/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9848860
There *are* worse RPGS but most of them weren't made by a company that was capable of doing better and shit out a bland mediocrity on purpose just to cater to people they assumed were too stupid to playa a proper game.

It' not the just the quality that's an issue, it's the pandering and low expectations implicit in the concept

all I remember about it was that it was ridiculously short and I'm glad I rented it because I would have felt ripped off had I bought it

>>9848860
>This isn't really that bad of a game
I agree, people's standards are too high.

Honestly it could have been a solid mid tier game if they had just made some tweaks and polished it a bit more. Another month or two of dev time would have done it. Then it might be remembered today as "that fun spinoff" rather than a complete embarrassment

Nobody wants to go from "FFII" to this - It might have been a fairly respectable launch title though

Fanboys were mad at it because it stripped away all the bullshit nobody used (yeah you sure were going to cast that faggot poison and sleep spell), as well as the obnoxious random battles. The scope was limited, as it was intended - it's an introductionary RPG. Yet it never meant that the quality was bad. Exploration was fun and interactive, the characters varied and cool, as were the locations. The music is also great in fact it has one of the best battle themes to this day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaMNKS-LNTQ&t=403s

>>9849134
>The music is also great in fact it has one of the best battle themes to this day
I wish Ryuji Sasai composed for more games, I absolutely love his music. I think he only worked on this, FF Legend 3 and Rudra no Hihou.

Lots of good ideas here, like having Zelda style items and puzzles, enemies that change their appearance as they change damage and lots "quality of life" style improvements compared to other RPGs. What really kills it is the fact it wants to be a "Beginner's RPG" so bad. The combat is overly simple, repetitive and lacks tension. The story is kind of lame too, the only emote your main character has is his annoyed shrug. Great music too.

What baffles me is how did we go from "Final Fantasy sold more in the US than it did in Japan", FF and Dragon Warrior games being in Nintendo Powert's TOP 10 for NES/GB all the time, to... Mystic Quest?!

IN JUST A FEW YEARS?

Publishers really fucked up there. Crazy to think nobody capitalized on FF1 NES being a best seller, and all just probably because they didn't feel like releasing games that had booklets that were too big.

>>9849184
>enemies that change their appearance as they get damage

For the record they ripped that off Shell Monsters Story and Jubei Quest

>>9849227
This always confused me as well. My guess is that "market research" told Square that Americans were stupid and thought FF games needed to be dumbed down for them.

Nintendo pushed RPGs SO hard in the NES era with tons of coverage in Nintendo Power, big instruction manuals, ads...they even gave away Dragon Warrior as a gateway drug.
I'm guessing that while the genre was popular, it never became the phenomenon they were hoping for so they switched their focus.

>>9848860
Imho it aged better than FF IV - VI.

Most Square games doesn't aged well compared to Lufia 2, Dragon Quest 3 or V or even Mystic Quest.

>>9849163

Rudra no Hihou has like eight games' worth of music in it though.

USA USA USA

Cute story, great music.
It's not much of a GAME though. It's linear to the point of absurdity. It's not really much of a "role playing game" when it doesn't give you any choice in what you want to do.

>>9849231
>they even gave away Dragon Warrior as a gateway drug.
Only because they overproduced so many copies that they needed a way to get rid of the excess.

>>9848860
It sure isn't bad, and I get the intent, but I feel like it's difficult to market these kinds of games.
It was probably TOO easy and simple for its own good.

>>9848865
The game is outright intended to be an easygoing entrylevel game for newbies, so keeping things straightforward makes perfect sense. No convolution in story, characters, or gameplay.
As it is though, I think that Pokémon Red & Blue were a lot better at being entrylevel RPGs.

>>9849676
Pokect Monsters?

That would never work in the west, the RPG mechanics are too complicated, and western kids prefer action games anyway.

>>9849184
>combat is overly simple, repetitive and lacks tension
Yeah, what a strange choice by the people that made early FF games.

>>9849697
You didn't play FF1 and 2. Maybe you think you did (GBA, PR, or some other joke version), but you didn't.

>>9849703
Having bugs and glitches doesn't make a game more complex. Requiring more grinding, also doesn't give it more choices or freedom.

You purityfags are delusional.

>>9849703
This

>>9849710
You didn't play it. Sorry you were born too late. You'll never, ever know what it was like to experience the greateness of the original.

FWIP! TACK TACK TACK TACK

>>9849703
I did play the GBA version of both. While I realize they trashed a lot of what the game had going for it, the original versions seem to offer their own forms of tedium instead. I'm all ears if you think there was some form of depth to FF1 combat beyond "guessing if the enemy is about to die to not whiff an attack" or "oops, I didn't buy enough potions to make it to the boss, I'll have to backtrack through this dungeon and start it over".
Dawn of Souls was way too easy, but the encounter rate in those games is way too high considering nearly all of the enemies are more or less palette-swapped meat sacks to push past.

>>9849656
>It's not really much of a "role playing game" when it doesn't give you any choice in what you want to do.
how is that any different from any other final fantasy before it went mmo?

>>9849134
Exactly anon, the game was always supposed to be a kind of "RPGs 101" for younger players or people new to the genre. And it does a great job at that, I enjoyed playing it as a kid even though it was so simple.
I'm not sure it was ever a good idea to make a game like that, I don't see how you can make money on it. And apparently the game wasn't marketed effectively in terms of letting people know that. But it's unfairly derided, it did well at what it was intended to do.

>>9850198
soul

>>9850421
Or even from other JRPGs. They have the tabletop mechanics of stats and the like but absolutely zero role playing.

>>9850421

Even the very first FF gives you a customizable party and two different vehicles capable of circumnavigating the planet. FF games often let you choose what part of the world you want to explore next. Usually there are even optional quests. Sometimes you can explore required dungeons out of order. Sometimes there are optional abilities, even optional characters. Yes of course there isn't much "true roleplaying", but there's still a substantial step on the freedom scale between the average FF game and Mystic Quest. Even the slave-to-its-story FF4 has optional side quests.

>>9850279
>I'm all ears if you think there was some form of depth to FF1 combat beyond "guessing if the enemy is about to die to not whiff an attack" or "oops, I didn't buy enough potions to make it to the boss, I'll have to backtrack through this dungeon and start it over".

I have played NES FF1 a lot and I don't know of much depth in it (unless you're doing some weird challenge run thing) beyond what you describe. I played a romhack version of it once that actually made combat challenging and interesting, with lots more useful spells and a surprising amount of strategically significant variety in the compositions of enemy groups. The basic engine of the game can certainly support that, but yeah it's not really present in the original game.

Thanks for not mentioning bugs, anyway. The bugs are not very relevant to this limitation of the game. It's just that too many spells, whether they work right or not, aren't very useful, and most monster groups are too similar to lots of other monster groups. The cthulhu-looking dudes in the ice cave, though overpowered, stand out in many people's memories for good reason. There's hardly any enemy (or enemy group) in that game with much personality of its own.

>>9849473
>>9850198

I hereby declare us the United States of Tristam. Please enjoy the new national anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tj_CsCt6vY

This is my favorite FF game and has been since i played it (after ff3) in the 90s.

>>9850816
The bugs exist, sure, but everything else you mentioned is more significant, as you note. In the modern day there are tons of minimal patches to fix the bugs only, at least as I understand it.
>too many spells... aren't very useful
>monster groups are too similar
Yeah, that was exactly how I felt. Every combat felt basically the same, with only minor variation. That got worse as time went on because I played the GBA version and you eventually are just way beyond any foe because of how they ramped up the leveling rate, but I think that repetition would just be felt from another angle on the NES version. FF2 went a long way in adding enemies that had distinctive abilities / resistances, and changing the formation setup so that you had to gain access to rear line foes. Even then, the GBA version is still super easy, so for that game I think the NES difficulty could be appropriate. Of course, the leveling systems are still quite distinct there, so maybe it again becomes too much of a tedious micromanagement enterprise to enjoy the combat. I haven't started FF3 yet, but I am hoping it continues to show improvement from FF2. Supposedly the Pixel Remaster is the best way to play it, but I have been too lazy to pirate it.

>>9850804
Good explanation here.

And I'm not even saying Mystic Quest is BAD, far from it. It's a fun and cute little game, worth playing, it's just a very on-rails experience. Which is precisely what it was intended for: handholding western players who were hesitant about getting into "RPGs".

>>9851107
>that repetition would just be felt from another angle on the NES version.

It's a very repetitive game yes... the funny thing though is that despite my preceding criticisms of its shallow combat, I love love LOVED it as a kid. It was super fun for me (somehow) whether I was robotically grinding or exploring an interesting new area. The game is great just as it is for the right kind of player, but it's way too easy and tedious for most experienced adult players.

Most old JRPGs for consoles badly need high-quality romhacks to provide them with "hard modes" (but without changing the story or changing fundamental mechanics any more than necessary). I've been excited by what little I've read about those couple of famous FF6 reworkings; maybe that's the kind of thing I'm talking about (I haven't played them yet). The FF1 romhack I tried would have been a pretty good example, if not for the fact that it did in fact mutilate the story and dungeon maps in amateurish ways.

If I were a billionaire then all this stuff would get fixed. A fun hard-mode hack for every excessively easy old game, a translation for every untranslated game.

>>9848873
It was only $30.

>>9848961
>Then it might be remembered today as "that fun spinoff" rather than a complete embarrassment
It was never thought of as an embarrassment. We all knew it as an entry to RPGs because it was marketed that way. The game was a fun budget game that came with a strategy guide you had to send off for in the mail. It's remembered fondly by people who were around at the time when we had very few RPGs to play. We felt very fortunate to get any at all. You aren't remembering it as an embarrassment because you weren't around. You think of it as an embarrassment because you are just now discovering it and holding it to standards that didn't exist at the time.

>>9849703
Which 2 are we talking about here? Famicom or SNES?

>>9851992
No, I played it when I was in my early teens back in the early 90s when I was visiting a friend who owned it. We had both played FF2 and FF3 already, just like every other kid in the neighborhood who liked RPGs. We all agreed Mystic Quest was a wet fart in comparison.

>>9852106
Then you were both stupid for thinking it would be comparable to Final Fantasy 2 and 3.

im sorry but you can't really expect me to play a final fantasy game with the lion king cover art

>>9848860
It's shit.

>Zasshu-sama
>I kneel

i played it when i was very young. i cant remember if i played ff4 or this first. either way i can still play thru it every few years but yeah probably wouldnt recommend it to a new player at this point

>>9848924
>>9848873
really it just needed to be 2 or three times longer, and this would have been a fine game

>>9848860
It has a banging soundtrack
https://youtu.be/SUGDp39srk0

It's a comfy game. I don't see what FF2-3fags see in their annoying operas, and FF1 is simple aswell. Sure, you have a boat, but...who even likes boats? No one plays it for the boat. You play it so you can slay enemies, not its so-amazing boat travel.