it any day of the week. Even IV and V, honestly. VI just feels kinda messy to me in comparison, which made sense once I learned about its development cycle.
If they scrapped half the playable characters and focused in I think I'd have enjoyed my time with it a lot more.
If they scrapped half the playable characters and focused in I think I'd have enjoyed my time with it a lot more.
I have a lot of problems with Persona 3 but no one in their right mind can deny that these and like 80% of the rest of the soundtrack are bangers
Apocalypse's theme is amazing and yet so disappointing. It combines the series oppressiveness with a sombreness we don't usually see, because the focus has shifted to the people living in post-apocalyptic Tokyo and the struggles and losses they go through just to survive. And then the game has way to much "power of friendship" stuff going on and shallow writing with weak thematic foundations. The song has so much melancholic promise that the writing completely fails to live up to.
The composers and artists (well, the artists make it most of the time, anyway; the composers are flawless) are so fucking on point, but clearly something failed to communicate to the writers. The newer crew writing SMT needs a good dragging-off-to-the-side by the old guard and a stern talking-to, because they clearly missed something that the rest of the younger crew had no huge difficulty picking up.
P3 is my least favourite of the core Persona games (ie 3, 4 and 5) but I'll agree it has the best OST of the bunch and Battle for Everyone's Soul is up there with Dancing Mad as GOAT final boss anthem
I thought Nocturne was very tedious to play though because of its battle frequency. Same goes for DDS.
Great atmosphere yeah but SMT IV is great on that front too, has better gameplay and a better OST :P
By the way I bought Xenoblade 2 yesterday. The plan was to buy Octopath, but I couldn't find it so I went with xeno 2.
It better be as good as Era is telling me :P
It better be as good as Era is telling me :P
Yup it's the first one I posted!. It's so fucking good.
This is very debatable. While Nocturne doesn't quite keep up its difficulty all the way through, it never cracks like SMT IV does. The latter is just much worse balanced and smirk is a bad mechanic (that would later be fixed by Apocalypse). Demons also feel completely interchangeable in SMT IV since they can learn everything. Couple that with IV's inferior dungeon design and I don't think it beats Nocturne at anything besides QOL improvements to fusions and stuff like that.
An argument can definitely be made for IV:A being the best playing game in the franchise on a purely mechanical level, though I still give the nod to the PS2 era (and possibly Strange Journey) because Apocalypse's dungeons are still fundamentally broken by save anywhere and no penalty for death.
fucking lol
:O
GIVE IT
But murdering each other is the only way we know to resolve conflict! :(
Still hands-down my favourite final boss theme from any game.
Pretty much how I felt too, except I still preferred FF8 over it
This might be an uncommon opinion, but I liked Nocturne's smaller demon roster. Having like 400+ demons in IV and IVA made everything feels so transient and meaningless. The demons are supposed to feel like transient tools you use and discard, but the sheer number in IV and IVA blows past that and just has everything feel interchangeable. IVA improves this a bit with the type rules, but I still think the optimal demon roster size is somewhere in between Nocturne and IV.
Also I can't ever agree with the idea that IV plays better than Nocturne because fuck the loss of the VIT stat. Horrible decision. IVA has enough other improvements that it plays much better than IV, but still, bring my VIT stat back! >:(
I'm very scared New Vegas will not make it! Haven't checked the voting thread so I legit have no idea lol.
I might start panicking if it gets to the top 10 without an appearance, but I can't imagine it not placing, it seems to be the most beloved game in the series.
Seriously, I know Kaneko was heavily involved with the scenario design for SMTIV. Bring that man back just long enough to have him lecture everybody, dammit.
(Though that image is from TMS, which is just a weird, weird offshoot, not part of SMT).
(Though that image is from TMS, which is just a weird, weird offshoot, not part of SMT).
Ok if Nocturne's #22 then we can all at least agree that the Demi-Fiend/Hitoshura, the MC, is the most powerful RPG MC.
Not only is he the strongest optional superboss in a different game but he's also arguably the hardest RPG superboss of all time.
Suck on that Crono!
Not only is he the strongest optional superboss in a different game but he's also arguably the hardest RPG superboss of all time.
Suck on that Crono!
The focus or priorities of the game should determine it. The focus of Bloodborne is the twitch action. Timing dodge rolls, learning the boss patterns to avoid getting hit and knowing when to attack... those are hallmarks of an action game.
Strategy games like Tactics and Ogre Battle are on the edge of being RPGs, similarly Ys and Zelda on the edge as action games with some RPG elements. The focus of Tactics is the strategy, the focus of Ys is the action.
The focus of an RPG is time in menus (battle, dialog, shop/crafting, party/character management, map, quest journal).
Hmm, OK. I could see that argument being made though I don't quite agree. And what if I spend a lot of time building/min-maxing my Bloodborne character? :) And where do games like Dragon's Dogma fit in? What about Fallout 3 where you can build entirely for combat and choose to focus on that?
I don't know, how many RPG protagonists
collapse the infinite multiverse into a state of primordial chaos and lead the legions of Hell to kill the consciousness of the multiverse itself?
Because I feel like it can't be all that many.
(Is Demi canonically the most powerful SMT protagonist? SJ and SMTIV don't come close, SMTIVA and Devil Survivor Overclocked's Chaos route come closer but don't make it, Raidou doesn't make it, and I don't know enough about I and II. What happens to Seraph in DDS2 is probably the closest comparison, and I feel like that's still less ridiculous).
Last edited:
Difficulty is irrelevant when one game is playable while the other isn't :D Haven't played 4A yet but I don't consider Nocturne to have better level design either. And I prefer demons/fusions in IV too.
A remake might change my mind though, it desperately needs it !
SMT4 can't possibly have better gameplay than Nocturne when it's so fundamentally broken with everything being a glass cannon, very inferior difficulty balance and partner AI giving your enemies free smirks due to RNG. It had great ideas for sure, and Apocalypse enhances them a lot, but it still misses the mark, IMO, because much like with many other elements in IV, it bites more than it can chew.
Fusion search makes demon fusion more convenient for sure, but that doesn't make Nocturne's system bad at all, it's just a QoL feature.
Fusion search makes demon fusion more convenient for sure, but that doesn't make Nocturne's system bad at all, it's just a QoL feature.
I don't think it's necessarily tied to demon count but yeah, demons in Nocturne feel like actual distinct creatures, whereas in the IV games they're just a bunch of parameters with different PNGs attached.
His ability to pull off that look with the shirtless + shorts combo already makes him the strongest without equal, but these are strong arguments too, yes.
This is a bad meme image and you should feel bad for posting it.
Dragon's Dogma is a good one... but it has it's reputation for it's action, and that is the focus. The player character is more or less similar to a souls game, an avatar for the player to customize and equip with gear or abilities. Not too much dialog or time in menus.
The BGS Fallout games are RPGs through and through- VATS is even a menu option for the battles.
Can't say I agree. It's more menu-driven than Souls games, maybe even the like of FO3. Lots of quest logging, map consulting, crafting, pawn tweaking, numbers crunching, etc. It's as much an RPG as Skyrim. Not calling Dragon's Dogma an RPG sounds honestly beyond weird at this point. Have you actually played it, btw?
I mean, Aleph and Nanashi did beat
God
receiving help from the previous game's protagonist and party makes him look a bit less impressive than Aleph
edit: tags are hard
I suspect SMT5 will be closer in tone to SMT4: Apocalypse than to Nocturne. But I guess we'll see.
Blah blah blah, Atlus' greatest game, blah blah blah, "I challenge you to a duel", blah blah blah, SMT vs Persona, etc
No. Those who have not SEEN must go now and devote 60 hours to this greatness. Swallow the magatama, become one with this brutal, lonesome, artistic champion.
Fun fact: that's a Mac text-to-speech option chosen cuz it sounds like the Voice Of The Legion.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No. Those who have not SEEN must go now and devote 60 hours to this greatness. Swallow the magatama, become one with this brutal, lonesome, artistic champion.
Fun fact: that's a Mac text-to-speech option chosen cuz it sounds like the Voice Of The Legion.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wouldn't say Last Story is a friends on an adventure type vibe.
but It does have one of the best parties though. With good interactions.
robbed
Nocturne and Xenogears out of top 20, sad. I guess in the end you can't beat popularity.
P3 is an interesting game, but probably not something I'd put in top 50.
P3 is an interesting game, but probably not something I'd put in top 50.
But it's not wrong though.
Right, but the distinction is that Aleph and Nanashi
go after YHVH, while Demi goes after the Great Will/Axiom itself.
Aleph and Nanashi are no pushovers, but there's an order of magnitude difference there. Going after an exceptional powerful entity that is sometimes an aspect of a thing vs going after the mother thing.
Edit:
By the rules of the Amala Multiverse, Nanashi is still playing the Axiom's game. I can't speak to the specifics of Aleph's situation. Demi seeks to burn down the game.
Yes, loved it. There is time in menus, more than a souls game, but again the focus is the action. Dragon's Dogma and Bloodborne exist in a new action game space, players want more depth and longevity but still want great action games. RPG mechanics are a perfect fit.
oh no.
Well, as someone who also got influenced by online people. Have a lot of patience, the tutorials are frustratingly bad and don't rage on the gacha-esque mechanics
And if you're used to deal with anime tropes, the game has them all. From the best to the worst. Most characters are walking archetypes.
And don't play in english, japanese is the way to go.
If you can look past that, and how janky it is, you will find a surprisingly excellent game that only makes you wish it was better than it actually is
Apocalypse makes things a little murky though because
despite going after the Great Will, Demi-Fiend still serves under Lucifer as a general and if Apocalypse is to be trusted Lucifer is just a chump under YHVH's will, so the Demi-Fiend is bound to fail spectacularly against something even greater than him. Speaking of which, man, I still don't like what they did with Lucifer's role in Apocalypse. It thematically undermines so much and the trade-off just isn't worth it imo.
What are the RPG releases for the rest of 2018? There's the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Enhanced Edition, Pokemon Let's Go, and then ...?
Oh yeah! Can't believe that one slipped my mind. I'm super excited for new DQ. Even I was more interested in the 3DS version that won't be localized :(
Dragon Quest XI, Yakuza Kiwami 2 (since we're counting those), MHW PC, Valkyria Chronicles 4, the standalone XB2 story DLC, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, The World Ends With You for Switch, AC: Odyssey if those count and probably plenty more
It's just gonna get better from here on out
Disco Elysium is a notable RPG coming out soonish, not sure if it's 2019 at this point though.