Is this game worth $20?

[WiggilyWah]

So I've had this game on my wishlist for a while, and I've never played it before. I'm accustomed to buying most games during a sale since I have so many other games I've yet to try. So my big questions for the game are this:

How does the 360 gamepad support fare?
Is it a grindy JRPG like so many seem to be?
Does it have good length/replay value/new game +?
Any glaring flaws/design choices with the game itself that should be considered?

[RADKILLA[420]]

It is very very very good.a tiny bit grindy,but nothing to complain about,as long as u dont run from every fight you should be fine.the story is great ,the characters are lovable ,its funny.360 game pad works perfect,not sure bout newgame+it is lengthy.good luck gettn every achievement,super hard to do.i rate this 10/10 for a jrpg and i ve played all the great ones since 1990.i love it.id pay 50$ for it.shhhhhhh.... dont tell the devs that tho:Pi beat it on psp,a few years back.and absolutley loved it,till my psp got stolen,so happy its on steam,cant wait for part 2 n 3:)

[Stabbey]

1) No idea, I played with keyboard and mouse, and it definitely has good support for those.

2) It's not grindy, and in fact is anti-grind most of the time. Enemies don't give a lot of XP, and if you're too high a level, they eventually dtop down to only giving you 1 XP. Fight a reasonable amount of enemies and you should be fine. You don't need to fight every encounter unless you want item or sepith( a crafting currency) drops.

3) It's a pretty long game. How long depends on how much you do, but you can easily sink 40 hours into it, if not more, depending on how thourough you are with NPC conversations and side-questing. There is a NG+ mode which lets you change the difficulty, and carry selected things over. There's not really anything different when replaying though.

4) I can't think of anything too bad.

[Imortal12233]

1) Not sure about gamepad as I used mouse/keyboard, but at worst you should be able to do key mapping if you really wanted to mimic keyboard keys.

2) Not grindy at all, If anything I spent more time avoiding enemies throughout the game then looking for more to fight as I moved along with the story.

3) good length at 40+ hours of gameplay and I plan to play newgame+ a bit closer to when SC comes out.

4) Only flaw I can think of is side quest deadline not always being clear. This is irrelevent to a blind run though and for perfect run a guide easily fixes this.

[MichaelXC]

I wouldn't call these flaws, but there are certain quirks you might want to consider:

1. It's VERY text heavy, so if you aren't the reading sort, it could feel taxing.

2. This coupled with the relatively slow start might drive some people away initially. I'd say the story really picks up after chapter 3 (about mid-way). I personally like how the game slowly builds up it's world, but like I said, be prepared for a slow start, and quite a bit of busy work side quests in the beginning.

3. Equipment customization is rather limited in certain aspects (only 3 slots for equipment with rather unimaginative stats), but most of the customization comes in the form of inserting quartz in slots (think materia in FF7), and these, to me, more than make up for the limitation of the former. Need Estelle to be a healer, slot in a water quartz, but which water quartz do I want? HP, Magic def, or Freeze effect for weapons? Want her to be tankier, give her an earth defense quartz. Want fire magic? Pop in an attack quartz, and so forth. Higher tier magic would require combinations of multiple quartz, and you would spend quite some time balancing each characters' quartz to get what you want for your team.

4. No move and attack, meaning you can't move a character to a certain position and attack an enemy on the same turn. You have to choose one or the other, although moving and not attacking would mean your next turn comes up sooner.

5. Also, no defend command, not really a big deal, but just something to mention.

6. Like with a lot of JRPGs, if you can't stand Japanese anime tropes, I wouldn't recommend this game, especially considering how much this game is based on it's characters and story.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

[kikixeni]

Depending on how many sidequest you do (there are a huge amount of optional sidequests that are fun and have good rewards) you could be playing anywhere from 40 to 60 hours on this game. If you're like me, enjoying exploring and talking to all the NPCS (after every plot event, ALL the NPCs in a given area (tons) will change dialogue. Most of them have their own lives/tiny plots, so it's very fun to do) you will sink 55 hours into you first playthrough. So at less than a dollar per hour of pure joy... worth it.

Anyway not much in the way of grinding. Enemy encounters are easily avoidable too (but you shouldn't avoid ALL of them. You just can when you want to). Replay value- the main thing is going back and catching new dialogue and stuff from NPCs. Even minor villagers sometimes say things that foreshadow huge events in the sequel, it's pretty fun to scavenger hunt. Replay is good if you want to do a 100% run, almost impossible without a guide.

No glaring flaws unless you don't like slow starts. The plot for this game extends to the sequel, which is closer to 100 hours, so it's like 100-150 hours of gameplay for the whole story depending on how slow you are. That's why the beginning of First Chapter is so slow... it's building up for a lot.

[Rei dos Vermes]

How does the 360 gamepad support fare?

It works 100%.


Is it a grindy JRPG like so many seem to be?

You have to grind just a little bit when you enter new areas, but killing monsters never felt tiresome in this game.


Does it have good length/replay value/new game +?[b/]

It took me 61 hours to finish the game in the first playthrough. I still haven't started the New Game+ mode.


Any glaring flaws/design choices with the game itself that should be considered?

Yes. It's near impossible to get all the secrets without a guide. Some NPCs will give you secret quests and items on specific parts of the story. So if you want to 100% this game you have to talk with EVERY NPC on the entire region after EVERY cutscene that moves the story forward.

[Bronski]

I use the 360 controller and it works great. I've used the controller more than keyboard and mouse but I would say both are pretty good options for playing the game.

One of the things I really like is that you can save anytime you want. Probably comes from the fact this was originally a PSP game but it looks great on PC.

It starts a little slow but that slow start has a lot that ties into the later stuff (at least what I've played so far). I actually like that they don't just throw you directly into some huge quest to save everything right from the start.

[Erpy]

This was not originally a PSP game. The PSP version was a port of the PC version. This game was released on PC a decade ago.

That said, yes, you can save the game anywhere. What's more, you have nearly unlimited save slots. And the game auto-saves whenever you enter a screen, so even if it crashes you'll hardly ever lose more than a few minutes of playtime.

[T]

Considering the sheer amount of text in the game, and how well the translation/localization is, makes it worth $20 imo.

Although keep in mind this game is literally 10 years old. So if you think of it in terms of that it might seem a little expensive.

However to me, it's the localization and the bugfixes to the original that make it worth the $20.

And yes, the PSP version was a port of the original PC version. The PSP version just happened to get released in North America first.

[TheSkrin]

1. Gamepad support was passable at release and has since improved to "great" status. No complaints there.

2. I never once had to grind in this game.

3. It took me about 65 hours to complete all the quests and finish the game. It has a New Game+, but I can't think of anything you could do differently in a followup playthrough. A replay's not really justified for this one.

4. At release there were several menu problems and random crashes, but these have all been fixed through constant patching, so now I've no noteworthy criticisms.

[Zaratus]

RE: grinding

The game also has an optional feature called "Retry Offset". (Can turn it off in the menu somewhere) Basically, when you get game over and choose to retry a battle, it'll lower the enemy stats a little bit. A little less attack, defense and speed. If you lose again? It'll lower the stats a little bit more. And so on, until you win the fight. Of course, it is faster to just win the first time around, but if you manage to get in over your head, or just get really unlucky, you don't have to worry about just giving up to grind a bit. Of course, you never really have to worry about lost progress, due to the very frequent autosaves.

[Midnight Meows]

WiggilyWah eredeti hozzászólása:

So I've had this game on my wishlist for a while, and I've never played it before. I'm accustomed to buying most games during a sale since I have so many other games I've yet to try. So my big questions for the game are this:

How does the 360 gamepad support fare?
Is it a grindy JRPG like so many seem to be?
Does it have good length/replay value/new game +?
Any glaring flaws/design choices with the game itself that should be considered?

1.) My guess is very good. I'm using a Nyko PS3 pad which Windows identifies as a generic USB game pad. It works perfectly fine with Trails. I've also used the mouse on occasion out of curiosity and it appears to work just fine.

2.) Thus far no. I haven't finished the game yet but I've felt no need to grind. Note that I enjoy doing the Bracers Guild monster hunt stuff and this keeps my characters up in levels and in certain items.

3.) I haven't finished the game yet. The prologue itself was as long as some modern games are from start to finish, though that's more of a symptom of modern game design. Heh.

4.) The combat is too slow, IMO. There is no option to skip combat animations (not that I can find anyway), and no "auto fight" feature (where you press a button and everyone does melee). So for every fight you're watching the same combat animations, the same camera zoom in-and-out. It's annoying. The combat can therefore become repetitive. In terms of technical problems, however, I have not yet had a single bug.

edit: typo fix

[WiggilyWah]

I went ahead and picked it up yesterday after some of your guys responses. I'm curious if this follows traditional JRPG mechanics in the fact that you can find items by exploring environments (like a bookshelf, barrels, other random objects). I'm still in the prologue and finished exploring the city in which the Bracer's Guild is, but didn't find a single item. Are items to be found while exploring?

[kikixeni]

No items in random objects, but there a treasure chests hidden behind trees and stuff on the field. Use the camera swivelling to find them. Make sure you speak to the chests after you take the item, lol

[SchwartZero]

WiggilyWah eredeti hozzászólása:

Are items to be found while exploring?

Yes, you find them inside chests in dungeons and out in the field.

After all, bracers aren't kleptomaniacs.