look I've been sick all day and it was this or skyrim mods okay

lmaooooo this opening is everything I could have asked for

literally the first piece of audio in the entire game is that General-MIDI-ass plastic "violin" lead

it's so perfect

I drew this character on lined notebook paper in 2004

villager immediately outside your house: WOW IT REALLY SUCKS HOW SEVEN YEARS AGO A PORTAL OPENED AND PEOPLE STARTED GETTING TRANSFORMED INTO DEMONS

the best part is the opening cutscene was this super vague in-medias-res flashback with a bunch of mysterious stuff happening and then this rando NPC immediately goes "AS YOU KNOW [explains exactly what happened]"

Characters and static geo apparently use two different shadow maps, and they're just multiplied together instead of combined

can't remember the last time a game did this tbh

I think it mostly went away as games started to rely less on baked shadows? I remember even the Overgrowth blog talking about combining shadow maps with baked lightmaps in like 2009 though

this is teenage anime grimdark as heck i love it

it just introduced a mechanic whereby you can trade HP for damage which is always an extremely rad way to do combat design

JRPG update:
Less than three hours in we have established that
1. The world is overrun with demons
2. The real villains are still, as always, the Catholics

oh no shops have levels

leveling up merchants is... probably THE most boring RPG mechanic I can think of that's somehow in dozens of games?

oh no there's cooking

also the entire premise of the story is that this grimdark anime girl is cursed to eat people's souls

but like you can still cook soup for +3.5% cooldown reduction or whatever

happy to report that the protagonist's dialogue primarily consists of repeating whatever the other person just said back at them as a question

I equipped glasses on Edgelord Beltjacket and now she is Cute

I played through like 95% of Vesperia without understanding how equipment mastery worked

looking forward to playing this one with characters that actually work correctly

This game keeps introducing more combat-system complexities and providing zero incentive to use them or even understand how they're supposed to work?

the protagonist has a button that makes her do like 4x damage and there's basically no reason not to just push it forever

like using it drains HP and makes enemies hit harder, so like it's introduced as this cool risk/reward thing, but you heal after getting a kill with it and it nukes most enemies to death in like three seconds

protagonist heroically saved a character from falling off a bridge and then they immediately jumped off of the same bridge but on purpose

this wasn't presented as a joke or anything it was literally just a thing that happened in this videogame

I'm like 9 hours into this game and this is basically gibberish? There have been dozens of ""tutorial"" popups like this and I'm still just holding RT and mashing A and winning every fight

if I expend the effort to parse this, "influencing the efficacy of title skills" is hilarious bc title skills are mostly single-digit percentage buffs to extremely specific and situational stats

Also "artes" are literally just attacks, so as near as I can tell this is an incredibly obnoxious and overcomplicated way of encoding "some of your buffs will get a bit stronger as the game goes on" into the combat system

I don't think this is even something you could min/max? It's basically just regular character advancement stuff made annoying and unpredictable

Okay here's a thesis: If you're making a systems-heavy game, please ensure that your systems have enough immediate and obvious results to justify the cognitive load they place on your players

A fun constant of JRPG settings is that political power maps directly to level of ability in single combat

I would venture describe this waterfall as "half-assed"

Super Mario Odyssey (2017)

wow a sewer dungeon full of slimes

who could have predicted this

Interestingly, a bit of Lore has stated that there were about 1.2 million people living on the continent on which the game takes place, and about half were killed by demons 10 years before the game starts

world population of 600k sounds... reasonable for a JRPG tbh

like JRPGs are always these weird settings where there are like... five cities on the entire planet, surrounded by infinite forests covered in level 80 monsters

In this case they just made it canon that there're barely enough humans to keep a society functioning

lmao a giant boss showed up and the whole party was like "nah we don't need to fight this" and just left

the writing's kind of struggling to keep a consistent tone but the main characters are all supposed to be grimdark antiheroes and occasionally it does a really good job lol

so this dude just identified the dungeon we're in based on its architecture, which is pretty remarkable given that it's the same tileset that made up the random sewer we crawled through a few hours ago

to be honest this game like... doesn't really have art direction? Like it's got that X Box Game aesthetic where like a "rock" or "grass" is a lumpy blob of triangles with a photo of a rock or some grass mapped on top

like the whole game p much looks like this promo(!) shot:

which like, fine, it's a low-budget JRPG right

but like they're re-releasing Vesperia and LOOK HOW PRETTY VESPERIA WAS

Vesperia's ten years old but it's gorgeous; all the textures are painted and it's got all these neat composed-to-screen color gradients everywhere and the environments are creative and compliment the stylization of characters and aaaa

and like it's still very much a mid-budget JRPG with tons of recycled tiles and palette-swapped enemies and all that, but it's got TASTE

no idea what happened between that and Berseria but Berseria's... honestly pretty bad most of the time :(

Alright now that Sony's done telling us about 4K HDR murder I'm back to tweeting about this bad cute JRPG

I found Valley of Drakes

this game has a bonus currency named "tales coins" that's used for items like costumes

while exploring you'll very rarely find a drop that gives you about 6 of them

or you can repeatedly play a minigame that gives you 110 of them in eight seconds

uhh maaaaybe tone down the shadow bias a bit namco

huh actually on closer inspection it's not bias; the shadow is ALSO correctly cast under the cat

I guess it's just weird artifact of using a separate shadow map for characters? That whole side of the box SHOULD be in shadow, but since it receives and doesn't cast we get... this

(Confession: I've never actually implemented shadow mapping myself so I COULD be super wrong here

p sure two maps with inconsistent casters/receivers would do this though)

I'm about 25 hours into this game and it's still ROUTINELY popping up completely bonkers explanations of new mechanics like this

I raised the difficulty a notch several hours ago and I've still won every fight by holding RT and mashing one of four face buttons

Also we were gonna take a pirate ship to go do Plot Stuff but then the NPC crew spontaneously became sick for no reason so we had to go to a town to buy medicine and the dude in the town is like "sorry we're out of medicine bc it grows in a forest and there's a demon there"

I mean I get that JRPG plots are *fundamentally* about preventing you from doing whatever you're supposed to do until you beat up a bunch of sentient mushrooms in a forest and then kill a boss, over and over again for 60 hours, but you could be a bit less blatant about it

one of the characters yells "victory is ours" when he wins a fight and I can't stop thinking about the Moonbase Alpha voice going "VICTORY IS MY!"

we play jrpgs for the writing

this game has some seriously odd water rendering

reflections are distorted by waves but everything *under* the water isn't refracted

Rather than a cubemap or SSR they're doing actual planar reflections, i.e. redrawing the entire scene upside down

Reflections thus look p good when they're the only thing you can see clearly, but if there's nontrivial geometry underwater, like in that shot, it gets super weird

Also those boats are animated so they don't have reflections; apparently only static meshes are drawn in the reflection pass

seems like a p unnecessary optimization given that every mesh in the game is like twelve polygons, but meh who knows I'm not the engine dev

a character unlocked a new move and now when he attacks he yells DIE OR BE KILLED

this is how shadows work right

this is how sunbeams work right

okay so there's a kid in this game, who's voiced by a 30-something-year-old woman, which is normal for voice acting, but this actress has somehow practiced the ability to crack her voice on every vowel to mimic puberty and it's utterly excruciating to listen to

like this is inducing an actual physical flinching reflex whenever she talks; I am not using hyperbole here

gotta be honest I'm spending most of my time playing this game thinking about how much better Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was

Tales has a super-attack system that's based on a gauge that takes multiple encounters to charge, which means you never use it ever bc it's too precious to waste (and does nowhere near enough damage to justify its charge time)

Xenoblade 2 *requires* you to use your strongest attacks as soon as they're charged bc they reset after every fight. It's so unbelievably better than every other JRPG with multi-encounter gauges that I can't even take them seriously anymore

(okay in fairness XB2 does also have one super gauge that persists across multiple encounters, but I give it a pass bc it's a shared resource for several different actions, and it still charges fast enough to use multiple times in bigger fights)

I genuinely don't think *anyone* actually enjoys dealing with the economy of really-slow-charging super gauges, but it's this completely unexamined design component that consistently shows up in dozens of JRPGs despite being terrible