This week’s Retro Roundup is pretty late due to unhappy real-life occurances, but at least this week people can’t whine about how I couldn’t possibly have spent enough time with these games to have formed an opinion. Ah, who am I kidding. People can complain about anything.
I’ve also posted a preview of Hoshigami Remix, which game had the good fortune to sneak in shortly before Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War arrived. Otherwise I don’t think it would have fared as well in the kangaroo court of my opinion.
Yeah, I’m replaying FF Tactics in Japanese. I haven’t really touched the game since I first played it in 1998, but I’m surprised as how easily I’ve fallen back into it. Yes, I know, blah blah blah — too easy, too simple, not enough units on the battlefield, T.G. Cid is a cheap bastard. Fine, whatever. It’s still fun, yannow?
Currently my characters are all around about level 10 and I’m heading to the final battle of Chapter One. Pimp daddy Ramza and his team of fly honeys, that is: Rose the Knight, Yukiko the Archer (whose combination of longbow, Armor/Weapon Break and Concentrate might accidentally make the upcoming battle a little too easy), Jennifer the Monk and Violet the White Mage. Boys are stupid, as Todd Goldman might say, after seeing someone else say it first.
It occurs to me that if I were stranded on a desert island, I could probably manage to get along just fine as long as I had the Ivalice games with me. Heck, just waiting for Vagrant Story’s smithy boxes to load into memory could kill months.
Yeah, seriously, Gafgarion. It’s not her fault that the PlayStation’s memory card slot had such a pokey I/O controller. Jerk.
So would you say that Hoshigami Remix is going to be worth it to a huge SRPG (or TRPG, as I noticed you calling them) fan? I’m going to be getting Luminous Arc when that makes it’s way here, but this is the first I’ve read on Hoshigami.
Also, I envy you for having both a PSP AND FFT:TLW. I about went out and bought a PSP just for that occasion, then I realized that I’ve got rent.
Hoshigami’s kinda clunky and the skill system seems pretty lackluster, but it’s out before Luminous Arc (which just arrived today) and FF Tactics A2, so it seems like a decent quick fix.
Then I’ll probably end up picking it up; if for no other reason than I’m sure when I get around to wanting to play it, it’ll be harder to find.
Oh, Ninja Gaiden. That game did something weird with my head. And Rygar. There used to be awesome people at Tecmo. Now it’s a bunch of jerks who can’t hold a candle to Capcom (not that they could, but they tried. Man, they used to be so good. Now, Ninja Gaiden Black feels like work, it’s a chore to play. But the original NES game, you could finish it in less than an hour and feel happy you saw the hero making out with his “price” (hmm, so they were sexists even back then). Anyway, it was just like watching a Gekko Kamen anime episode, where Gekko Kamen is a young ninja with a hot girlfriend and a purple suit. Armakuni from Last Ninja was much more scary because he didn’t talk. He just killed. And was a lonely old man who traveled in time to kill a Shogun in New York City. Awesomeness like that has not been seen in videogames since the late 80’s.
Hey Jeremy, does the Japanese PSP release of Tactics have an english language option?
I don’t know if I’ll pick up Hoshigami when it drops for DS unless it gets a major price drop; I was one of the few burned by that masochistic original release.
No multilingual option in Lion War, thus my need to play it in Japanese. Besides, this game is unquestionably getting a fresh translation, so they wouldn’t just leave the crappy old one in there. FF Anniversary had the language option because they were just using the GBA script, which was fine.
Is it true that the FFT PSP port is plagued with slowdown? If that’s true, I’m gonna stick with my emulated PSX copy.
Slowdown only seems to be a problem when spells and animated skills are used. It’s annoying but not crippling — certainly it’s nowhere near as bad as the PS1 port of Tactics Ogre.
Plagued is too strong. It’s noticable, but not game-breaking.
You know, I was going to mention the colors in Castlevania in your previous post, but this works, too. You know that scary shade of blue/purple that almost all of the blocks seem to have on.. which level was it? I think the one where you fight Death? That color now elicits in me a Pavlovian shudder of horror. And because Cid’s armor seems to be that same color, I never once used him in FF Tactics. Thanks for screwing me up for life, Castlevania.
You really thought Hoshigami was better than Saiyuki? De gustibus and all, but MAN was Hoshigami (or “oh, shit! ‘Gami!” as it quickly became) horrid. The only fun I had was exploiting the utterly broken level-up system by raising the main character to level ninety-nine within the first few hours of play and then blitzing through the game with no allies, laughing scornfully at the former cheapness effortlessly laid waste. Of course, given the bland-ass story, even that was a big fat waste of time. Whereas Saiyuki, for me, was surprisingly compelling.
Anyway, I hope your real-life issues are getting better.
“I’m heading to the final battle of Chapter One.”
You’re going to give Algus (that little Richie Rich-looking punk) a well-deserved and brutal beating, right?
I pounded him so hard he felt it in my last playthrough, nine years ago. But I hear he has an expanded role in this game and plays a small part in a later chapter, so maybe I didn’t pound him hard enough.
“What’s going on? It’s been nearly an hour!”
yeah, seriously. sodomizing god should only take like 5 minutes max.
Will you list all the changes from the original when you’re done?
Even more annoying line: “Don’t blame us. Blame yourself or God.” If someone told me that I’d be tempted to punch them.
Which is exactly why you should only say it if you’re riding a chocobo, and the one you’re saying it to isn’t.
Heh, nice team. Personally I always kept ‘Rad’ in my part because…well…look at his name!
You only have girls in your party? But…but how will you get a Bard? Ramza isn’t cut out for that line of work.
“I pounded Algus so hard he felt it in my last playthrough, nine years ago. But I hear he has an expanded role in this game and plays a small part in a later chapter, so maybe I didn’t pound him hard enough.” Well that just means you might have an extra chance to pound on him.