Quick Look: Lost Sphear

Unpopular(?) opinion: I thought I Am Setsuna was straight-up bad. This doesn't seem much better? Though the battle system looks more interesting.

Megasphear.

Sphear Effect.

They seem just to churn these out and hope to touch on some nostalgia. Kind of ironic the studio is named Tokio rpg factory.

@paulunga: I don't think a lot of people will fight you for saying that

It looks like Koudelka...

@paulunga: I'd say aggressively mediocre. This one doesn't look like enough of a leap forward to give it a shot I'm afraid.

Only Rorie could use a JRPG to bring up discussion of SSD capacities and prices.

Clever use of the word Sphear.

I know it isn't but it looks like a typo and I hate it.

@genessee: Man, I loved that game. Such a weird one that was. I would totally be down for a good re-master of Koudelka, despite re-master fatigue. I just really dug the atmosphere and bizarre enemies.

Yeah, this looks kind of awful.

@thewildcard: I suppose aggressively mediocre just doesn't cut it for me anymore after Persona 3-5, other SMT games, The Last Story, Trails in the Sky, Xenoblade Chronicles, Lost Odyssey etc. I mean, many, MANY SNES and PS1 JRPGs were also of middling quality but people (me included) were still eating them up back then.

@syndrom: A bit of a sidenote: How are Idea Factory and Compile Heart still a thing? Their games are routinely terrible. Is it really just the fan service?

Numenera story wasn't great.

It's really tough to see how these games are supposed to compete. There were some time periods where you could just crank out a JRPG and do well, but now a low budget, throwback JRPG doesn't really fit when you have tons of more ambitious games that are either spinning on the JRPG formula in an interesting way or doing the classic JPRG better. And if you just want to constantly play JRPGs and have no problem with middling ones, you can buy them by the bucketful on any platform for under $10.

I'll just take this opportunity to say that if this looks remotely interesting, get Cosmic Star Heroine instead if you haven't played it. Less than half the price and actually has some new ideas in it.

Sadly, this just looks dull.

Here's to hoping Project Octopath Traveler doesn't trip on itself.

@deathpooky: I feel like there's a niche for a menu-driven combat RPG on mobile that hasn't really been filled and if someone found the right way to tell a good story using five minute play sessions, they could probably get away without making an absolutely superb product. Not that that applies here.

For me it is a really good idea to go back to snes/ps1 era JRPGs, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and possibly take a different direction than JRPGs have taken since then. HOWEVER these games seem to not do that final step. There are a lot of good things about those old rpgs that have been kinda lost over the years in the genre but this seems to be another game just straight up aping the time period with no attempt to take it anywhere new (and honestly, not getting exactly what made them fun). The problem there is that plenty of JRPGs that were very good from back then still exist and most people haven't played all the classics outside of Square games.... so why play this over checking out a series you missed out on?

@paulunga: Oh I generally agree. Striving to be okay can be even more boring than flawed but ambitious games, and that's the biggest thing I have against Tokyo RPG Factory's stuff so far: they aim way too low. Trying to be throwback that reminds you of older games, but not bringing anything new or innovate on isn't a good place to be.

Man seems Square Enix is in a really bad situation these days. There games just aren't hitting like they used to except for the rare gem like Nier last year.

I do wonder how much of that company is made up of Enix people over Square people these days.

So is Project Octopath basically the next Bravery Default/Second game? Those games seem like the right way of handling a retro throwback while still feeling mostly modern and engaging.

@ripelivejam: Oh hey, thanks for the reminder. I was meaning to check out the demo when it came out but never got around to it. Downloading it now. To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of the game's look, solely because of the depth of field effect being way too aggressive for my tastes. But it's all about the gameplay and story anyway, so hopefully it delivers.

While we are naming our favorite rpgs of recent I gotta tell people to play tales of berseria. It's incredibly good.

@brad Every subsequent re-release of FFIV (PS1, GBA, whatever else) has been a port of the "hard" version from Japan. So no need to play a fan translation, you can just play one of those. There is a bug in the GBA version that messes up the ATB order in weird ways, but it's not too big a deal if you're not doing some kind of speed run or something. The GBA version adds some post-game content that's somewhat interesting.

I liked the DS remake, personally. It's much more different as it's not just a port. I'm pretty sure it's also available on Steam, phones, and I think the PlayStation store?

I was super-impressed with the demo of Octopath. It has some clear-cut, efficiently told, pretty interesting character stuff, some pretty good combat (should be mentioned, it's still very traditional turn-based stuff), and I thought it looked great. When played on a TV, at least, I thought it was unplayably blurry in handheld mode.

I also downloaded the demo for Lost Sphear and have tried it twice and just find myself not caring ten minutes in. Not good for this game, especially when it costs $50.

Brad and Rorie talk about JRPGs like they live in an alternate reality where Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 never came out and aren’t the highest rated games of their type available on Vita and PS4. It’s kind of nutty to play FFX again on Vita when P4G is available and cheap and you’ve never played it before.

@steveurkel:Ya don't say ;p

I should get back on the "Tales of" train. The last one I played through was Tales of Vesperia (360).

@curufinwe: Well, maybe the have no interest or negative interest in the trials and struggles of anime high schoolers?

I think it's fair that they have a blind eye towards some series, whatever the reason may be. Honestly, I can sort of understand how the SMT and Persona series can be viewed as different beasts or veins among JRPGs. Kind of like how Pokemon is on it's own separate island in these talks.

Wait, this is a Square Enix joint..? It looks like an indie mobile game... O.o

This looks incredibly underwhelming. It could be fine if it cost $20, but $50 is way too much, especially since Xenoblade Chronicles 2 came out a month ago and is only $10 more.

the price tag + not having heard of it until now = stopped cold.

I played the demo and it's not great from what that impressed on me. The lifeless assets and character animations gives me a similar vibe to the DS remakes of Final Fantasy 4 & 5.

The thing these nostalgia pieces don't get is that A LOT of the character of classic jrpg's was driven by the environments. I Am Setsuna was super bland and this doesn't look much better.

I will play almost any JRPG put out there, it’s my favourite genre by far. I Am Setsuna I fell off halfway through for how lifeless it seemed.

This, if it is possible, seems worse. At least I Am Setsuna went for its aesthetic, with the snow and piano, even if it wore thin. This just seems like it was put together with generic RPG maker tools. I was hoping they’d really go all in on fixing everything that I Am Setsuna struggled with.

Yes, same here. Really enjoyed just about every aspect of Octopath other than the 3D graphics (because the UI and 2D art is great). I mean, I spent two hours finishing both of the demo characters and was bummed out that there wasn't more. That rarely happens with demos.

I enjoyed I Am Setsuna for the aesthetic, even if everything else about it was extremely average. It was a slow-paced turn-based JRPG that I played all the way through, which is really hard to do for me, so something resonated somewhere. I'll probably grab this on sale to play on commutes, it seems like a step forward? There's mechs or something in here too, I heard, so I wanna see that.

@Menkhor: Kind of. Tokyo RPG Factory is on a small-ass budget, kind of like SE set them up to fail.

@zentheninja: In what sense? Critically? Because last I heard FFXV sold gangbusters and it reviewed alright.

I Am Setsuna is the definition of mediocre. It's not terrible by any sense, just downright boring. I played it through completion and it's just a whole bunch of meh.

The fact that this is just I Am Setsuna reskinned and sold for $50 seems almost like an insult.

The best version of FF4 is the PSP rerelease. Just ignore all the After Years fanfiction content unless you're a superfan.

I've never heard a more perfect fit for I Am Setsuna than "aggressively mediocre". I purchased that game for $15 and beat it, landing on about that as a review.

At $15, this looks dull. At $50, this looks terrible. Rorie is hardly the most effusive with praise, but even what he gave this game in this Quick Look seemed far too high. JRPGs aren't the largest or most active market out there, but there's still far better products than this or a FFX remake.

Brad seemed bored the whole way through too. That's not good video.

@ildon said:

Yeah I was going to say the same thing -- but then i hear Brad mention the DS version and he literally says "wow that was hard!". Well it is the hard version, so maybe they made the easy version for a reason!? :)
Also on looking it up i found that the American SNES game was easier, but it wasn't the easy version from Japan:

"It is often thought the original North American translation was a translation of Easy Type, but the translated version was developed before Easy Type, and the difficulty is reduced further in Easy Type than in the North American version. This leads to speculation that Easy Type was based on the North American Final Fantasy II rather than vice versa."

I couldn't help but laugh out loud at the Tidus spoiler