/vr/ - Retro Games

A fun game. Hope you played the previous two to enjoy the plot like you're supposed to.

>>4355282
B grade shounen schlock.

>>4355282
A bogstandard console RPG.

>>4355282

A whole lot of running around pointlessly till you hit puberty

>>4355282
Complete disaster. Instant art downgrade from previous games.

>>4355282
One of the best JRPGs ever made, and definitely the best BoF game.

>>4357173
>>4355893
Getting mixed signals here.

>>4357201
BOF is hit or miss with people. There's not much special about the series as a whole.

>>4355282
Smooth jazz.

>>4357208
>There's not much special about the series as a whole.
Fanart of catgirl from 2. 3 is absolute dogshit game though.

>>4357201
Someone whose everything to eat as a kid was that game will be forever attached to it. It's memorabilia, but whether to trust those people or not is up to you. I found the game lacking myself.

>>4357201
Someone whose everything to eat as a kid was that game will be forever attached to it. It's memorabilia, but whether to trust those people or not is up to you. I found the game lacking, myself.

>>4357208
>There's not much special about the series as a whole.
Fanart of catgirl from 2.

It's the best one

>>4355282
Expect to play a videogame and form your own god damned opinion you cuck.

>>4358290
source

>>4359623
>not being opinions or advice before diving head first

>>4355282
Decent game only bogged down by its drawn out prologue/kid portion.

I suppose it's good you're playing this before playing IV. III would seem like such a boring letdown after playing IV.

>>4359767
That game have a better battle system, a real 3D map. Gen system made it the best BoF. Only prob is the plot is becoming shit at the end.

BoF4 got better animation and maybe plot but I don’t like that asian culture too present.

>>4355282
It's ok, has some neat ideas, suffers from a sort of poor translation and lack of interface polish. The story has its ups and downs, the combat is hit and miss.

How much you'll like the game depends entirely on how tolerant you are of its flaws, because every good idea is marred by poor execution.

make sure you don't level up at all for the first third of the game. just run from everything.

God /vr/, you are a bunch of faggots. Someone posts one of the most memorable games of the '90s JRPG era and most of you soy boys are bitching about how its "hit or miss" or generic crap that's no good for anything.

I've said it before, I'll say it again and I stand by it now more than ever: /vr/ doesn't actually like retro games. Fuck you guys lol.

>>4360089
As someone who played the game on release and enjoyed it, I stand by what I've said about it being so-so. It's a fun game and plays closer to 1 than 2, but when you take the JRPG collection of the PSX era as a whole, it's still lacking compared to some of the best.

First off, it's a very standard JRPG, which is exactly what the game set out to be, the most essential elements of a fantasy RPG. That in itself isn't bad, except it doesn't attempt to innovate on any concept nor mitigate any of the flaws of JRPGs as a whole, so common, annoying things that show up in other JRPGs show up here.

The master system for skills and attributes has the exact same problems as Espers in FFVI - it encourages the player to obsessively manage their level ups and who they're mastered to to determine their character builds. Leveling up with a less useful master is wasteful, while leveling up before you have access to some of the better masters is just plain gimping yourself. This means frequent trips to various locations in the world to apprentice yourself to useful masters after gaining a few levels and means you need to level in advance of dungeons so you don't get forced to leave in the middle of one to manage your masters. The skill system along with it has a lot of flexibility but no real depth, since you just bind useful skills to whoever you wish with no permanence.

The dragon system initially has some depth to it in that you have interesting combinations and gene splicing choices, but eventually reaches its conclusion in the Kaiser form, which not only surpasses all other dragon forms but also all party members and is trivial to maintain. I do realize the series is very focused on Ryu of the dragon clan and dragons are supposed to be immensely powerful in lore, but I feel like the raw strength and ease of maintaining that form sort of undermines party composition and synergy, resulting in everything becoming focused on maintaining and supporting Ryu's Kaiser.

>>4360154
For a good half of the game, you're running around as a child and solving small quests that feel like they lead nowhere except to unlock the next area you want to visit. Your original goal after your time with Rei and Teepo was to find out what happened to them, and pretty much nowhere along the way until the conclusion of the child's quest do you do anything of note. The entire arc of defeating Balio and Sunder offers no real conclusion except for destroying them, training Boyd and activating the lighthouse is still just a simple stumbling block on your road without any value to the overall story except to pad for time, and when you finally do arrive at something related to your quest, you're pretty much immediately spirited away back across the world to start the entire process of returning again with few answers and more questions and yet more filler content to delay your travels. Simply putting a few hints or clues about your former comrades or some more details of the dragon clan during each arc would've solved this, but instead the player is to accept the delays without any furthering of the main plot, much like a TV series airing episodes with only filler.

While not a big part of the game, the Fairy Village minigame is very easy to have fall apart on you if you fail to return semi-frequently and properly manage your fairies' jobs. Because of that, it became more a chore to keep up with the fairies than was worth the reward outside a few items, which is disappointing, because you could tell the devs put some time in making it and it was interesting in theory, a step up from Township of BoF2.

>>4360157
Now for what the game does well, it does indeed have an interesting story within. It's a shame that most of it is only revealed in the last 1/4 of the game, because I'd say if the writing was done well enough to contain that much exposition into the beginning 3/4s as well, I would pretty much say the game is worth playing for anyone regardless of any gameplay flaws that exist. The revelations about the Brood, the war between the guardians and them, and Myria and her station along with the hyper advanced machines hidden from the world was all great and done very well.

The more difficult enemies and bosses are genuinely enjoyable, requiring the player to think through certain boss battles on how to handle them with characters specific skillsets and the resources available to them. These often come at the end of long dungeons that serve to wear down a player's party and further test their ability to make it to the end in addition to making it through the boss. There's plenty of times when a player will probably lose a few times before bouncing back, which makes the bosses that much more memorable.

And finally, the setting itself is interesting at times, which includes Japan's love to mix fantasy elements with forgotten science and technology, giving us a world that's on the cusp of transitioning from the enlightenment to the industrial age as people discover more technology both on their own and from reverse engineering the scraps that have arrived from the shores beyond. If anons have noticed, BoF has a very linear progression of time, with the first game being somewhat similar to the classical era, the second closer to the medieval/feudal age, and BoF4 being a prequel to the previous three being set in a land similar to ancient China. This gives the overall story a clear progression of time and helps to show things are moving forward between each installment, and show Ryu's place in the world as it changes.

I want to merge with shamans.

>>4359658
time to source my claims I guess

>>4360157
>>4360165
Good overview. I'm replaying BoF3 after many years and while I remember being upset at how much of the game has you meandering as a child, I really can't remember much. You're spot on with the Master system though, I think I'll just ignore it since the game is pretty easy with Ryu's dragon forms anyway. You're not punished for using them in any way so there's no need to focus on the other characters.

>>4355282
3 was the last BoF I played. I played 1 and 2 as a kid, picked up 4 and 5 as a teenager, but couldn't find 3, so I ended up emulating it years later.

It's just ok. It has some neat moments, the combat is pretty good (not as good as 4 but better than the others), and the dragon system is the most developed, but the characters are hit or miss (Peco is cute but why does he exist? Nina is at her most bland, and while I think Garr is awesome literally no one else I know likes him.) and the plot is really meandering. The actual story is "Myria had all the dragons killed, hidden one wakes up, Garr finds him, tries to kill him and fails, has a change of heart, they all go find Myria to ask wtf is wrong with her" it just takes a decade to get there. It's probably a holdover from the SNES era but 4 and 5 had much more coherent narratives. My personal recommendation is to play 4 instead, but 3 is not a bad game and you're gonna have a pretty good time.

>>4360514
Just like FF6, you can ignore it and beat the game anyway, though Peco was pretty much designed to abuse it with. It's not a super big deal, but still a thing.

>>4358290
does it amuse you to tempt fate like this

>>4360157
>The entire arc of defeating Balio and Sunder offers no real conclusion except for destroying them
Actually you find out that demon monsters like balio and sunder were created by Myria to manipulate and control weaker creatures and limit their cultural growth. That's why she gives the power to sadistic assholes. It's literally so she can keep everyone else down.

This is most obvious when you find tyrant chickens in Myria Station, it was even the fucking chickens man

the fucking chickens even!

>>4361067
Does that make Myria Lawful Evil?

>>4359767
I agree with this. I played IV before any of the older ones, so I was pretty spoiled from the get-go.

>>4360089
It's 'one of the most memorable' because it has a devote fanbase, but that doesn't mean that there's easily 10-15 better jrpgs on the PS alone

>>4361067
I don't really remember much exposition after Balio and Sunder on that. I remember Garr telling you about the Brood and that's why you can transform into a dragon, and that there's more answers across the sea, and I remember there being a big to-do about the two merging to a strong form, but that's it really. I don't know if they ever even elaborated on who they were working for, unless you mean to say they were taking orders from Myria.

But that was my big complaint several times throughout the game. It sort of picked up side plots, halfway concluded them, and moved on. Sometimes the second half of the game brought closure, sometimes it didn't. Rei and Teepo were another good example, you spend the entire time as a child wondering what happened to them and you get zero details on Rei and only a single line about a Purple haired kid who traveled east before you.

>>4361485
There's no exposition, but there's a laboratory floor on the station where experimental subjects are being created, and as you go through you fight multiple versions of Mikba and Balio/Sunder's combined forms, as well as the chicken Rocky, basically directly implying that part of Myria's so called benevolent rule was to release tyrannical demonic powers unto the world and give them to unstable criminals on purpose. Keep in mind she also created DeathEvans, who is supposedly still alive somewhere under the Earth's crust at the end of BoF3.

>>4361485
what i don't get is how teepo got pacified by myria so easily and that he would just try to murder his friends from his childhood with such weak brain washing, the shit he fell for was like /pol/ tier holocaust conspiracy shit

>>4361485
It's called "show, don't tell." The game doesn't really have any broken plot threads as you said, it just doesn't really care to stop you and toss paragraphs of exposition at you, shit just happens and you only ever really get Ryu's side of the story and sometimes some of the other player characters.

>>4361523
Teepo mostly saw the rotten side of humanity and never had a life affirming journey with his friends to balance it out. He just wandered around alone and took care of himself and Myria manipulated his journey and guided him to the station ahead of you. He sees humans as petty and weak and foolish because that's what he was exposed to.

>>4361527
Yeah I guess, but it does kinda feel like they just wanted one of the initial trio to have a tragic end, there could have been a little more depth to their conversation at the end besides "if you don't seal yourself with me forever I'll just kill you"

Top tier RPG, miles about garbage like Trigger.

>>4361523
hi moshe