Rajaah's CRPG Blog

Caliane said:

i do enjoy icewind dale (2000) more then temple of elemental evil. (2003)

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After some more choice paralysis I fired up Neverwinter Nights, now playing some of that. Had two seemingly game-ending glitches (i.e. spots where I got trapped because something didn't happen that was supposed to) and I'm only one dungeon in. Definitely a game where you want to do backup saves in safe areas. Seems like it'll be a fairly quick game considering how easy it is to completely break your character builds. Fighter+Weapon Master and Barbarian+Weapon Master are both super broken.

This reminds me of 1999-era EQ (with 2001-era visuals). The combat is very clunky and whatnot. I'll have to dig up the planning I did before on a build, which was supposed to be a crit-based scythe weapon master. Might start over (only level 3) and do a scimitar weapon master instead, since scythe is pretty slow and it looks a bit odd having my dainty lady in a corset carrying a giant death-scythe.

Kharzette said:

The JRPG section was interesting. I've tried to get into them over the years and found them quite unplayable. It makes sense now that their main influences are previous games where western games are mostly influenced by D&D. Its kind of like AI's training off AI generated junk so eventually you end up with garbage.

I think I missed everything after Skyrim in that video except BG3.

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What do you find unplayable with the JRPGs? Just the general overload of weebyness and how half of them seem to take place in a Japanese high school?

I was the other way around. In the 90's I didn't really get CRPGs and found them unplayable, but I liked JRPGs a lot thanks to Chrono Trigger and FF6/7. Over time I fell out more and more with JRPGs and liked CRPGs more and more, but I'd still say 90% of the RPGs I've played in general were the J variety.

The funny thing is, CRPGs were what I actually wanted all along. I was all about the D&D influence, dungeon crawling, character builds, stats, stuff like that. I'd mine those things out of JRPGs while fending off all the weebyness and deflecting all the goggle boys.

Kharzette said:

I had taken home a ps2 devkit and flashed it to play games and bought one of the final fantasies, I think it was 11. At some point I just got stuck and couldn't go any further and gave up. I found out years later that you have to find an inn and rest to advance the story. That's a good example of "well everyone knows that!" kind of thing you get when the games only influence is other games.

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This is a good example of my main issue with JRPGs, how frequently they expect you to find one thing or talk to one person to progress the story. It's fine if it's some magical macguffin in a nearby dungeon that the story is pointing you at; that's normal. The issue is when you're just trying to move the story forward and have to talk to some random cat-person in a random house and the game gives you no indication of it, so you're just wandering around. And yeah, when you go ask about it on a message board you inevitably get a bunch of "everyone knows that" type responses. The worst is when JRPGs try to be open-worldy while still limiting your progression behind talking to the right people at the right times. They're just giving you more land-area to be lost in while you're looking for the one person you need to find to progress.

Sounds like it was probably FF12, the beginning is in a big city area that can go in a bunch of directions. FF11 is the MMO, never played it.

Caliane said:

rpgmaker xp is also something that should have been mentioned. that has a LONG history.

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Is RPG maker XP considered the best one?

I remember RPGM 2000 and 2003 being pretty well-liked back in the day. I guess RPGM MV is the current one. I only played the ones on console (RPG Maker 1, 2, 3) which were extremely limiting. It's too bad I put so much energy into RPG Maker on PS1 (hundreds of hours, and basically had the first half of a full functioning game) because I could have accomplished a lot more with a PC version. Just having keyboard support alone would have sped up text entry by about 50x. There were also the two Super Dante games on SNES that looked really cool (could create something that looked just like an FF5 level game) but were Japan-only.

Burns said:

So, looking at the genre as an adult, the main thing for me was JRPGs seemed to offer no choices and were completely on rails; which was in stark contrast with all the western RPGs I loved.

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Yeah that's the problem. Imagine an EQ where you can't progress the game, fight anything, or go to any dungeons until you talk to this one particular NPC in Qeynos, and the game only gives you his general area "South side of town". And that kind of thing happening repeatedly over the course of a game.

JRPGs really are kind of "on rails" a large amount of the time because they're focused on telling a story. You'll get JRPG fans / CRPG detractors who will say this is a good thing because open games don't tell good stories in comparison. However I think this is bunk in the modern era, and even in the past when the open games were light on narrative, you were still kinda just telling your own story as you went through them.

Kharzette said:

I didn't even know they made exodus on snes!

I've always wanted to try some coding on the ps3. All those little simd cores to play around with. I got mine out over the weekend and experimented but the firmware on it is just too new to do much with. I could write some code and get it on there with a thing called HEN, but I can't install linux or do any debugging. I'm lost without a debugger.

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I think Exodus is only on NES. It's a pretty rough port and hard to play. Quest of the Avatar is also on NES and is a fantastic port. They made it more like Dragon Warrior and I've seen people say it's a top 20 game on the system. Finally the NES got Ultima 5 as well but it was a completely bungled port and barely playable. So the 3 Ultimas that got NES ports really run the spectrum, with Ultima 4 being the one most worth playing (and Exodus if you really, really like Ultima).

SNES got Ultima 6 and 7 IIRC and neither reviewed very well. While the NES ports were very console-ized ports, the SNES ones stayed much closer to the PC originals and thus were actually harder to play with console limitations. They exist though. There's a Runes of Virtue game on SNES that got poorly reviewed, probably because it's a port of a Game Boy game.

Game Boy got two Ultima Runes of Virtue spinoff games and from what I've read they're both good games, but I really don't know. Game Boy is very much either a you love it or you don't system, and modern emulation has made a lot of GB games a lot nicer visually.

If I were to play any of the console Ultimas I'd go with Quest of the Avatar on NES and the two Rune games on GB. And maybe Exodus.

turbo said:

One of my most fondest memories from a young lad was Ogre Battle, so fustrating because you could get punished by making a few of your armies super strong and killing everything. It could change your alignment if I recall and make you miss certain req's for class changes. Loved that game, would love a modern twist trying to recapture that fun.

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Something just came out called Unicorn Overlord (Switch, PS5) that's supposed to be a modern rendition of the Ogre Battle formula. Don't know much about it except that it still lets you steamroll the game with a few strong units consolidating your best fighters.

Caliane said:

Dunno. thats the version that came to me. Could be due to it being part of the 2000's indie explosion, or simple that it was up on steam for free a few weeks ago.

mz is the current version yea.


Exodus on the NES I think might have been my first real rpg. hard to say. The early days for gaming were of course very complicated. no one had every system. and if you had PC, your hardware at any given time might have been dated.

Like for me.. I had one uncle/cousins who had an atari 2600. so my brother and I would play that, at their house during parties, or get togethers. and have access to their games.
Another cousin had sega master system>genesis. so had access to those games there. they were bigger gamers, so had a good selection of games. my first time with might and magic was with them. I don't remember if it was their pc, or genesis.
A neighbor was the first to get an NES. so first experience of mario brothers was there.
so, short of Pong, our first console was the atari 5200. (which is not as bad as it gets a rap for). My brother and I played the heck out of that, before eventually getting a NES. I don't remember what year we got the NES finally.

sears. sears would have NES stations set up for kids to play. Metroid first play was at sears.
Sears ALSO had a large PC section, and would often have games set up and playable. with the best video and sound cards too. so you'd see all these cool as fuck games, but not like your home pc could handle them.

If we were playing metroid in sears in 87, that probably means we didn't have one yet.
dragonwarrior released in the us in 89. the free dragonwarrior with Nintendo power sub was in late 1990. which is were we got that.
Ultima exodus came to the NES in 87.
so, I think we got the NES sometime between 87 and 90.

Pc gaming. at any given time, didn't have a pc capable of handling modern games.
We had access to pc's and even portable pcs due to my dad's work.
1983 compaq portable.

but were not constantly being updated. 4color cgi graphics. pinball, price is right, flight sim, need for speed, test drive, cal games. also some roguelikes(iirc was a copy, not actually Rogue), and castle.
Secret of monkey island, a neighbor owned. they had vga graphics or maybe svga, while copied and took back home to our cgi. hah.

kings quest 6. kept seeing this in stores, and iirc, we did upgrade our pc to be able to run this at a decent quality. that would have been 93. this was one of the first high res games I had.
Doom. visited dad's work, and they had Doom, on a work pc. 93' naval contractors. ha
gato as well. which is super not surprising for sub contractors..

Gato (video game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think NES Exodus is actually pretty solid. especially... 10 yr old me. there's no way I would have been able to get into the actual way way more complicated PC exodus.

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I'll probably run NES Exodus at some point, along with Quest of the Avatar. F the Ultima 5/6/7 Nintendo ports though. 5 in particular is basically unplayable.

I remember the free Dragon Warrior promotion with Nintendo Power. I missed out on it (and the whole NES era) and didn't procure a subscription until 1993.

I had a pretty terrible Windows 3.1 computer from like 1992 to 1998. At the time it seemed cool though, and could play some very limited games like that 3D Breakout game where you knocked a ball around to break blocks. 3D was like the coolest thing ever at that time, as blocky as it was.

What made me upgrade computers was this text MUD called Legends of Terris. THAT was a great game. Had nine classes and all of them were really interesting / different. Fighter, Berserker, Monk, Ranger, Thief, Battlemage, Naturalist (Priest), Wizard, Sorcerer. At level 35 each class would get access to abilities from other classes, and could learn them at various increased costs. So a Berserker could learn to heal, at like a 3x penalty. You got build points every time you leveled that could be used to get skills. There was no level cap, you could level indefinitely. Highest-level player in the game was like level 130 IIRC.

The meta was Sorcerer, which hit harder than any other class, and Berserker, which couldn't retreat from fights easily and couldn't learn cross-class skills easily at all, but outputted a ton of DPS. If you went barehanded and learned Monk skills, a Berserker could out DPS a Monk with fists. Only class that was "bad" was probably Wizard, which could use spells from both spell fields (Naturalist and Sorcerer) but only at like 60% effectiveness. Better off going with one of the pure classes and just cross-speccing at level 35. Battlemage was also kind of bad actually, half a Fighter with access to spells across the board that they weren't good at either. If you wanted to be a real battlemage type character you were better off going with Ranger or Monk, which both learned priest magic alongside their melee abilities. A Ranger with complete heal was pretty much an unstoppable battlemage type character, given their range attacks. Lastly there was Thief which could assassinate mobs on their first attack (from hidden) for huge damage and became the meta for a while. They were at a disadvantage once they shot their opening attack though.

In any case, Terris was a pretty damn awesome game and I definitely miss playing it. They never really gave it any kind of final boss. There were a couple of super high level zones that supposedly had other things beyond them / secret superbosses / etc, but I never found out for sure. There were definitely some huge secrets in the game and finding one was a big rush because it might lead to a whole new area that few people even knew about. Eventually the players got so strong that they introduced this uber-mob called the Gatekeeper that was basically the Kerafyrm of the game. Hit super hard, had a ton of HP, would run everyone over. It guarded some huge gate that went nowhere and it never went anywhere while I was playing. I assume they added some sort of expansion or something beyond it eventually. But yeah, the GMs would just summon Gatekeepers and other super-tough mobs in the middle of town zones to "invade" and that'd be the only thing that could really threaten the high level players after a while. It was pretty awesome stuff.

Oh my God, after a year I finally have a CRPG Blog to post. Played NWN quite a bit the last couple evenings. I don't know of I'll stick with it or finish the game because it's not the best experience at this point. It's very much a Pre-KOTOR with a medieval setting. Even the HD enhanced edition has a terrible draw distance and blocky character models. I'd say the 2D Infinity Engine games look much nicer than this early-3D style, way more detail and personality in those games. And NWN2 won't even have the benefit of being an enhanced port.


First I went with a lady in a dress with a scythe, with the intent of going Weapon Master build using said scythe.


Game can look really nice when it wants to. In any case, this woman and her scythe just looked ridiculous after a couple hours so I restarted and specced for a Scimitar master instead. This gave me a shield and made things easier. Plus I had bungled some stat allocation the first time and I was able to fix that.


Now she's basically an EQ Druid in looks. Haven't gotten any spells yet, fully focused on melee traits and getting all the pre-reqs for getting access to Weapon Master. Plan right now is 8 levels of Fighter, 7 levels of Weapon Master, then Barbarian for the rest. Really like this game's system of mixing and matching classes as you level. Would love a version of EQ where you could level classes individually and end up with like a level 20 Wizard who has level 6 Bard songs and level 1 Druid snare, a kiting maniac.


Speaking of EQ, much like EQ this game has a chessboard. That's pretty cool.


The first major dungeon is basically the Plane of Justice from EQ (this pre-dated PoP by over a year). I recruited the Rogue NPC with a Ykesha and chewed through it. Took an age and a half because it was so easy to get lost. Up to the big boss now, the Intellect Devourer who jumps from body to body like Azazel from Fallen. You can tell the NPCs to run away beforehand so he has fewer people to leap into. Even them he's still tough. Not sure if it's the final battle of Chapter 1 (of four) or not. Have about six hours played.

Caliane said:

ha. yeah, in Shadows of undrentide I was 100% playing a shadowdancer. hordes of underdark, I think the sd again, and a run with a red dragon disciple. the shadow dancer was fun, as it gave me a lot to do in combat. stealth, in and out and positioning. and traps, etc. since I was playing the rogue always. (I don't remember what I played in vanilla nwn.)

And obviously yes, early 3d has no aged well.

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What NWN expansions are worth playing? I'd be okay with skipping both of them unless one is super great.

I hope NWN2 is a bit prettier and less rough around the edges. Considering it came out in 2006 (after both KOTORs IIRC) it should be.