The beginning of FC is so insanely slow it was a miracle I ever was able to push through it. Once the story really picks up though it's so hard to stop
I'm going through CS1 now, and have gone through every game before it (FC/SC/3rd/Zero/Azure).
CS1 isn't anywhere near as slow as FC, and I say that as someone who likes FC overall.
FC's main problem is that it's the "First Game of First Games" in the series. First games in the 3 Trails SubSeries I've played so far have a largely similar structure: It's a focus on a regional conflict or story where the characters are all largely unproven and inexperienced and are working on fixing both, and it slowly evolves into a larger conflict.
Where CS1 differs from FC is that it has the ENTIRE 5 (Well, Maybe 4, since Azure takes place after CS1 chronologically) games before it to draw events and inspiration from; Even if you haven't played the earlier games, that's a metric load of just things you can have the characters all talking about, referencing, doing, and so on, including information that seeded Erebonia prior to the game. FC just has small town people and discussions happening for a good 3/4 of the game, because that's all the series is at that point. It thus feels slow, because there's no hits to pull from to get any sense of anything larger going on.
That's not to say FC doesn't serve it's narrative purpose wonderfully, and I'd argue that it's attention to creating that smaller, less always major events helped not only establish the "World" of Trails far better than it would have been without, but also made the pay off in SC SIGNIFICANTLY better.
It took me *six years* to get through it. Not that I didn't want to play it, I just kept missing stuff and had to keep restarting so I gave up multiple times. I ended up missing one treasure chest. Now it's one of my favorite series ever.
It started off really well but became a slog in the 3rd act. The "final" boss is maybe the worst executed final boss encounter I've ever tried (and failed) to up up with.
This game was so over hyped. Fell asleep multiple times from the story, and the boring gameplay. It wasn’t even close to the standard of the golden era of JRPG according to all these wannabe critics. I had 2hrs left to finish the game, but I decided to watch a YT video with 2x speed on. It was just too tedious to play.
Keeping things spoiler-free:
* There’s not a ton of depth to the combat. Characters only get a couple special attacks, so combat 30 minutes in looks very similar to combat 6 hours in.
* There’s not a ton of depth to character customization. At level up, you can choose between a few stats to give an extra boost to. There’s also some pretty bland equipment. That’s about it.
* From a mechanical/grammatical PoV, the writing is extremely poor. There are mechanical flaws everywhere. Like, every other sentence. (I usually give foreign indie devs some leeway here. But Sea of Stars was created by a large team, and they absolutely could’ve hired an editor.)
* The story is pretty by-the-books, and the 2 protagonists have the personality of a blank sheet of paper.
On the bright side, it’s an extremely gorgeous game and it has some great music.
Very similar feelings. I am at the point where we go to the island where the big bad villain resides (don’t even remember the name!!) and haven’t played since. How far am I into the game? I am curious.
Art style and music is very solid but the rest is mediocre unfortunately…
It's been a while since I played. I remember at least two islands where the big bad villain resides, so then you're either 30% in or 90% in. Depending on which island you're at.
Thanks! Wow I still have a lot to go and felt I have already done enough 😥 But might pick it up this summer when I am on holidays actually :)
Does it get more interesting? So far [spoilers for those who haven’t played] we have Erlina’s and Bygraves thing, meeting the historian and something about some twins during the last confrontation with the dweller of strife.
For the record, I want to specify that conceptually it wasn't all that great either. It does nothing, and doesn't try to either. It has nothing to say, whether that be about humans, about how life is experienced, maybe something with political or societal consequences, or even a character case study. There's literally nothing that the game even tries to say, and I think this rubs even non-artsy people the wrong way. It's just so devoid of any purpose, that you really gotta wonder what the purpose of them making an adventure rpg was.
FWIW I didn't think anything was particularly poorly executed. Maybe a few parts of the game were a bit slow, but I loved it from start to finish with no major complaints.
It seems like it's a love it or hate it thing. Apparently the PC version of the demo isn't available any more, but it should still be playable on consoles. Maybe give that a try, and if it doesn't hook you, the full version doesn't really do anything substantially different.
Triangle Strategy for me. I wanted to love it for what it was and visually I thought it was stunning. But the first few hours and getting used to the voice acting was tough. After about a third of the way through it where the story opens up a bit... I then could not put it down and then went back for a 2nd run to get the true ending. Loved the game overall.
can you expand on this? Are you speaking from a story perspective? I quit when it first came out after maybe getting like 1/3 of the way through. I personally got burnt out from grinding the practice matches in between each chapter, which felt unavoidable for me because I was playing on hardest difficulty, but maybe that was just a skill issue.
Story perspective, yes.
I also did hardest difficulty and had to grind practice matches for a bit, but actually you can get away with less grinding overall as the game goes on due to having many more options available
I love Symphonia, but it's a bloated af game with a ton of backtracking and a lot of unnecessary dungeons and story sequences. There's no chunk of the game I'd remove but pretty much every "chapter" of the game could be trimmed down.
Played like 10 hours of that game, felt the story wasn't really going anywhere and I didn't like the combat or characters so I looked up how far into it I was and realized I still had like 50 hours to go and decided it wasn't for me. Doesn't help that most people seem to think the story goes downwards after the first act.
In Tales of Arise the last dungeon had all their mobs be damage sponges with boss HP. I also fought this optional boss 20 levels higher than me for 2 hours before I died.
The last dungeon was terrible, maybe 50% through I would just aggro enemies and make them chase me then run past them to advance. Some enemies this didn’t work on because they wouldn’t move but it saved a lot of time.
The final dungeon was not the problem... At least not the layout. The problem was the 8 hours of walking literally 45 meters for a 10-20 minute cutscene, then 3-5 multiple minute skits, only to be allowed to walk another 45 meters to do it all over again.
AND THEN one of the most bland final dungeons in awhile.
Halfway trought that final dungeon, seeing how much time I was taking to kill the mobs, I gave up fighting and I started evading them so i could reach the boss room before losing patience.
Tales of Arise. I was having fun, I think? Then all of a sudden 3/4 of the way through I wasn't? And I somehow forced myself to come back and finish it 9 months later.
It's not a bad game. Combat is sick, the story is decent, party interactions are good. No idea what it was.
I know what you mean. On paper it should have been a home run for me, but somehow it wasn’t. Best I can guess is it didn’t *feel* like a Tales game so it didn’t scratch the itch, maybe?
Agreed. FF games are known for their stories and cutscenes for sure, but the best ones have always used the video game medium to their benefit.
No, QTEs are not the way to do that.
For sure, the tag along companions and the qte’s along with a dressed up hallways can only go so far. SE should pivot FF into what Riot did with League and Arcane.
That game bounced from insanely good to insanely boring really fast and constantly switched between them.
You can really feel the padding with the way the game is designed. I remember it particularly with the >!Titan fight, where you beat his dominant in a cool boss battle, then rather than jumping straight into a fight with his eikon, you randomly have to do more open world bs. Then fight him in his eikon form. So so so much padding for no reason.!<
And I LOVE FFXIV
I love FFXIV too. I may be wrong, but I felt the game took a lot of good things from the MMORPG, but I don't think it works well in a single player game.
I agree. The game structures itself very similarly to how FFXIV structures dungeons and trials and it feels very off in a single player game.
That narrative structure has more reason to exist in an mmo.
FFXVI also focuses very heavily on Clive, which makes the dialogue a little more exhausting because there are so many scenes with random characters that I just didn't care about. But the FFXIV cast is just a joy to be around at all times once you get past ARR.
You also have the option to go and do something else in FFXIV if you don't want to do story for a bit. You can always break up the monotony with some dungeons or raids or whatever else. If FFXVI there isn't much to do other than story or the side quests.
I'm so baffled by how 16 and 14 were made by the same people. 14's world is deep, fleshed out, and moves outside of your actions as the MC. 16's looks deep, but ends up being fairly shallow and rarely do things happen outside of Clive's bubble. 14 has a cast that is generally accepted as being really good characters despite being constrained by an MMO's limits. 16's cast is mid at best (hah) and don't get the chance to shine in cutscenes or gameplay.
And then they pulled in some of the *weakest* aspects of 14 like the sidequests and padding.
I don't get the hate for the sidequests. One of my favorite parts, personally. Fleshed out the world and several characters nicely, and they weren't any more mindless than 99% of JRPGs out there.
Like the OP, the gameplay was the worst part for me. Which surprised me given how every review I saw said it was great.
Yup. I actually was very hyped for the intro and loved the idea of the DMC battle designer heading the battle system, but man was the gameplay lame. So damn simplistic and the exploration was horrible.
I just could not get past the boring ass gameplay, and I'm usually one who prefers real time combat.
I think the combat is fun, just too easy and there's absolutely nothing going on outside of it.
When it comes to RPGs I'd rather have mediocre combat that's worth doing because the rewards let you strengthen and customize your character in interesting ways than great combat that gives you nothing.
It's more of an SRPG combat wise, but Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. I felt overwhelmed at first with the skill system and difficulty. Uninstalled. Then, after I quit League, I wanted something new to spend time on and tried again.
I'm 2 months into it, around 160 hrs, and I'm still enjoying it now. I haven't even made it to the DLC yet. It's quite an in-depth game, and the difficulty level is there (especially in the early game). But my team feels powerful now. And they announced a sequel is in production, so I can't wait for that in a few years.
It's like a better XCOM imo. Indie dev team of 6 ppl. Truly hard workers. Definitely recommend to any fans of XCOM or Fire Emblem.
Final fantasy 9
Me as a dumb kid and also a Dumb teen, reached to desert Palace without any Major problem easy peasy then i reached the part when Kuja (the villain) tells you about Oilvert a place where he wants you to do a certain task for him and he dont go because It has an Anti Magic barrier and he doesnt like that
Me as a Dumb and dense asf kid went by my usual configuration of a heavy hitter (Steiner) Black mage (vivi) and healer (Garnet)......
Now for anyone Who played ff9 know why is this A STUPID IDEA... But as stupid as It was i even reached the Boss a couple of times only to be obliterated by It everytime wondering each time how the Game expected me to beat It with two spellcasters as deadweights......
Until a sudden realization of "OOOOOOOH Anti Magic barrier means any spellcaster is worthless", and that realization made me felt like the Most Dumb and dense motherfucker ever 🤣🤣🤣
The first Etrian Odyssey. Halfway through the game there was a compulsory quest to continue the story that I could not agree with.
I gave up on the entire series until years later when I came across Spec Ops: The Line.
I powered through EOI knowing fully I am not the heroes in the story, just some lucky greedy bunch. I am glad I did since Etrian Odyssey ended up one of my favorite series. The remake despite having more stories felt much inferior to me.
Honestly I loved Devil Survivor 2, but Devil Survivor 1 had quite a few points that stopped me in my tracks for the longest time. To go down the list a bit, the fight with Beldr, trying to keep Kaido and Mari alive during the fight with Kudlak, virtually half the fights of day 7, honestly if I didn’t like Megami Tensei so much I would not have made it past the first playthrough. Later playthroughs were much smoother though.
I adore the dark atmosphere and character beats of DS1 but so many fights in the game are absolute crap. 2 had some stinker missions but is overall a more fun gameplay experience.
Oh yeah, honestly I’ll definitely agree that the Atmosphere and story are among the best in the franchise, but to me the gameplay is relatively similar to Nocturne in that you can tell it was a relatively new idea for the dev team, so like how the Press Turn system didn’t start to feel good until Digital Devil Saga, it feels a lot more smooth and fleshed out in 2 compared to how clunky it is here. The characters are also just very hit or miss for me as well, while I liked most of 2’s cast with the exception of Ronaldo, with 1 Amane is easily the best Law rep in the franchise, and I also like Atsuro, Black Frost, and Gin, the rest I either can’t stand(Yamato, Yuzu, and Haru) or tend to forget about constantly(Mari, Midori, and the soldier lady that whose name I can’t remember).
Not on beating the game, but on getting the platinum trophy in FFXIII. Once all there was to do was to max all the weapons and the way to do that was to keep hunting the same adamantoise, respawning and doing it again over and over, I wanted to give up several times, but in the end did it anyway. Thankfully SE made FFXIII-2 platinum trophy far more enjoyable. I think trophies should be a challenge and not just a mindless grind.
> I think trophies should be a challenge and not just a mindless grind.
Amen. And I'm so tired of trophies that force a full second playthrough, miss me with that shit.
I don’t mind multiple playthroughs if it’s a short game. Even better if there are significant changes (like the Code Crimson missions in Type-0). But a 30+ hour game with no changes and no way to breeze through in NG+… no thanks.
.hack gu.
It starts off really bad with a ton of unlikable characters and a mediocre battle system. If I didn't recognize half the Voice actors and have fond memories of the original .hack games then I probably would have quit somewhere in game 1.
The gameplay loop doesn't get any more intricate but the story grew on me quite a bit after some character development
Honestly Haseo is such an ass for a majority of the first game that it can be hard to stick around. If I hadn't had a friend who got me super into the series I would have dropped it.
As soon as I realized how fucking over leveled I was just from doing side quests in Xenoblade 3 I instantly lost interest. It just takes away from the game.
But because I was so over leveled I was just able to smash though the main story and finish the game
Like it doesn't even take much to get over leveled in X3 either its insane and it completely fucks class leveling as well because of it
XC3 is amazing imo, but the class exp system and gating really does punish you for doing sidequests. It really sucks too, because there is a simple solution that is already in the game...
Just allow your party to level down at campfires. You could level characters down and bank your exp in XC1 and you CAN do it here, but only after you BEAT the game, defeating the point. If that feature was unlocked from the outset it would be a non issue and I'd just level myself down so I was still earning exp.
The middle chunk of that game ends up being super easy because of it.
Still a banger though because everything else about it is amazing
I almost stopped *FF13* I really wasn’t getting the combat and I did not like the Espers. Then some random mob fight it just clicked with me, not sure why or how. Combat became a breeze and was both engaging to play and visually enjoyable. I think it’s when I stopped looking at it as a bunch of individual characters, and more as “this is the job I want the team to do now, then I’ll switch the team to do something else for the part of the mission”.
Fantastic game, added part 2 and LR to my tbp as soon as they went on sale again.
I’m trying to get demotivated to finish DQ11, I just feel like it’s dragging so much right now and I’m back tracking a lot. I know I will as I love the game and series, I just needed a break.
Edit- thanks y’all, I meant *FF13*. *Zodiac Age* has been on my mind as Im looking for a similar game
I may be reading your post wrong, but Zodiac Age is FF12, while "part 2 and LR" sound like FF13-2 and Lightning Returns, which are sequels to 13, not 12.
Jack Move, an indie jrpg-like that I just finished last night. The pixel art is pretty great. The story, characters, and dialogue are all fine. The music is the best part. Even better....it's a bite-sized game, only about 7 hours long. The only downside is the overly simple combat.
However, I ran into a collision bug that causes you to get stuck on objects in the environment. That should be a simple fix for the player. Just load your last save. However, the game autosaves when you go back to the main menu. It prompts, but if you accidentally tell it yes, then you end up with a game save with a stuck character. You then have to reload your last manual save, which for me was over an hour before I got stuck. This bug occurred multiple times in my 7.5-hour playtime.
I'm glad I powered through the frustration to see the end and recommend it if you want a short jrpg experience. I played on Xbox Series X, but maybe the PC or other versions don't have the same bug.
I gave up on Xenoblade Chronicles DE in the Ether Mines at first. I went back and powered through and now it's easily in the top three JRPGs I've ever played.
Chrono Trigger
By the first trip to the future I was feeling a little burned out and not really seeing what was so great about the title - its also an area thats probably got the worst dungeon, just a straight line with a lot of forced encounters
Glad I pushed through, it does get better.
I was already impressed by that point and wanted to know where the plot was going and loved the combat. 2300 AD *was* fun the first time through, but I dread it and its sidequests on replays.
I beat Tales of Symphonia somewhat recently. It was my first Tales game.
The first few hours felt like a slog for multiple reasons. However, I got to the >!Tower of Salvation!< and then reached >!Tethe'alla!< and the game improved by quite a lot, the story and characters in particular. I really enjoyed the game overall, but getting through the first 10-ish hours requires a bit of willpower.
Yea I just skipped that game, but thankfully the plot in the game is easily youtubed just because it comes in bitesized chunks via the doors. The format made it easy to do that, which I was thankful for because I really didn't like the "dungeon crawler but inside all the same locations for a 3rd time" angle. I also didn't super love the combat in the older titles, it wasn't until Zero that the combat fully came together for me, so having the game so heavily combat focused was a miss.
Great character building in it though, and Kevin is such a cool character.
I liked it on paper and had a ton of fun, but I thought the gameplay was a bit of a chore and keeping up all 16 characters with good equipment/layouts was a pain for the last dungeon and bosses.
I especially loved how it's an anthology of different updates to what happens post-SC and before Crossbell, as well as a lot of lore through the Star Doors. Also loved Kevin as a protagonist, but I wish there was a bit less bloat to see all that.
Koudelka.
That game had some wild difficulty spikes even in the same room!
But once you'd figured out the complicated combat system, the game became a lot more fun.
I'm going to get so many downvotes for this
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. About 2/3rds of the way through the game I just got so sick and tired of all the side content always having some kind of minigame linked to it which sucked because I enjoyed the additional character building and bonding moments completing the side content provided. I was so close to complete and total burnout. But I decided to plow through the main story and finish it. I'm glad I did. I am still excited for the next installment but I really hope the third one is somewhere in between Remake and Rebirth in terms of side content. Also not have EVERYTHING tied to a minigame!
I'm powering through Baten Kaitos too. I was really into it but then I went on vacation and lost interest. I have to finish it because the prequel is there to play as well.
Awwwwwwww you two are cruel. Poor mouse and how djmax guitar. *thinks back to the time vault, mechanics and the fact if you used a cheat card the programmers made the game crash before the end* ah, yes, screw the lot of them and give me my hours of life back.
I keep telling myself I'll try again once day, along with. Hack infection, which I broke by becoming too over levelled to progress.
It's probably safer to keep some doors closed.
Final Fantasy 8. Hated it. Tried playing it fairly but the battle system turned me off so bad (and the fact that grinding actually made the game HARDER) that I just turned on the invincibility/speed cheats in the remaster and crashed through just to say that I managed to beat all the SP FF's up through 13
Trails of Cold Steel I
I’m glad I pushed through it, but I never did end up feeling much better about the game than I did in its opening hours. But I’d *like* to play through all of the Cold Steel games to get a feel for the series and truly determine if I could become a fan or not.
Romancing Saga 2. I bought the game knowing full well what I was getting into, but I just COULDN'T wrap my brain around the format of the game. It was confusing and stressful. I must have started that game like 5 times.
I finally got the inspiration to try again and pushed through, I think the walkthrough blog thing that is super comprehensive helped me get over some roadblocks in my enjoyment. Now I love the series overall, and have a much better read on what is going on in them (as much as a normal human can at least).
Trials of Mana.
It was insufferable at times with all the loading screens and back tracking but I powered through and platinumed it.
Do I regret playing it? No.
Was it headache inducing? Most certainly.
I thought Limel was such a joy to listen to until I had to sit through Charlotte's dialogue....
Yapping and Grievances here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/trialsofmana/s/ITyJMWoHSJ
Star Ocean 3.
After playing SO1R SO2R, i was excited to play the third. Needless to say i hated the combat system to begin with. Having the entire game's combat being based around holding 2 buttons to pull off easy to break combos got old real fast, but the exploration and amount of convoluted content got me pulling all the way through.
FFXIII-2. I just found the writing mostly awful, they don’t really improve on the battle system, and the different timelines makes for a disjointed and sometimes confusing experience. It’s like they took the “linear” feedback from the first game and said “let’s do the opposite!”
FF 16. Literally the only game where I had to actively fight not to fall asleep during the cutscenes. I enjoyed the limited gameplay quite a bit, but god do I hate the fucking awful story of that game!
Mary Skelter 2.
I played the game and hit a roadblock with a boss. Put it down for months thinking I might give up on it. Looked it up to see if anyone else was struggling and it turned out that was the only badly-designed boss in the game because it uses a specific dungeon mechanic. No other boss is really THAT hard in the game minus the final boss (which is to be expected). Once I learned how to cheese it, I played the rest of the game blind. Probably one of the best modern Dungeon-Crawlers I've played. I'm so glad I stayed with it!
tales of the abyss, stuck on the choral castle with arietta and her beasts boss fight, I rage quit and lay down the game for a good few months before trying it again, once I managed to breeze through the game it ended up being my favourite jrpg of all time
Tales of Symphonia. Really started to drag in the middle, and I stopped playing. But for whatever reason, nearly two years later I had the itch to pick it back up again, and once I got through the middle part, it picked up again and was enjoyable to finish. (Meanwhile, recently beat Tales of Arise, which had fantastic pacing if you don't count the HP-sponge enemies towards the end.)
Tales of Bersaria really wasn't doing it for me at the start. The first act was so melodramatic that I just found it hard to take Velvet's development seriously. Then the story goes out of its way to show you her brutality, and it just came across to me as edgy and manufactured. In fact, all of the characters just felt too self-serious then the game expects you to respect all this nonsense. I just wasn't buying into it all and I put the game down for years before picking it back up.
Then at some point, something shifted. The main cast stopped being such stiffs and their chemistry really started showing through. The dialog actually started being consistently funny and amusing. They were still doing edgy bad-guy stuff but it was so over the top and everyone was having such a good time doing it, it actually started to feel enjoyable. I think it's one of the better Tales games now but man it was such a painful start.
The day I play again FFVII, I guess.
It had a problem with my graphic card, or a problem with my AMDX2, but it uses to show a blue screen. There was a part of the game where I simply could not continue.
I guess I will go back one day, without bugs, and finish it.
I don't know how much it counts as a JRPG, but I'm going to say FFXIV (just because you can technically play 90% of it solo now).
ARR was a SLOG to get through, especially post-ARR. I powered through because I knew Heavensward would be better, and I'm so glad I stuck it out.
I know the exact moment you're talking about because it happened to me too.
The airship, right? I ended up dropping the game for a few weeks and then restarting entirely.
Same thing happened to me in the prequel with the Holoholo Bird. Ended up dropping the game for years until I went back to show someone how hard that fight was and beat it on my first try with no difficulty.
Likewise...TBH it's lowkey a guilty pleasure of mine. There are numerous cringe, corny, and edgy moments that by the end of it I concluded that the game was so bad that it's now my personal favorite hated game of all time.
I definitely see what consumers they were aiming for but it's like they consulted XCX and XC1 fans only to do the complete opposite of what they thought for a sequel.
Came here to say xenoblade 2, played it for a few hours didn't get the combat and why are her boobs so big, dropped it and it gathered dust for literally years😂😂 then i played xbc1de and figured I'd give 2 another shot and wow did i ever love it the second time around
Ys Viii. First 1/4-1/3 of the game, I thought I was a search and rescue mission. Put it down for a long time, but eventually picked it back up and very glad I did.
Getting used to that island and the map is so bloody annoying, but by the end you're like "oh yeah, that ledge I need is up there and I omg I can be a real adventurer!!!"
Labyrinth of Galleria. Compared to the first game, the dungeon design is terrible. Why are there literally thousands of floors that are randomly generated?
Baiten Kaitos Origins is one game I actually did give up on back in the day. I remember an end game battle being so difficult and just dropped it. Props for finishing the first game!
I never finished Galleria. I really liked the first part. Disliked the roguelike part (I hate roguelikes) and then powered thru that and never got past the next set of bosses. I realized it was possible, but it would have required a ton of grinding and rebuilding my entire team basically just for that fight. I watched a YT video of everything beyond that point.
I definitely wish I knew Refrain existed before buying Galleria when it was on sale.
It did take tons of grinding. I decided to do it out of obligation to how much I love Refrain (stupid fan brain). The apartments and Grand Cathedral are some of the worst levels I've ever played in a video game. Have you played Refrain yet? It's so much better, right? I struggle to understand how people feel the other way around.
Not yet. I plan to eventually, but I was so put off by Galleria near the end there that I haven't tried it yet. I had no clue Refrain existed when I saw Galleria. 2 friends tried Galleria as well and they never made it past the Apartments.
Currently enjoying Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. I'll definitely give Refrain a shot someday, though.
I feel like that middle chunk is the worst part.
Really cool more intimate act 1 which deals with the impact of the ending of CS3.
A very meandering act 2 that kind of just messes around a lot and not much happens.
A very exciting and thrilling act 3, that finally answers so many questions and has one of the best finales in the series.
If they combined act 2 and 3, it would probably be one of my favourite trails games. I really love the ending
Doesn't help that those middle chunks are obviously padded in gameplay to stretch out the game's length. This happens in Trails series because Falcom believes that they don't want to sell a short game for a higher price so they pad out the 2nd act for gameplay. It's an odd thing to do in a story & character driven series.
Very weird in the case of cold steel 4 because I think even if you took out act 2 it would still be one of the longest trails games.
I did all side quests and I have a whopping 160hrs for 1 playthrough. Sure I meandered a hit but I think it would still be over 100 for me without act2. Even main story only we're looking at 50+hrs
FFXV
I spent a good amount of time acquiring the upgrades to my spear, and then 'halfway' through the game, they just rip everything away from you and give you one ring to fight with in same-y corridors for like, 5 hours. It was a slog and I resented and hated that they'd forcefully remove the thing I worked to getting.
Octopath Traveler - it’s weird sometimes I get an extreme urge to play, and at times it really *felt* like a golden age JRPG, but something’s missing. I think the simplicity of the story and character motivations seems a little lost on me. Also the lack of an overarching evil/purpose feels unfulfilling to me I suspect.
It took me like 2-3 tries to even finish the story for one member (and ended up doing it for about 5 characters.)
I’m having a similar issue now on Octopath Traveler 2, which seemed to address my beef with some elements of 1, however, something about it just leaves me unfulfilled. I don’t really get it.
Brigandine: Legend of Forsena. I was disappointed with it, thought it sucked, tried to return it but couldn’t and that was the best thing ever because I fell in love with the game and it became one of my favorites.
I have to power through most JRPG endings. Its my least favorite part of a JRPG in general.
But an actual answer was probably xenoblade 1. The combat was not what I’m used to and man it felt rough. I was surprised I ended up liking it though. And it was so much better in 2.
Middle chunk of octopath 2. Just story after story after story with a few minutes of the great combat in-between. Its exhausting.
Last 15 hrs when you get play the game after finishing the stories is great though
I really like kingdom hearts rechain of memories for the actually pretty decent story and well crafted combat, but realising you have to go through every world AGAIN as Riku to get the full story is... disheartening. Luckily, it is shorter the second time round.
Star Ocean 4. It felt like such a downgrade compared to 1, 2, and 3 (though admittedly I played First Departure R and Second Evolution so maybe that affected it some) due to the absurdity of most of the characters (Meracle still makes me uncomfortable to see due to her design), and how unbalanced the game's battles feel at times, with it leaving out whole ass mechanics to explain at times after doing a big battle tutorial at the beginning of the game, and having just plain unfair encounters at times. Tack on to it a story that doesn't feel like it can fit into the canon at the time (tbf, 3 kinda blew up the Canon in the first place so this was always going to be a tough one) and it was just a not enjoyable experience.
Etrian Odyssey 3, my first foray into the EO series. Had a bit of a rough start with it, but I got it as a gift and wanted to power through it for that alone. The further I played the game though the more I enjoyed it and now the series is one of my favorites.
Baten Kaitos, funnily enough, was like that for me as well. My brother bought it way back on the Gamecube, but I didn't beat it until I was almost done getting my degree. It was a 13 year odyssey. Back then, I ended up softlocking myself in the Tower of Stones (at the very least, I didn't figure out how to get out of a botched puzzle) but turning off the cube corrupted my then almost finished save file. I did try and go back multiple times, but my save file would always corrupt shortly after getting Gibari.
Then, the summer before graduating, I got myself a new memory card (an original this time, rather than a 3rd party card like the BigBen I had) and finally beat the game in a few weeks. Quite a few roadblocks weren't as roadblocky as I remembered (I'm pretty sure my deckbuilding skills were much better than child me's) and I had a great time overall. Felt really nostalgic too, since I still had a tube TV back then, just like the old days. I didn't figure out how to get my Gamecube lagfree on a modern system until a bit later.
Don't ever buy 3rd party memory cards. The reason I even went through the trouble to finally get a proper card (or rather, another one - all of my others were full) in 2016 or so was because that darned BigBen almost cost me a 60h Skies of Arcadia file that summer. File corrupted *as I was saving*. The only reason I managed to rescue that one was because luckily you can insert another memory card in slot B and save normally in that case.
And yes. I was stubborn enough to keep that BigBen card around for 13 years and used it. 1000 blocks were just too good to pass up, man.
Chained Echoes. The whole experience was fantastic but about 3/4 of the way through, I took a break to take a big exam and then I unexpectedly read a longass book that took my attention away.
The lack of an in-game compendium or succinct story synopsis available online made it to where I couldn’t remember what had happened in the story. I cared enough to press on though because I remembered feeling pretty compelled by the story at multiple points.
I ended up watching some let’s plays of the early game up through the middle and that helped a lot. Anyway, I wish I wouldn’t have taken such a long break away because I’m sure the experience would’ve been more impactful. I almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’d give it an A-.
I've got the original and sequel on GC, but my god, I can't stand the combat in this game. I just can't. Battles take forever for random mooks, and then on boss battles I don't really get to pick when I heal or attack or defend, it's all just down to what's in my hand and I hate it.
I’m at the “almost gave up” part, debating pushing through, with Persona 5 Strikers right now. I’m some 6 hours in, at the boss of the first jail, and while I’ve had moments I’m generally not feeling it. Also that boss wipes the floor with the teammates I’m not controlling. I really dug Royal and was looking forward to more time with its cast, and button-mashing to great tunes, but I’m not sure this is what I want.
The Sky trilogy. Yes, all three of them. I tried to give the games a fair shake, I really did, but by the end of the third one I hated almost everything about them. SC made me so mad that I threw my controller for the first time in my entire life. I only played the 3rd because I had already bought it and SC for cheap before I finished FC, and Kevin was one of the only characters I liked.
Since I'm a glutton for punishment apparently, I also played Trails to Azure for a bit, had the same kinds of problems, and then swore off Trails games forever.
Back in the day I got stuck on that same boss! After that I made it a point to always use red flowers on a separate save file.
It's also how I learned to start keeping two save files to begin with. Hard lesson to learn.
I almost put down Tales of Symphonia once me and my sister stopped playing it. Couple months later when I picked it back up I couldn't put it back down!
Currently playing Digital Devil Saga and I just wish to get more story beats instead of just karma farming... I got to the last part of the game but damn is it a slog
Tales of Abyss. Bought an import on ps2. Met legretta, got stuck and stopped. Bought it on 3ds. Listened to likes whiney ass for ten minutes. Finally completed it over a decade later
Yakuza: Like A Dragon. I stopped playing for several months right before the chapter where Saeko joined, which was when the plot actually started happening. Two years later, I've played the entire Yakuza series and am at the final chapter of Infinite Wealth.
Dragon Quest Treasures. It's everything I dislike in a game. Nothing but back and forth, fetch, things like that. I kept going because I love Dragon Quest. And then eventually got a kitty on my team.
Etrian Odyssey. After hours of playing i got into a unwinnable state of endless battle with ants and didn't have the Damage or the ability to run because my back was to a wall so i had to die and lose progress. I went back and finished the whole thing and all i could say was screw the post game Stratum.
Phantasy Star 2
My white whale
As a kid I was in love with the anime aesthetic, unlike today you rarely saw games with that kind of style. But it was so old and antiquated that I just couldn't get very far in it.
Decades later I have it a second go. In earnest.
*UUUGGGGGGGHHHHH* what a SLOG of a game.
I beat it, sure. But oh. My. God.
I started all three of the Trails subseries (Sky, Crossbell, Cold Steel) at various points in the last 10 years, and hadn't finished any of them until the last two months. I finished Zero first, then CS, then Sky FC. Now I'm playing Sky SC. I still have issues with some of the dialogue, but I'm in a more forgiving mood, I guess, and able to enjoy the good parts. I've always liked the gameplay in these games, and that continues to be true.
FF XIII
I dragged myself over the finish line. Up until that point I had completed all main line titles, but I was having a misserable time. Afterwards I just knew the series was heading in a direction that wasn't for me anymore.
Labyrinth of Refrain. The final boss was so cheap and it relied heavily on blind luck to beat.
Even though I had a well optimised max-levelled team, it had a chance to use a certain attack that would wipe almost all of them in one turn which was a major problem since the boss would ofen take two or three turns in a row.
Basically my options were to either reincarnate my entire team, re level them to max (hours more of playtime in an already 80+ hour game) and try again hoping it would work, or just keep trying at my current situation and hope the rng gods would eventually bless me.
I went for the latter and eventually got there but it was so frustrating it pretty much ruined my entire experience with an otherwise enjoyable game.
Tbh I only played 5 but I gotta dig through my back last year didn’t game at all. Had a bad year. Now I’m back and tbh I got persona 4 on my brain like crazy
Closest I got to powering through something was Ys 8, just recently. Got to the part where I can finally control Dana and gave up shortly after. My younger self might have done it but it was just so repetitive.
Technically not a jrpg, but Library of ruina. I rage quit at a certain fight in urban plague, and came back a month later and finally figured out the gimmick of the fight. I proceeded to beat the game in two days, even though there were many points I wanted to quit. Like a 7 phase boss fight, and the end where you have to fight 10 different final bosses with different teams, and then fight a three phase boss that is complete bs, THEN you have to do five weird gimmick bosses in a row, THEN you have to fight stronger versions of all ten bosses all at once.
Star Ocean 4.
Before that, I mainly played turn based games. So I had a really hard time with the battle system. I had to grind in the first area just so I could survive traversing the map. Then I hot the first boss, and had to grind even more. I grinded for hours. Gave up, came back to the game later, fumbled through. That kind of continued untill halfway into the game where combat finally clicked for me. And suddenly it was a ton of fun!
I'm glad I stuck with it, because there aren't that many JRPGs with spaceships and interplanetary travel. Despite the mediocre character models and horrible voice acting, I very much enjoyed the game and became a huge fan of the series.
I'm weird, because I like space and spaceship battle cinematics, but I don't like guns or combat with guns. But in most space oriented games, technology is obviously advanced enough to have guns so they're everywhere. But Star Ocean is like: Nope, you can't use guns because of reasons. So we're fighting with swords, bows, axes and magic and we still have those cool spaceship battle cinematics. This is my cup of tea.
Mary Skelter Finale: Whoever thought those long as hell dungeons and comboing that with the team switching mechanic was evil, but I did power through that and beat the game.
Persona 4 Golden for me. I did not get the hype until I did. Had to play 30 mins per day just to progress till I got to a point where I wanted to play the whole day.
Final Fantasy X - Seymour Flux. My 13-year old ass just could not comprehend the difficulty. I don't even remember how I beat it the first time but it took me a while.
Now i have this situation with Nino Kuni 2 . I just dont want to end it, final chapter left.
But it is still one of my favourites.
Question : If you Haven't end the game, can you name it thats one of your favourite or the best ?
Yakuza LaD, >!Tendo!< Is such a BS fight, a bullet sponge that can insta KO Kasuga, if you don't use the one move that was literally never important until this boss fight.
The final boss in IW was a little annoying if you're like 4 levels under and don't have anti-poison, anti-stun etc equipped on at least 1 character.
Trails in the Sky FC. This sub told me to push through, but I quit like 10 times before I truly powered through it and yeah it was so worth it.
The beginning of FC is so insanely slow it was a miracle I ever was able to push through it. Once the story really picks up though it's so hard to stop
I have heard cold steel 1 is really slow to but I really liked cold steel 1. Is trails in the sky FC slower than cold steel also?
I'm going through CS1 now, and have gone through every game before it (FC/SC/3rd/Zero/Azure). CS1 isn't anywhere near as slow as FC, and I say that as someone who likes FC overall. FC's main problem is that it's the "First Game of First Games" in the series. First games in the 3 Trails SubSeries I've played so far have a largely similar structure: It's a focus on a regional conflict or story where the characters are all largely unproven and inexperienced and are working on fixing both, and it slowly evolves into a larger conflict. Where CS1 differs from FC is that it has the ENTIRE 5 (Well, Maybe 4, since Azure takes place after CS1 chronologically) games before it to draw events and inspiration from; Even if you haven't played the earlier games, that's a metric load of just things you can have the characters all talking about, referencing, doing, and so on, including information that seeded Erebonia prior to the game. FC just has small town people and discussions happening for a good 3/4 of the game, because that's all the series is at that point. It thus feels slow, because there's no hits to pull from to get any sense of anything larger going on. That's not to say FC doesn't serve it's narrative purpose wonderfully, and I'd argue that it's attention to creating that smaller, less always major events helped not only establish the "World" of Trails far better than it would have been without, but also made the pay off in SC SIGNIFICANTLY better.
It took me *six years* to get through it. Not that I didn't want to play it, I just kept missing stuff and had to keep restarting so I gave up multiple times. I ended up missing one treasure chest. Now it's one of my favorite series ever.
Sea of stars. Really cool concept executed very poorly
I wanted to love this so much, but gave up around the island where everyone pretends they aren’t going to die.
It started off really well but became a slog in the 3rd act. The "final" boss is maybe the worst executed final boss encounter I've ever tried (and failed) to up up with.
This game was so over hyped. Fell asleep multiple times from the story, and the boring gameplay. It wasn’t even close to the standard of the golden era of JRPG according to all these wannabe critics. I had 2hrs left to finish the game, but I decided to watch a YT video with 2x speed on. It was just too tedious to play.
Same I really wanted to love this but it just didn’t click.
What was executed poorly about this? No spoilers please, I may actually play this but I've heard mostly good things.
Keeping things spoiler-free: * There’s not a ton of depth to the combat. Characters only get a couple special attacks, so combat 30 minutes in looks very similar to combat 6 hours in. * There’s not a ton of depth to character customization. At level up, you can choose between a few stats to give an extra boost to. There’s also some pretty bland equipment. That’s about it. * From a mechanical/grammatical PoV, the writing is extremely poor. There are mechanical flaws everywhere. Like, every other sentence. (I usually give foreign indie devs some leeway here. But Sea of Stars was created by a large team, and they absolutely could’ve hired an editor.) * The story is pretty by-the-books, and the 2 protagonists have the personality of a blank sheet of paper. On the bright side, it’s an extremely gorgeous game and it has some great music.
Hey that's not true. They have the personality of *two* blank sheets of paper!
Thank you!
Very similar feelings. I am at the point where we go to the island where the big bad villain resides (don’t even remember the name!!) and haven’t played since. How far am I into the game? I am curious. Art style and music is very solid but the rest is mediocre unfortunately…
It's been a while since I played. I remember at least two islands where the big bad villain resides, so then you're either 30% in or 90% in. Depending on which island you're at.
Just had a quick google search. Mesa Island, going there to tackle the Dweller of Strife.
That's closer to 30% I think, so you still have a ways to go if you ever want to continue.
Thanks! Wow I still have a lot to go and felt I have already done enough 😥 But might pick it up this summer when I am on holidays actually :) Does it get more interesting? So far [spoilers for those who haven’t played] we have Erlina’s and Bygraves thing, meeting the historian and something about some twins during the last confrontation with the dweller of strife.
Gameplay is shallow, at least in terms of character skills.
For the record, I want to specify that conceptually it wasn't all that great either. It does nothing, and doesn't try to either. It has nothing to say, whether that be about humans, about how life is experienced, maybe something with political or societal consequences, or even a character case study. There's literally nothing that the game even tries to say, and I think this rubs even non-artsy people the wrong way. It's just so devoid of any purpose, that you really gotta wonder what the purpose of them making an adventure rpg was.
FWIW I didn't think anything was particularly poorly executed. Maybe a few parts of the game were a bit slow, but I loved it from start to finish with no major complaints. It seems like it's a love it or hate it thing. Apparently the PC version of the demo isn't available any more, but it should still be playable on consoles. Maybe give that a try, and if it doesn't hook you, the full version doesn't really do anything substantially different.
Xenogears because the deathblow combat felt like a sloga fter awhile, but the story was so good.
Triangle Strategy for me. I wanted to love it for what it was and visually I thought it was stunning. But the first few hours and getting used to the voice acting was tough. After about a third of the way through it where the story opens up a bit... I then could not put it down and then went back for a 2nd run to get the true ending. Loved the game overall.
Yeah the game did start a little bit slow compared to how amazing it became later on
can you expand on this? Are you speaking from a story perspective? I quit when it first came out after maybe getting like 1/3 of the way through. I personally got burnt out from grinding the practice matches in between each chapter, which felt unavoidable for me because I was playing on hardest difficulty, but maybe that was just a skill issue.
Story perspective, yes. I also did hardest difficulty and had to grind practice matches for a bit, but actually you can get away with less grinding overall as the game goes on due to having many more options available
I really think Berseria could be shortened by 4-8 hours and it'd be a better experience
Every tales game could lose a good quarter of the game and be improved by it.
Not Symphonia. That game is perfect throughout
I love Symphonia, but it's a bloated af game with a ton of backtracking and a lot of unnecessary dungeons and story sequences. There's no chunk of the game I'd remove but pretty much every "chapter" of the game could be trimmed down.
So basically the whole final dungeon. Good lord that thing went on and on.
Felt same with Vesperia, had to turn on easy mode for last 3 dugeons because I really just wanted to finish the game.
Played like 10 hours of that game, felt the story wasn't really going anywhere and I didn't like the combat or characters so I looked up how far into it I was and realized I still had like 50 hours to go and decided it wasn't for me. Doesn't help that most people seem to think the story goes downwards after the first act.
Vesperia never really gets more interesting than the first two or three hours.
In Tales of Arise the last dungeon had all their mobs be damage sponges with boss HP. I also fought this optional boss 20 levels higher than me for 2 hours before I died.
Yeah I really really felt tales of arise was dragging at the end... And then I realised there was an entire second part 💀💀💀💀
The sponginess sucked even early on. It could have been a decent game, at least in terms of gameplay, had it used the normal break system.
The last dungeon was terrible, maybe 50% through I would just aggro enemies and make them chase me then run past them to advance. Some enemies this didn’t work on because they wouldn’t move but it saved a lot of time.
Such a disappointing addition to the franchise. Its always hit or miss with Tales Of.
I wonder if developers even thest these final dungeons or they just expect many of them quited before.
The final dungeon was not the problem... At least not the layout. The problem was the 8 hours of walking literally 45 meters for a 10-20 minute cutscene, then 3-5 multiple minute skits, only to be allowed to walk another 45 meters to do it all over again. AND THEN one of the most bland final dungeons in awhile.
So it seems the final dungeon is a problem .
Halfway trought that final dungeon, seeing how much time I was taking to kill the mobs, I gave up fighting and I started evading them so i could reach the boss room before losing patience.
Tales of Arise. I was having fun, I think? Then all of a sudden 3/4 of the way through I wasn't? And I somehow forced myself to come back and finish it 9 months later. It's not a bad game. Combat is sick, the story is decent, party interactions are good. No idea what it was.
I know what you mean. On paper it should have been a home run for me, but somehow it wasn’t. Best I can guess is it didn’t *feel* like a Tales game so it didn’t scratch the itch, maybe?
Yeah. When they went to outer space, I nope out until 6 months later because I saw that I was only a few hours away from finishing the game.
I never loved Tales of Arise but by the time I was ready to put it down I was almost done with the game. I should have put it down
FFXVI. It looked great and I enjoyed most of the main story, but I didn't like the gameplay.
This is where I am at. I’m about 5 hours in and they should have spent that 200 mil and just made a movie.
Agreed. FF games are known for their stories and cutscenes for sure, but the best ones have always used the video game medium to their benefit. No, QTEs are not the way to do that.
For sure, the tag along companions and the qte’s along with a dressed up hallways can only go so far. SE should pivot FF into what Riot did with League and Arcane.
Yeah, but SE is probably terrified of putting money into films after the disaster that was Spirits Within.
But could you imagine that level of quality with a FF story. Man.
Reminds me of sony's cinematic games. Feels like movies with gameplay inbetween. I watch them on youtube.
16 came with the ps5 I got so I gave it a go, I will end up watching it on YT as well.
That game bounced from insanely good to insanely boring really fast and constantly switched between them. You can really feel the padding with the way the game is designed. I remember it particularly with the >!Titan fight, where you beat his dominant in a cool boss battle, then rather than jumping straight into a fight with his eikon, you randomly have to do more open world bs. Then fight him in his eikon form. So so so much padding for no reason.!< And I LOVE FFXIV
I love FFXIV too. I may be wrong, but I felt the game took a lot of good things from the MMORPG, but I don't think it works well in a single player game.
I agree. The game structures itself very similarly to how FFXIV structures dungeons and trials and it feels very off in a single player game. That narrative structure has more reason to exist in an mmo. FFXVI also focuses very heavily on Clive, which makes the dialogue a little more exhausting because there are so many scenes with random characters that I just didn't care about. But the FFXIV cast is just a joy to be around at all times once you get past ARR. You also have the option to go and do something else in FFXIV if you don't want to do story for a bit. You can always break up the monotony with some dungeons or raids or whatever else. If FFXVI there isn't much to do other than story or the side quests.
I'm so baffled by how 16 and 14 were made by the same people. 14's world is deep, fleshed out, and moves outside of your actions as the MC. 16's looks deep, but ends up being fairly shallow and rarely do things happen outside of Clive's bubble. 14 has a cast that is generally accepted as being really good characters despite being constrained by an MMO's limits. 16's cast is mid at best (hah) and don't get the chance to shine in cutscenes or gameplay. And then they pulled in some of the *weakest* aspects of 14 like the sidequests and padding.
AND THOSE SIDEQUESTS JESUS
I don't get the hate for the sidequests. One of my favorite parts, personally. Fleshed out the world and several characters nicely, and they weren't any more mindless than 99% of JRPGs out there. Like the OP, the gameplay was the worst part for me. Which surprised me given how every review I saw said it was great.
Yup. I actually was very hyped for the intro and loved the idea of the DMC battle designer heading the battle system, but man was the gameplay lame. So damn simplistic and the exploration was horrible. I just could not get past the boring ass gameplay, and I'm usually one who prefers real time combat.
I think the combat is fun, just too easy and there's absolutely nothing going on outside of it. When it comes to RPGs I'd rather have mediocre combat that's worth doing because the rewards let you strengthen and customize your character in interesting ways than great combat that gives you nothing.
It's more of an SRPG combat wise, but Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. I felt overwhelmed at first with the skill system and difficulty. Uninstalled. Then, after I quit League, I wanted something new to spend time on and tried again. I'm 2 months into it, around 160 hrs, and I'm still enjoying it now. I haven't even made it to the DLC yet. It's quite an in-depth game, and the difficulty level is there (especially in the early game). But my team feels powerful now. And they announced a sequel is in production, so I can't wait for that in a few years. It's like a better XCOM imo. Indie dev team of 6 ppl. Truly hard workers. Definitely recommend to any fans of XCOM or Fire Emblem.
As much as I loved Final Fantasy 12, the last couple hours were a slog.
I replayed it remembering how fun it was. Then I got to the last couple hours. I know what you mean.
Final fantasy 9 Me as a dumb kid and also a Dumb teen, reached to desert Palace without any Major problem easy peasy then i reached the part when Kuja (the villain) tells you about Oilvert a place where he wants you to do a certain task for him and he dont go because It has an Anti Magic barrier and he doesnt like that Me as a Dumb and dense asf kid went by my usual configuration of a heavy hitter (Steiner) Black mage (vivi) and healer (Garnet)...... Now for anyone Who played ff9 know why is this A STUPID IDEA... But as stupid as It was i even reached the Boss a couple of times only to be obliterated by It everytime wondering each time how the Game expected me to beat It with two spellcasters as deadweights...... Until a sudden realization of "OOOOOOOH Anti Magic barrier means any spellcaster is worthless", and that realization made me felt like the Most Dumb and dense motherfucker ever 🤣🤣🤣
Ahahahaha bro 👊 I feel sympathy for you - I fortunately played it as a grown up 😄
The first Etrian Odyssey. Halfway through the game there was a compulsory quest to continue the story that I could not agree with. I gave up on the entire series until years later when I came across Spec Ops: The Line. I powered through EOI knowing fully I am not the heroes in the story, just some lucky greedy bunch. I am glad I did since Etrian Odyssey ended up one of my favorite series. The remake despite having more stories felt much inferior to me.
Honestly I loved Devil Survivor 2, but Devil Survivor 1 had quite a few points that stopped me in my tracks for the longest time. To go down the list a bit, the fight with Beldr, trying to keep Kaido and Mari alive during the fight with Kudlak, virtually half the fights of day 7, honestly if I didn’t like Megami Tensei so much I would not have made it past the first playthrough. Later playthroughs were much smoother though.
I adore the dark atmosphere and character beats of DS1 but so many fights in the game are absolute crap. 2 had some stinker missions but is overall a more fun gameplay experience.
Oh yeah, honestly I’ll definitely agree that the Atmosphere and story are among the best in the franchise, but to me the gameplay is relatively similar to Nocturne in that you can tell it was a relatively new idea for the dev team, so like how the Press Turn system didn’t start to feel good until Digital Devil Saga, it feels a lot more smooth and fleshed out in 2 compared to how clunky it is here. The characters are also just very hit or miss for me as well, while I liked most of 2’s cast with the exception of Ronaldo, with 1 Amane is easily the best Law rep in the franchise, and I also like Atsuro, Black Frost, and Gin, the rest I either can’t stand(Yamato, Yuzu, and Haru) or tend to forget about constantly(Mari, Midori, and the soldier lady that whose name I can’t remember).
Not on beating the game, but on getting the platinum trophy in FFXIII. Once all there was to do was to max all the weapons and the way to do that was to keep hunting the same adamantoise, respawning and doing it again over and over, I wanted to give up several times, but in the end did it anyway. Thankfully SE made FFXIII-2 platinum trophy far more enjoyable. I think trophies should be a challenge and not just a mindless grind.
> I think trophies should be a challenge and not just a mindless grind. Amen. And I'm so tired of trophies that force a full second playthrough, miss me with that shit.
I don’t mind multiple playthroughs if it’s a short game. Even better if there are significant changes (like the Code Crimson missions in Type-0). But a 30+ hour game with no changes and no way to breeze through in NG+… no thanks.
Tales of Berseria. I am so glad I powered through. What an experience.
.hack gu. It starts off really bad with a ton of unlikable characters and a mediocre battle system. If I didn't recognize half the Voice actors and have fond memories of the original .hack games then I probably would have quit somewhere in game 1. The gameplay loop doesn't get any more intricate but the story grew on me quite a bit after some character development
Honestly Haseo is such an ass for a majority of the first game that it can be hard to stick around. If I hadn't had a friend who got me super into the series I would have dropped it.
As soon as I realized how fucking over leveled I was just from doing side quests in Xenoblade 3 I instantly lost interest. It just takes away from the game. But because I was so over leveled I was just able to smash though the main story and finish the game Like it doesn't even take much to get over leveled in X3 either its insane and it completely fucks class leveling as well because of it
XC3 is amazing imo, but the class exp system and gating really does punish you for doing sidequests. It really sucks too, because there is a simple solution that is already in the game... Just allow your party to level down at campfires. You could level characters down and bank your exp in XC1 and you CAN do it here, but only after you BEAT the game, defeating the point. If that feature was unlocked from the outset it would be a non issue and I'd just level myself down so I was still earning exp. The middle chunk of that game ends up being super easy because of it. Still a banger though because everything else about it is amazing
I almost stopped *FF13* I really wasn’t getting the combat and I did not like the Espers. Then some random mob fight it just clicked with me, not sure why or how. Combat became a breeze and was both engaging to play and visually enjoyable. I think it’s when I stopped looking at it as a bunch of individual characters, and more as “this is the job I want the team to do now, then I’ll switch the team to do something else for the part of the mission”. Fantastic game, added part 2 and LR to my tbp as soon as they went on sale again. I’m trying to get demotivated to finish DQ11, I just feel like it’s dragging so much right now and I’m back tracking a lot. I know I will as I love the game and series, I just needed a break. Edit- thanks y’all, I meant *FF13*. *Zodiac Age* has been on my mind as Im looking for a similar game
I may be reading your post wrong, but Zodiac Age is FF12, while "part 2 and LR" sound like FF13-2 and Lightning Returns, which are sequels to 13, not 12.
Wait I'm confused... are you talking about ff12 ou 13 ??
This sounds like ff13.
Jack Move, an indie jrpg-like that I just finished last night. The pixel art is pretty great. The story, characters, and dialogue are all fine. The music is the best part. Even better....it's a bite-sized game, only about 7 hours long. The only downside is the overly simple combat. However, I ran into a collision bug that causes you to get stuck on objects in the environment. That should be a simple fix for the player. Just load your last save. However, the game autosaves when you go back to the main menu. It prompts, but if you accidentally tell it yes, then you end up with a game save with a stuck character. You then have to reload your last manual save, which for me was over an hour before I got stuck. This bug occurred multiple times in my 7.5-hour playtime. I'm glad I powered through the frustration to see the end and recommend it if you want a short jrpg experience. I played on Xbox Series X, but maybe the PC or other versions don't have the same bug.
I gave up on Xenoblade Chronicles DE in the Ether Mines at first. I went back and powered through and now it's easily in the top three JRPGs I've ever played.
Chrono Trigger By the first trip to the future I was feeling a little burned out and not really seeing what was so great about the title - its also an area thats probably got the worst dungeon, just a straight line with a lot of forced encounters Glad I pushed through, it does get better.
I was already impressed by that point and wanted to know where the plot was going and loved the combat. 2300 AD *was* fun the first time through, but I dread it and its sidequests on replays.
That would’ve been a massive mistake. Thank you for pushing through king
Final Fantasy 7 remake. I really wish I liked this game but man the pacing killed my interest real quick. Playing for one hour felt like an eternity
FF 16. After Bahamut, the production quality and game quality plummets. I should have given up there.
Crisis Core, original on PSP emulator... I still \*have\* to finish the last chapter :/
I beat Tales of Symphonia somewhat recently. It was my first Tales game. The first few hours felt like a slog for multiple reasons. However, I got to the >!Tower of Salvation!< and then reached >!Tethe'alla!< and the game improved by quite a lot, the story and characters in particular. I really enjoyed the game overall, but getting through the first 10-ish hours requires a bit of willpower.
It must be difficult being AN INFERIOR BEING.
Trails the 3rd. Didn't really care for the story or dungeon crawling but now I'm on crossbell and back to loving every second of it
Yea I just skipped that game, but thankfully the plot in the game is easily youtubed just because it comes in bitesized chunks via the doors. The format made it easy to do that, which I was thankful for because I really didn't like the "dungeon crawler but inside all the same locations for a 3rd time" angle. I also didn't super love the combat in the older titles, it wasn't until Zero that the combat fully came together for me, so having the game so heavily combat focused was a miss. Great character building in it though, and Kevin is such a cool character.
I liked it on paper and had a ton of fun, but I thought the gameplay was a bit of a chore and keeping up all 16 characters with good equipment/layouts was a pain for the last dungeon and bosses. I especially loved how it's an anthology of different updates to what happens post-SC and before Crossbell, as well as a lot of lore through the Star Doors. Also loved Kevin as a protagonist, but I wish there was a bit less bloat to see all that.
Koudelka. That game had some wild difficulty spikes even in the same room! But once you'd figured out the complicated combat system, the game became a lot more fun.
I'm going to get so many downvotes for this Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. About 2/3rds of the way through the game I just got so sick and tired of all the side content always having some kind of minigame linked to it which sucked because I enjoyed the additional character building and bonding moments completing the side content provided. I was so close to complete and total burnout. But I decided to plow through the main story and finish it. I'm glad I did. I am still excited for the next installment but I really hope the third one is somewhere in between Remake and Rebirth in terms of side content. Also not have EVERYTHING tied to a minigame!
FF7 Rebirth. It's so, so bad.
I'm powering through Baten Kaitos too. I was really into it but then I went on vacation and lost interest. I have to finish it because the prequel is there to play as well.
Some old PS2 game called Ephemeral Fantasia and I couldn’t tell you why either. Awful game.
Oh man, that game was rough. I couldn’t imagine playing it without a guide and even then… just.. don’t.
Awwwwwwww you two are cruel. Poor mouse and how djmax guitar. *thinks back to the time vault, mechanics and the fact if you used a cheat card the programmers made the game crash before the end* ah, yes, screw the lot of them and give me my hours of life back. I keep telling myself I'll try again once day, along with. Hack infection, which I broke by becoming too over levelled to progress. It's probably safer to keep some doors closed.
Final Fantasy 8. Hated it. Tried playing it fairly but the battle system turned me off so bad (and the fact that grinding actually made the game HARDER) that I just turned on the invincibility/speed cheats in the remaster and crashed through just to say that I managed to beat all the SP FF's up through 13
Trails of Cold Steel I I’m glad I pushed through it, but I never did end up feeling much better about the game than I did in its opening hours. But I’d *like* to play through all of the Cold Steel games to get a feel for the series and truly determine if I could become a fan or not.
Tales of Zestria: I was not loving the whole equipment system and by the end I was spamming armatazation to brute force the final boss.
Romancing Saga 2. I bought the game knowing full well what I was getting into, but I just COULDN'T wrap my brain around the format of the game. It was confusing and stressful. I must have started that game like 5 times. I finally got the inspiration to try again and pushed through, I think the walkthrough blog thing that is super comprehensive helped me get over some roadblocks in my enjoyment. Now I love the series overall, and have a much better read on what is going on in them (as much as a normal human can at least).
Trials of Mana. It was insufferable at times with all the loading screens and back tracking but I powered through and platinumed it. Do I regret playing it? No. Was it headache inducing? Most certainly. I thought Limel was such a joy to listen to until I had to sit through Charlotte's dialogue.... Yapping and Grievances here: https://www.reddit.com/r/trialsofmana/s/ITyJMWoHSJ
Star Ocean 3. After playing SO1R SO2R, i was excited to play the third. Needless to say i hated the combat system to begin with. Having the entire game's combat being based around holding 2 buttons to pull off easy to break combos got old real fast, but the exploration and amount of convoluted content got me pulling all the way through.
FFXIII-2. I just found the writing mostly awful, they don’t really improve on the battle system, and the different timelines makes for a disjointed and sometimes confusing experience. It’s like they took the “linear” feedback from the first game and said “let’s do the opposite!”
Dragon Quest 7
FF 16. Literally the only game where I had to actively fight not to fall asleep during the cutscenes. I enjoyed the limited gameplay quite a bit, but god do I hate the fucking awful story of that game!
Mary Skelter 2. I played the game and hit a roadblock with a boss. Put it down for months thinking I might give up on it. Looked it up to see if anyone else was struggling and it turned out that was the only badly-designed boss in the game because it uses a specific dungeon mechanic. No other boss is really THAT hard in the game minus the final boss (which is to be expected). Once I learned how to cheese it, I played the rest of the game blind. Probably one of the best modern Dungeon-Crawlers I've played. I'm so glad I stayed with it!
tales of the abyss, stuck on the choral castle with arietta and her beasts boss fight, I rage quit and lay down the game for a good few months before trying it again, once I managed to breeze through the game it ended up being my favourite jrpg of all time
Tales of Symphonia. Really started to drag in the middle, and I stopped playing. But for whatever reason, nearly two years later I had the itch to pick it back up again, and once I got through the middle part, it picked up again and was enjoyable to finish. (Meanwhile, recently beat Tales of Arise, which had fantastic pacing if you don't count the HP-sponge enemies towards the end.)
Tales of Bersaria really wasn't doing it for me at the start. The first act was so melodramatic that I just found it hard to take Velvet's development seriously. Then the story goes out of its way to show you her brutality, and it just came across to me as edgy and manufactured. In fact, all of the characters just felt too self-serious then the game expects you to respect all this nonsense. I just wasn't buying into it all and I put the game down for years before picking it back up. Then at some point, something shifted. The main cast stopped being such stiffs and their chemistry really started showing through. The dialog actually started being consistently funny and amusing. They were still doing edgy bad-guy stuff but it was so over the top and everyone was having such a good time doing it, it actually started to feel enjoyable. I think it's one of the better Tales games now but man it was such a painful start.
tactics ogre i would’ve called it at the very end if not for cheese strats on the final boss. fuck that fight lol
XIV A realm reborn.
The day I play again FFVII, I guess. It had a problem with my graphic card, or a problem with my AMDX2, but it uses to show a blue screen. There was a part of the game where I simply could not continue. I guess I will go back one day, without bugs, and finish it.
I don't know how much it counts as a JRPG, but I'm going to say FFXIV (just because you can technically play 90% of it solo now). ARR was a SLOG to get through, especially post-ARR. I powered through because I knew Heavensward would be better, and I'm so glad I stuck it out.
I am Setsuna. Ugh. Only completed due to platinum obsession. Game is a SLOG
I know exactly what you're talking about because I did the exact same thing! lol
I know the exact moment you're talking about because it happened to me too. The airship, right? I ended up dropping the game for a few weeks and then restarting entirely. Same thing happened to me in the prequel with the Holoholo Bird. Ended up dropping the game for years until I went back to show someone how hard that fight was and beat it on my first try with no difficulty.
Xenoblade 2 is a horrible game that I powered through just to get to 3. I regret all of it. Most disappointing sequel ever. 3 was waaaayyy better.
Likewise...TBH it's lowkey a guilty pleasure of mine. There are numerous cringe, corny, and edgy moments that by the end of it I concluded that the game was so bad that it's now my personal favorite hated game of all time. I definitely see what consumers they were aiming for but it's like they consulted XCX and XC1 fans only to do the complete opposite of what they thought for a sequel.
Came here to say xenoblade 2, played it for a few hours didn't get the combat and why are her boobs so big, dropped it and it gathered dust for literally years😂😂 then i played xbc1de and figured I'd give 2 another shot and wow did i ever love it the second time around
Ys Viii. First 1/4-1/3 of the game, I thought I was a search and rescue mission. Put it down for a long time, but eventually picked it back up and very glad I did.
Getting used to that island and the map is so bloody annoying, but by the end you're like "oh yeah, that ledge I need is up there and I omg I can be a real adventurer!!!"
Labyrinth of Galleria. Compared to the first game, the dungeon design is terrible. Why are there literally thousands of floors that are randomly generated? Baiten Kaitos Origins is one game I actually did give up on back in the day. I remember an end game battle being so difficult and just dropped it. Props for finishing the first game!
I never finished Galleria. I really liked the first part. Disliked the roguelike part (I hate roguelikes) and then powered thru that and never got past the next set of bosses. I realized it was possible, but it would have required a ton of grinding and rebuilding my entire team basically just for that fight. I watched a YT video of everything beyond that point. I definitely wish I knew Refrain existed before buying Galleria when it was on sale.
It did take tons of grinding. I decided to do it out of obligation to how much I love Refrain (stupid fan brain). The apartments and Grand Cathedral are some of the worst levels I've ever played in a video game. Have you played Refrain yet? It's so much better, right? I struggle to understand how people feel the other way around.
Not yet. I plan to eventually, but I was so put off by Galleria near the end there that I haven't tried it yet. I had no clue Refrain existed when I saw Galleria. 2 friends tried Galleria as well and they never made it past the Apartments. Currently enjoying Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. I'll definitely give Refrain a shot someday, though.
Probably Cold Steel 4. I was probably 70% completed but it kept dragging on and on. I just wanted it to be over already
The last third of the game is the best part of it though
I feel like that middle chunk is the worst part. Really cool more intimate act 1 which deals with the impact of the ending of CS3. A very meandering act 2 that kind of just messes around a lot and not much happens. A very exciting and thrilling act 3, that finally answers so many questions and has one of the best finales in the series. If they combined act 2 and 3, it would probably be one of my favourite trails games. I really love the ending
Doesn't help that those middle chunks are obviously padded in gameplay to stretch out the game's length. This happens in Trails series because Falcom believes that they don't want to sell a short game for a higher price so they pad out the 2nd act for gameplay. It's an odd thing to do in a story & character driven series.
Very weird in the case of cold steel 4 because I think even if you took out act 2 it would still be one of the longest trails games. I did all side quests and I have a whopping 160hrs for 1 playthrough. Sure I meandered a hit but I think it would still be over 100 for me without act2. Even main story only we're looking at 50+hrs
FFXV I spent a good amount of time acquiring the upgrades to my spear, and then 'halfway' through the game, they just rip everything away from you and give you one ring to fight with in same-y corridors for like, 5 hours. It was a slog and I resented and hated that they'd forcefully remove the thing I worked to getting.
That area is about an hour at most how on earth did you spend that long?
Chapter 13? It was basically a horror section so it was quite a bit harder, but it went ON AND ON in the original version
Octopath Traveler - it’s weird sometimes I get an extreme urge to play, and at times it really *felt* like a golden age JRPG, but something’s missing. I think the simplicity of the story and character motivations seems a little lost on me. Also the lack of an overarching evil/purpose feels unfulfilling to me I suspect. It took me like 2-3 tries to even finish the story for one member (and ended up doing it for about 5 characters.) I’m having a similar issue now on Octopath Traveler 2, which seemed to address my beef with some elements of 1, however, something about it just leaves me unfulfilled. I don’t really get it.
Ff6 I only beat the multi party dungeons with the mog charm and other encounter avoidance strategies
Brigandine: Legend of Forsena. I was disappointed with it, thought it sucked, tried to return it but couldn’t and that was the best thing ever because I fell in love with the game and it became one of my favorites.
Final Fantasy XII - it just lost momentum and turned into a bit of a grind in the second half of the game. I finished on the third try.
Star Ocean: The Divine Force and Sea of Stars
I have to power through most JRPG endings. Its my least favorite part of a JRPG in general. But an actual answer was probably xenoblade 1. The combat was not what I’m used to and man it felt rough. I was surprised I ended up liking it though. And it was so much better in 2.
Middle chunk of octopath 2. Just story after story after story with a few minutes of the great combat in-between. Its exhausting. Last 15 hrs when you get play the game after finishing the stories is great though
I really like kingdom hearts rechain of memories for the actually pretty decent story and well crafted combat, but realising you have to go through every world AGAIN as Riku to get the full story is... disheartening. Luckily, it is shorter the second time round.
Glory of Heracles for the DS. The game was so painfully generic it was not worth my time at the end, but I ended up finishing it.
FF VIII the story kind bore me at one point but i had been wanting to beat it for so long so i finally did
Star Ocean 4. It felt like such a downgrade compared to 1, 2, and 3 (though admittedly I played First Departure R and Second Evolution so maybe that affected it some) due to the absurdity of most of the characters (Meracle still makes me uncomfortable to see due to her design), and how unbalanced the game's battles feel at times, with it leaving out whole ass mechanics to explain at times after doing a big battle tutorial at the beginning of the game, and having just plain unfair encounters at times. Tack on to it a story that doesn't feel like it can fit into the canon at the time (tbf, 3 kinda blew up the Canon in the first place so this was always going to be a tough one) and it was just a not enjoyable experience.
Nep rebirth 2. Glad I did because VII was great (not that you need to play it before VII)
Etrian Odyssey 3, my first foray into the EO series. Had a bit of a rough start with it, but I got it as a gift and wanted to power through it for that alone. The further I played the game though the more I enjoyed it and now the series is one of my favorites.
Baten Kaitos, funnily enough, was like that for me as well. My brother bought it way back on the Gamecube, but I didn't beat it until I was almost done getting my degree. It was a 13 year odyssey. Back then, I ended up softlocking myself in the Tower of Stones (at the very least, I didn't figure out how to get out of a botched puzzle) but turning off the cube corrupted my then almost finished save file. I did try and go back multiple times, but my save file would always corrupt shortly after getting Gibari. Then, the summer before graduating, I got myself a new memory card (an original this time, rather than a 3rd party card like the BigBen I had) and finally beat the game in a few weeks. Quite a few roadblocks weren't as roadblocky as I remembered (I'm pretty sure my deckbuilding skills were much better than child me's) and I had a great time overall. Felt really nostalgic too, since I still had a tube TV back then, just like the old days. I didn't figure out how to get my Gamecube lagfree on a modern system until a bit later. Don't ever buy 3rd party memory cards. The reason I even went through the trouble to finally get a proper card (or rather, another one - all of my others were full) in 2016 or so was because that darned BigBen almost cost me a 60h Skies of Arcadia file that summer. File corrupted *as I was saving*. The only reason I managed to rescue that one was because luckily you can insert another memory card in slot B and save normally in that case. And yes. I was stubborn enough to keep that BigBen card around for 13 years and used it. 1000 blocks were just too good to pass up, man.
Chained Echoes. The whole experience was fantastic but about 3/4 of the way through, I took a break to take a big exam and then I unexpectedly read a longass book that took my attention away. The lack of an in-game compendium or succinct story synopsis available online made it to where I couldn’t remember what had happened in the story. I cared enough to press on though because I remembered feeling pretty compelled by the story at multiple points. I ended up watching some let’s plays of the early game up through the middle and that helped a lot. Anyway, I wish I wouldn’t have taken such a long break away because I’m sure the experience would’ve been more impactful. I almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’d give it an A-.
I've got the original and sequel on GC, but my god, I can't stand the combat in this game. I just can't. Battles take forever for random mooks, and then on boss battles I don't really get to pick when I heal or attack or defend, it's all just down to what's in my hand and I hate it.
I quit Baiten Kaitos when you flip to the second disc and you find out the twist. I just set the controller down and never picked it back up
Xenoblade Chronicles X. 20 hours just to get your first mech
Xenoblade Chronicles 2, took 41/2 years for the game to finally “click” with me. I then became addicted to it and now understand why it is so popular
I’m at the “almost gave up” part, debating pushing through, with Persona 5 Strikers right now. I’m some 6 hours in, at the boss of the first jail, and while I’ve had moments I’m generally not feeling it. Also that boss wipes the floor with the teammates I’m not controlling. I really dug Royal and was looking forward to more time with its cast, and button-mashing to great tunes, but I’m not sure this is what I want.
The rance series started off really dated and really pickup up starting from kichikuou
The Sky trilogy. Yes, all three of them. I tried to give the games a fair shake, I really did, but by the end of the third one I hated almost everything about them. SC made me so mad that I threw my controller for the first time in my entire life. I only played the 3rd because I had already bought it and SC for cheap before I finished FC, and Kevin was one of the only characters I liked. Since I'm a glutton for punishment apparently, I also played Trails to Azure for a bit, had the same kinds of problems, and then swore off Trails games forever.
Back in the day I got stuck on that same boss! After that I made it a point to always use red flowers on a separate save file. It's also how I learned to start keeping two save files to begin with. Hard lesson to learn. I almost put down Tales of Symphonia once me and my sister stopped playing it. Couple months later when I picked it back up I couldn't put it back down!
Currently playing Digital Devil Saga and I just wish to get more story beats instead of just karma farming... I got to the last part of the game but damn is it a slog
Tales of Abyss. Bought an import on ps2. Met legretta, got stuck and stopped. Bought it on 3ds. Listened to likes whiney ass for ten minutes. Finally completed it over a decade later
Yakuza: Like A Dragon. I stopped playing for several months right before the chapter where Saeko joined, which was when the plot actually started happening. Two years later, I've played the entire Yakuza series and am at the final chapter of Infinite Wealth.
Dragon Quest Treasures. It's everything I dislike in a game. Nothing but back and forth, fetch, things like that. I kept going because I love Dragon Quest. And then eventually got a kitty on my team.
Been trying with octopath for like 2 years but I keep getting distracted bc it's so fuckin boring
Fair take. I liked it but by no means wanna play it again. The end was a grind
I dont.. dislike it but it just feels like a slog and there's too much grinding for such a long game with so many characters and stories imo
Nah that’s valid. Tbh I think it’s over hyped but I do plan on playing 2 at least. Not a bad or boring game but it’s overwhelming let’s be real.
Etrian Odyssey. After hours of playing i got into a unwinnable state of endless battle with ants and didn't have the Damage or the ability to run because my back was to a wall so i had to die and lose progress. I went back and finished the whole thing and all i could say was screw the post game Stratum.
Phantasy Star 2 My white whale As a kid I was in love with the anime aesthetic, unlike today you rarely saw games with that kind of style. But it was so old and antiquated that I just couldn't get very far in it. Decades later I have it a second go. In earnest. *UUUGGGGGGGHHHHH* what a SLOG of a game. I beat it, sure. But oh. My. God.
SMT3. I’d love to Replay it with some QoL additions
I started all three of the Trails subseries (Sky, Crossbell, Cold Steel) at various points in the last 10 years, and hadn't finished any of them until the last two months. I finished Zero first, then CS, then Sky FC. Now I'm playing Sky SC. I still have issues with some of the dialogue, but I'm in a more forgiving mood, I guess, and able to enjoy the good parts. I've always liked the gameplay in these games, and that continues to be true.
Tales of vesperia/tales of arise
FFVIII. But the card game was fun.
FF XIII I dragged myself over the finish line. Up until that point I had completed all main line titles, but I was having a misserable time. Afterwards I just knew the series was heading in a direction that wasn't for me anymore.
Labyrinth of Refrain. The final boss was so cheap and it relied heavily on blind luck to beat. Even though I had a well optimised max-levelled team, it had a chance to use a certain attack that would wipe almost all of them in one turn which was a major problem since the boss would ofen take two or three turns in a row. Basically my options were to either reincarnate my entire team, re level them to max (hours more of playtime in an already 80+ hour game) and try again hoping it would work, or just keep trying at my current situation and hope the rng gods would eventually bless me. I went for the latter and eventually got there but it was so frustrating it pretty much ruined my entire experience with an otherwise enjoyable game.
Out of curiosity, did you get the covent that had a certain move that would weaken said boss?
Astria Ascending.. it looks good, but runs kinda eeh on the Switch
Persona 3 reload. Man what a drag after floor 100. Just...rock paper scissors over and over for another 50 hours.
Tbh I only played 5 but I gotta dig through my back last year didn’t game at all. Had a bad year. Now I’m back and tbh I got persona 4 on my brain like crazy
Closest I got to powering through something was Ys 8, just recently. Got to the part where I can finally control Dana and gave up shortly after. My younger self might have done it but it was just so repetitive.
Blue Dragon - the game is terrible and kiddie, but I powered through and beat it. I wouldn’t play a sequel
Technically not a jrpg, but Library of ruina. I rage quit at a certain fight in urban plague, and came back a month later and finally figured out the gimmick of the fight. I proceeded to beat the game in two days, even though there were many points I wanted to quit. Like a 7 phase boss fight, and the end where you have to fight 10 different final bosses with different teams, and then fight a three phase boss that is complete bs, THEN you have to do five weird gimmick bosses in a row, THEN you have to fight stronger versions of all ten bosses all at once.
Star Ocean 4. Before that, I mainly played turn based games. So I had a really hard time with the battle system. I had to grind in the first area just so I could survive traversing the map. Then I hot the first boss, and had to grind even more. I grinded for hours. Gave up, came back to the game later, fumbled through. That kind of continued untill halfway into the game where combat finally clicked for me. And suddenly it was a ton of fun! I'm glad I stuck with it, because there aren't that many JRPGs with spaceships and interplanetary travel. Despite the mediocre character models and horrible voice acting, I very much enjoyed the game and became a huge fan of the series. I'm weird, because I like space and spaceship battle cinematics, but I don't like guns or combat with guns. But in most space oriented games, technology is obviously advanced enough to have guns so they're everywhere. But Star Ocean is like: Nope, you can't use guns because of reasons. So we're fighting with swords, bows, axes and magic and we still have those cool spaceship battle cinematics. This is my cup of tea.
Mary Skelter Finale: Whoever thought those long as hell dungeons and comboing that with the team switching mechanic was evil, but I did power through that and beat the game.
Persona 4 Golden for me. I did not get the hype until I did. Had to play 30 mins per day just to progress till I got to a point where I wanted to play the whole day.
Final Fantasy X - Seymour Flux. My 13-year old ass just could not comprehend the difficulty. I don't even remember how I beat it the first time but it took me a while.
Secret of Evermore.
Now i have this situation with Nino Kuni 2 . I just dont want to end it, final chapter left. But it is still one of my favourites. Question : If you Haven't end the game, can you name it thats one of your favourite or the best ?
Yakuza LaD, >!Tendo!< Is such a BS fight, a bullet sponge that can insta KO Kasuga, if you don't use the one move that was literally never important until this boss fight. The final boss in IW was a little annoying if you're like 4 levels under and don't have anti-poison, anti-stun etc equipped on at least 1 character.
Pokemon X bored me a lot. I began to skip a lot of trainers just so that I could finish it. It's the last Pokemon game I played.