JRPG tips (or which Yasumi Matsuno title should I give a shot)

valkyrie profile lenneth is a great JRPG and has a good psp port. Also valkyria chronicles 2 is very good.

The PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics has some serious slowdown that makes an already slow game borderline-intolerable. If that’s your platform of choice, then I think the remake of Tactics Ogre is a better choice, even if it has some weird quirks that betray its roots as a SNES game.

This just makes me want to try Vagrant Story again. It seemed cool and cinematic as fuck pre ps2 days. It was so damn difficult I got stuck like a dozen hours in though.

It seems Matsuno always tries to recreate his, and his team's, success twice. The team of Matsuno, Sakimoto, and Minagawa tried to recreate Ogre Battle for Square as FFT. Once again, they tried to recreate Vagrant Story for Level 5 as Crimson Shroud.

Vagrant Story is my favorite game of all time. It was a precursor to what many would probably think of as a pause-turn version of "Soulsborne" today. More than the dense combat that demanded the player be metodical, the other three elements of music, visual presentation, and story completes the package for me.

Especially the story, whose depth is a great contrast to the twisting and turning war sagas of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. Without giving much away, Vagrant Story's plot revolves much around a simple premise with key red herrings. There is what is presented to you as truth, and then there is the truth. All of this complemented by (at the time) great subtle use of camera direction to frame scenes, and one of Alexander O. Smith's best work for Square: all text dialogue was Shakespearean-style English that was understandable. It gave the story quite the flavor that I haven't seen since.

@arbitrarywater: Cool so I take you've played both of the titles then? What are actually, the meaningful differences between the two? Judging from screenshots and vids they both look really similar and it's hard to distinguish how one is mechanically different from the other from just reading.

Final Fantasy Tactics is still one of my favorite games of all time, the only game I ever paid money for a phone version (which is pretty good, once you turn off the double confirm stuff). It has so many customization options, weird secret stuff, amazing art direction and easily my favorite turn based gameplay bar none, to the point where I find myself comparing everything else turn based to it, and how similar they are is how much I like it. I really like the story, but I can also understand how it can seem obtuse because it has a ton of characters and has some jumps forward in time. Lots of interkingdom warring and politics made worse by evil ancient magics, but at its core its a proletariat vs bourgeois "evil nobility" story. War of the Lions added cutscenes and improved the translation, but the 'old english' is a little spotty and tends to follow Shakespeare norms rather than actual language. (T'were and t'was are not words, they're a contraction of 'it were' and 'it was' that you only use if you're counting syllables in something like Iambic Pentameter.) It isn't bad, but bothered me, but that probably has more to do with me working in theatre professionally and seeing it all the time than the quality of the game.

The PSP version slows down all the animations in battle, that I didn't really mind outside of the summon animations, which are pretty long anyway and gets tiring the 3rd time per battle you watch a still image shoot lightning over the battlefield for an unskippable 30 seconds. The phone version is sped up, which I really like having seen every animation hundreds of times already, but I don't know how well it feels as a first time player.

While I love each of the games you mentioned, there are better versions of them on other platforms. Instead I suggest trying out Jeanne d'Arc. It's a tactics game built for the PSP. It doesn't have as much depth as Tactics Ogre or FFT but I still found it quite enjoyable.

All great choices imo but Tactics Ogre is my favourite. I prefer the setting/world/politics of Tactics Ogre LUCT over FFT personally and I haven't played all that much of Vagrant Story, can't really imagine having a bad time with any of them if you like JRPGS.

I'm in the camp of preferring Tactics Ogre remake over FFT, but you should definitely play one of them. I've always been a little more attached to Ogre's world, and the psp version is a thing of beauty. Vagrant Story is cool but obtuse and difficult to get into.

@slasktotten: As a caveat, I’m going to admit that I’ve never finished either, but the biggest and most straightforward difference between Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre is that FFT is very much about switching your characters’ jobs on a regular basis, eventually ending with you hypothetically creating a whole team of jack-of-all-trades or hyper-specialized badasses. Tactics Ogre is a lot more rigid with its classes and doesn’t give you nearly as much motivation to swap jobs around. You can’t break it wide open in the same way as a result, though I do remember archers being OP as hell.

It’s been long enough since I’ve played either that I can’t tell you a bunch of plot specifics, though FFT is well-liked for its story and I remember liking how unorthodox the Law route in TO was.

Well, Final Fantasy Tactics is my all-time favorite game, sooo...

But really, it's hard to go wrong with ANY of those games. They're all incredible. FFT just happens to have my favorite story and gameplay system.

@arbitrarywater: Thanks for that! I'll start Final Fantasy Tactics. Since I am running cfw on my psp, I'm gonna give the unstretch / slowdown removal patch of War of the Lions a shot!

@charongreed: That was really informative and I now know what "lambic pentameter" is, which is dope!

Ultimately, Tactics Ogre is the better game, and is just unbelievably good, but I still picked FF Tactics. It's more compact and straightforward and I like the design aesthetic and music better. Make sure you save in multiple slots though, there's some battles you can get stuck on and have no recourse other than starting a new game.

tactics