Just finished Final Fantasy V for the first time, looking for more old school JRPGs to play now...

The Game Room
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So, I just finished playing through Final Fantasy V for the very first time, and it ended up being just “OK”. The Job/Ability system was pretty complex and I’m definitely glad I used a walkthrough to get the most out of the game. The story was meh, the characters largely forgettable honestly, but some of the music was outstanding and Gilgamesh was a lot of fun.

It got me in the mood for more old school, turn based JRPGs, but ideally something even better. I’ve (presumably) played all the big ones already… because this is one of my favorite genres. I obviously haven’t played them all though, so I’m looking for suggestions.

Here’s what I have played and how much I loved them, to help with any suggestions you might have:

Final Fantasy IV, VI, and VIII: Three of my favorite video games of all time. Played them each several times. The stories and plots and characters of these games are fantastic, especially VIII.

Phantasy Star 1 through 4: Also great. Love 'em all.

Crono Trigger and Crono Cross: I like them both and think Cross has one of the best battle systems ever conceived.

Lunar 2: Eternal Blue: Love it, love it, love it. The auto-battle functionality is great, and has the most memorable and lovable characters of any of the RPGs. Never played the Silver Star Story though… worth it?

Shining In The Darkness: An oldie and a goodie, 1st person perspective dungeon crawler. Unique to me, though I know there are other games in the genre that use this perspective, I haven’t played any.

Shining Force 1 and 2: Amazingly good tactical RPGs. I really dig 'em.

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: More excellent tactical RPGs although permanent character death kind of was a pain in the ass. Are other games in this series worth playing?

I have given a good effort at trying Final Fantasy 1 and 7 (put several hours into each), but couldn’t get into them. Blasphemy, I know (especially in the case of 7). Never even played 2, 3, 9, 10, etc for a minute. I’ve also tried FF Tactics but couldn’t get into that (despite my overall love for the genre).

How are the Breath of Fire games? I’ve never played any, but am kind of interested if any are top tier and worth my time. Legend of Dragoon? Xenogears? Lufia? Disgaea? Never played those either and I know they are well known.

This may seem odd but games with great and memorable soundtracks are the ones that really hook me, so heavy weight goes to games that fit that criteria. Second is the plot and characters. The battle system itself is largely irrelevant to me (though a great/unique one can definitely be nice for a change of pace).

Thanks in advance for the suggestions. And, also feel free to discuss FF V too. I have no desire to go through and play it again, but with so many Jobs and Abilities to try, is it worth it?

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If you haven’t played Chrono Trigger yet, I think you definately should.

If you want to go for the less obvious, I would heartily recommend ‘Treasure of the Rudras’ (Rudra_no_Hihō). It’s by Square as well, and it’s one of their last games on the SNES. They squeezed pretty much every last bit of awesomeness out of the machine. There’s an excellent fan translation.

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Good battle system and forgettable characters are typical of the old odd numbered FFs. The job system really is amazing though

Totally worth it! Same sense of humor, same memorable characters, same super-hard difficulty. Get the SSS Complete if you can

Keep trying! Especially with 7.

I’ve played Breath of Fire 3 and 4. Pretty good games, especially 3. I enjoy the fishing minigame. I remember it being quite long too, so there’s that. Definitely the 16 bit RPGs weren’t afraid to make you do some grinding.

Legend of Dragoon has nice graphics. It tried to be a FFVII ripoff and partially succeeded in the graphics department. I’ve only played it once when it came out though, and its been like 15 years, so take that for what its worth

Another oldschool game you can try is one of the Dragon Quest games. They are known for grinding and difficulty. I think I have DQ6. Reminds me of FFV because of the job system

Listen to me very carefully. Go to Amazon or ebay and buy Xenogears NOW. It is one of the best RPGs every fucking made. Ever. Its long as hell at 60-70 hours, has a soundtrack as memorable as any of the FF games, and goes deep into themes that will make you think. Get this game NOW. Your life is not complete until you play this game. Go now! Get it! Buy 2!

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Haha, now that’s the kind of resounding recommendation I was looking for. I’ve heard good things already about Xenogears but I think you’ve convinced me that this needs to be my next old school RPG.

Also, thank you for going through my entire OP and addressing each part of it!

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Secret of Mana for the SNES is not turn based, but it’s wonderful. It’s a Square game. There are three playable characters, and once you get a character in your group, s/he stays in the group. All of the characters can use any of the weapons, but some of the armor is specific to one character or another. The Sprite uses mostly offensive magic, the Girl uses mostly healing/support magic, and the Boy doesn’t use magic at all. You can play alone or with another person, and you can let the AI control the physical fighting of the one or two characters that you aren’t actually controlling. You’ll have to switch to a magic user to use magic, though. The story is great, though it’s a typical Square story. There’s some grinding, but you don’t have to spend days at it.

The secret to playing FFTactics, IMO, is to get job points without getting as many experience points…this means that basically you do job actions while keeping an opponent alive as long as possible. This also means that corpses have enough time to turn into treasure for many of your foes…which can make a big difference. If Ramza is in the party, for instance, he can use his special Squire abilities, and once any squire has learned Accumulate, that’s good for Job Points. EVERYONE in the active party gets a portion of JPs that are earned in the battle, if they are alive. I hated some of the classes, and I also hated trying to figure out the Zodiac compatibility. I never actually finished the game, because I got tired of grinding for random battles in order to get to the next Job skill. Still, it has one of the most beautiful opening scenes in a game that I’ve ever experienced.

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Cthulhu Saves the World was well received as an amusing send-up of the 8/16-bit JRPG genre done by people who obviously have a love for that sort of game.

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Hey no problem, I love RPGs and JRPGs specifically. Played a ton of them and I still do.

FF Tactics takes a while to get into. The beginning part where you’re leveling up your jobs and getting jobs can be tedious and hard, because you need to grind crappy jobs that doesn’t help you in battle much. I would say the first third of the game is like that. But once you unlock and get the best abilities for jobs like Lancer, Ninja, or Time Mage, you can pretty much control the battle. Grinding is tough though, it took me months of grinding to get level 99 for my main characters and master all jobs. There’s lots and lots of stealing involved

Just wondering, why did you play Lunar: Eternal Blue before Silver Star Story?

Did you buy Xenogears yet? Because WHAT’S TAKING YOU SO LONG??!? The soundtrack is done by one half of the Chrono Trigger team, Yasunori Mitsuda. I like the CT soundtrack but I like Xenogears more. There are a great range of sounds that fits perfectly for the different scenarios and environments in the game, from happy, bouncy tunes to darkened dungeon crawling. One thing I noticed that’s different from Xenogear’s soundtrack compared to say your typical Final Fantasy soundtrack is that Mitsuda is really good at using ambient sounds and noises. One of the later dungeons has a great, low striking noise that echoes, which gives an exaggeration of size to the dungeon itself. Its quite innovative. And Mitsuda uses a larger range of instruments than Uematsu, who is still the king of video game music but can stand to use a little less trumpets. This is Mitsuda’s zenith as a composer. Get the soundtrack to this game too

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I have obtained a copy of Xenogears and will be playing it soon! :slight_smile: I’m excited :slight_smile:

I can’t STAND games that “take a while to get into” especially if that’s 33% of the game. If a game doesn’t absolutely hook me within the first few hours of gameplay, I want nothing to do with it no matter how great the last half of the game may be. I’ve always been that way, and I may be missing out on some games because of it… but like Zero Punctuation said in one of his reviews, “The game gets really good half way through” is NOT a selling point for a game to me. So that explains why tactics wasn’t my thing I guess.

I don’t know why I played Eternal Blue first. I was young back then and didn’t care that I hadn’t played the first one (and it wasn’t around for some reason). To be honest, I think I did rent The Silver Star for the Sega CD when I was even younger (yes I had one when I was a kid) once, and played for a few hours. But that was soooo long ago and I barely remember it, I don’t count it as having actually played it.

I’ve been hesitant to go back and play the first Lunar game because I guess I just loved the characters from 2 so much that I had no strong reason to go back knowing they wouldn’t be in it (except for Nall). But if the characters are just as good, I definitely want to give it a try.

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I see that you like some tactics games like Fire Emblem. All the games are similar, so nothing new to experience but fun nonetheless. Another tactical series that I love is Ogre Battle (Ogre Battle for SNES, Tactics Ogre for SNES, Ogre Battle 64, & Tactics Ogre for GBA). The Tactics games are tactics based like Fire Emblem or FFTactics, but the Battle games are a different flavor. You create several groups (max of 10) of about 5 individuals in each. You then send the groups in different directions around the map to gang up on enemy groups, conquer distant cities, or find hidden treasure. You don’t have much control of individual fighting. Instead, your energy is spent creating a balanced group and dispatching or recalling them appropriately.

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Block out your schedule for the next month!

You won’t have this problem with Xenogears. The story moves pretty quick from the first town on. I guess with FF Tactics, the type of game it is usually won’t let you be super strong from the beginning. You have to grind. Plus, the story’s deep and has a lot of twists and turns, so you’re just playing through the prologue practically in the beginning.

I played the Playstation remakes. The company that did them went under, I think, but Working Designs updated it not only graphically but some of the jokes. I think I remember a Clinton joke in there while I was playing. Did you play Eternal Blue on PS or Sega?

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Nothing for Dragon Quest? I finished 1 and 2 earlier this year on my old Game Boy Color and they’re still highly addictive. Practically non-existent story-wise, though.

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YogSoSoth, I played the playstation remake of Eternal Blue. Working Designs did some great stuff, for sure.

Malden, I have actually played the first dragon quest game for the NES quite a bit and I think I may have even beaten it but can’t remember. It’s simple fun, that’s for sure.

Wolverine, Thanks for reminding me of the ogre series! I have seen 64 and would like to play it.

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Ooh, ooh! The ‘one video game’ thread reminded me of it, but I would recommend Terranigma. It was never released in the US unfortunately, but it was made by Enix/Quintet. It’s not FF-style, more Zelda-style (although it has levelling up), but I found the story to be staggeringly touching.

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I, personally, felt Shining Force 3 was excellent, but it’s a wee bit tricky to play, these days, because the Sega Saturn is in that awkward spot between “systems that are still easy to get hold of games for” and “systems that are old enough that you can get ROMs or ports of their games easily.”

Add in the fact that episodes 2 and 3 were never translated into English (though there’s a fan translation involving burning new discs with a patch) and the whole thing gets kinda muddled. =/

So… yeah. I guess that’s not much of a recommendation.

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Fishing was fun. When I was playing BoF 3 my brother would make me fish because he liked to watch that. “Ready? GO!” is ingrained in my head. I never beat the game, sometimes I quit playing right at the end.

Secret of Mana 2/Seiken Densetsu 3 is cool too. You can get 3 characters from a pool of 6, and the ending and antagonists are affected by who you choose first. It also has a branching light/dark job change system, so the warrior who starts with no magic can become a holy paladin with healing, or a darker gladiator type. You should probably do research for this one, though. It can be possible to build a party that only relies on items for healing, and get stuck.

For the sequel though, you need to play it in ROM form with fan translation (decently done), as it never was released outside of Japan afaik.

Nitpick: you don’t need to switch to use magic. Just push L/R to switch to the other character’s “ring.”

Yeah, it’s ROMs, Japanese, or European English version which won’t work with your NTSC TV for your options. If you can find a copy.

Cool game, it has you build up civilization. It is the loose “sequel” to Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, both good games in their right, but Terranigma’s my favorite. The plots in these are pretty dark.

ActRaiser by the same guys is interesting. It alternates between Ghouls’n Ghosts sidescrolling and an interesting overhead world building, something like Populous. The sequel dropped that second part, unfortunately.