BoF2 was one of the better SNES games as far as my memory goes, not in the same discussion as some of the all time favorites but was a hell of good game from start to finish. BoF3 was kinda meh.
Man i'm struggling to find a good game that lets me feel like my party and character customization choices matter as well as having some fun gearing options vs just the +1 bullshit.
Played and beat Symphany of War or whatever and for a basement lvl development group, I admit it was pretty fun.
Finally settled on Stranger of Sword City Revisited, owned the original version and lost a game due to a bug and never played again. So trying that for now....if anyone has a good recommondation feel free...
Try the FF6: Brave New World romhack. It's FF6...with some interesting character customization options (the Esper level up bonuses are now a big deal and basically spec your character in certain ways). A lot of the bosses are rebalanced to actually be a challenge under this new system. Also every character is more unique now, with wildly differing stats, and a few of the special moves have been significantly altered for the better (like Cyan's Bushido).
I wish there was an easy way to get hold of some of the old PS JRPGs like Alundra, The Legend of Dragoon, Parasite Eve II.
I would also sacrifice a small child to get my hands on a working version of Vandal Hearts.
If you get a modded Playstation Classic (or buy a new one and do it yourself) you can play all that. It's easy, but I don't really know how it works. Friend sent me a USB drive with all the ROMs / emulator install program on it, I plugged that into the PSC via a weird cord, and boom, now it has like 100 games (mostly RPGs). I've hardly played it since though. It can be a little iffy (sometimes it just doesn't want to work) but for the most part it's pretty incredible.
The only PS1 game I found to not work...was Parasite Eve 2, which has anti-piracy code and freezes up. Which sucks because it was one of the very few games on there that I wanted to play. So I bought that one on PS3 for like $6. The tank controls did me in after an hour though.
For the PSC mod you need a PSC, a USB drive (64 GB I think but can probably get away with a smaller one if you have a limited selection of games), and this weird split-cord that lets you plug a USB drive into the PS1's power cable. I can post a picture of how it looks if you want. Altogether I think all of this probably runs about $100 which is peanuts for what you're getting. I was lucky enough to get the PSC from a store for $20 and have someone send me the other stuff at cost.
BoF2 was really fun - had more customization (the shamans) than the other earlier entries. I'll disagree on BoF3 - it's probably my favorite of the series. Really cool characters and the storyline was fun, and while combat is relatively slow in all the games, it's more interesting imo than the other three. I don't know if I even consider BoF5: Dragon Quarter part of the real series because it's such a massive departure from how the others work as traditional JRPGs, and 4's new take on the dragons always made me go "meh." Also, the color palette in 4 made everything look... washed out.
That's a series I wouldn't mind Capcom to revisit, if they were of a mind to.
SaGa Frontier is one of the strangest games I've played narratively. I want to say it released around the same time as Xenogears here in the US (97/98?) and at the time I didn't know it was the crazy non-linear jumble that it was. I think I played the bard guy and ran around doing stuff and it seemed like events would just happen completely at random. Eventually got bored (I was like 16/17 at the time) and put it down. Picked it up a few years later and played completely through 3 of the storylines (Blue, Rose, and the mech's name that I can't remember) and thought it was a lot better than initially. I picked it up on Steam somewhat recently to give it another go; open world games are definitely more my jam these days than back when I was a teenager for sure.
I know what you mean, I didn't like BOF4 mainly because of the washed-out graphics. Also the weird overhead angle made it hard to see where you were in towns. I found the whole game a bit boring, but it had good music and it was Breath of Fire so I did it.
BOF3 was good and a big part of my 1999. It doesn't make any of BOF4's mistakes...which makes BOF4 even more disappointing because it came later.
SaGa Frontier can be a great game, but you have to really get into it and building up your characters. Otherwise it really is just a bunch of randomness. Lute (bard)'s scenario is the weakest out of all of them because it doesn't even have a real storyline progression like the others. You're just turned loose to do random stuff, and it's the same random stuff everyone else has access to. The extent of the content in Lute's scenario is...the beginning, the final dungeon. That's it. In-between you're supposed to basically just power up on your own with all the random stuff. It's easily the worst scenario. Best is probably either Emilia, Red, or Blue. Though Emilia's has the hardest final boss.
The Switch version of SF makes it waaaaay less time-consuming, since stats carry over from one scenario to the next. Meaning any characters you previously leveled up will still be leveled up. I think it even lets you keep your money. In the original version, I'm pretty sure every scenario had to start from scratch, which made it like a 100-hour game that took many weeks of my life. On the Switch I think I did everything in like 22 hours.
It's cool to be talking about JRPGs again. For like five years in the mid-2010's I stopped liking them and wondered why I ever did. I think it was after I played Final Fantasy Type-0. Something about that game made me mad. You play as a bunch of teenagers who are grizzled combat veterans somehow. A couple of the characters are little girls and the game makes sure you see their panties regularly. Basically all the "Japan!" cliches I don't like. I started wondering why I ever liked RPGs from there in the first place, and basically didn't touch one for a couple years. Not sure what came over me. Eventually I got back into them with Persona 5 I think.
