I honestly liked XIII more than XV. At least XIII felt like a complete experience unlike XV where the story felt rushed and several things happened off screen and required watching a movie and anime to understand everything. The empty open world and very easy, bland, combat where it's almost impossible to die because it's extremely easy to abuse potions and phoenix downs didn't help my enjoyment of XV either.

I can agree that at least FFXIII didn't require you to watch a movie to understand certain aspects of the story, but I still think FFXV has it beat in terms of having a coherent narrative, because at least in FFXV you won't be completely lost in terms of knowing who's who, what's what or where's where within the first fifteen minutes.

Even without watching Kingsglaive, you can still get the general gist of what FFXV's story is about. With FFXIII, you have to read entire pages of datalogs just to understand what happened five minutes ago.

FFXIII throws so many terms and names at you in such a short amount of time that you have no way of keeping up without stopping to do some additional reading, which in my view isn't any better than making you watch a movie or an anime to really understand the story.

TruEdgé67 wrote:

I honestly liked XIII more than XV. At least XIII felt like a complete experience unlike XV where the story felt rushed and several things happened off screen and required watching a movie and anime to understand everything. The empty open world and very easy, bland, combat where it's almost impossible to die because it's extremely easy to abuse potions and phoenix downs didn't help my enjoyment of XV either.

I haven't played any of them, but XIII looks far more appealing to me, even if I am not dying to play it at the moment. XV does just not look fun at all to me. It feels off somehow; boring characters, rushed... the entire setting sounds boring where you start the game as a prince. I may be boring or too traditional, but I prefer to start an RPG/adventure as a nobody.

My JRPG-list isn't long lol:
*Xenoblade Chronicles
*Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (+ Torna)
*Pokemon R/B/Y
*Pokemon G/S/C
*The Last Story (never completed it though, but did like it)
*Paper Mario Thousand Year Door
*Shining Resonance Refrain (trash, never completed it and never will)
*Ys VIII (have yet to start it)

Pretty much it. Don't know if Paper Mario counts, but I listed it anyway since it is an RPG and made by Japanese developers lol.

I never got around to XIII. Everyone kept saying it was bad, and tbh I wasn't too interested in it to begin with.

I picked up Octopath Traveler and Dark Souls Remastered for Switch today. As I said before, I've been looking forward to the former game for a while now. And Dark Souls is just kind of cool to own in a (sort of) cartridge form. The world is a better place now that you don't have to worry about that game getting scratched up.

I’ll be honest : only FF game I didn’t like was 2

But XIII abd XV do frustrate me

Also more people need to play wild arms

Imo the worst Final Fantasy is FFIII. That game is frustratingly difficult and doesn't really have a good story either. Seriously they made it so phoenix downs can't be bought at a store and made them limited to having to be stolen or found in chests. You don't get the life spell till quite a ways into the game iirc and it's so dumb that you can't revive party members for that long. I've beaten FFIII once and I'll never put myself through that again.

I really liked 3 . Everyone talked about this one boss was really hard and I ended up doing without realizing that was the hard part

The first thing is the final dungeon since there’s NO saving

So it’s no secret that JRPGs aren’t really my thing except for Pokémon, BUT I’ve really been wanting to play Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The combat looks complicated, is it simpler than it looks? I like the idea of living on giant creatures!

No it’s pretty complicated lol

Hmm well, there goes my contribution to the JRPG thread. I’ll see myself out.

Yea it’s liable to be a bit frustrating for the casual rpg-er. Lots of things to constantly keep track of in battle. Pokémon=driving an automatic car, XC2=Driving a stick blindfolded with your feet. Ok so it’s not that bad, just a lot of balls to keep in the air.

Also, as an aside, resonance of fate= flying a 747. That battle system was obtuse as hell.

It was fun just driving around that GORGEOUS world and doing random quests. And I thought the story was less of a mess than XIII, but that's not really saying much. XIII-2 was better, than XIII but I think I still enjoyed XV the most.

I'd say...not all that complicated, honestly? It's essentially MMORPG combat: You have an auto-attack that does not much damage and you use that while waiting for your abilities to charge up. Then you just...use your abilities. Certain skills work better in sequence (use one element and then another and the second one does increased damage, say) and using certain sequences of abilities triggers the option to use extra moves, but it's not really complicated because the moves that get bonuses are displayed on-screen, at least that's how I recall it working (I quit XC2 after the plot kept going out of its way to get more generic <<).

Xenoblade gets progressively more complicated combat wise, but it's never too much, and unless you want to do the optional endgame content, you don't need to master it, because you can simply make the content easier by outleveling it.

Hmmm I may give it a try, the concept just seems really cool! It reminds me of the giant creatures from the Neverending Story!

It seems complicated because there's a lot of stuff and the game keeps adding and explaining them kinda poorly (and you can't review tutorials, wtf), but really all it boils down to in the main game once you have access to everything is trying to use Break > Topple > Launch > Smash sequences (even this is kinda optional, I got by reaching only up to Topple for a good portion of the game and never saw Smash until a certain character near the end that has the entire combo on his kit joined the party) and stacking a ton of different elemental orbs into the target with the specials, then trying to break as many of them as possible on a single full party attack round so you can enter Full Burst and just delete whatever had those orbs on. This means that your objective on any important battle is essentially the same: Feed the special bar, use it to stack orbs, full party attack into full burst and win.

Oh and early on when you don't have access to much short step cancelling your attack combo is your friend, since it charges your skills faster.

Xenoblade games have a sort of rhythm to the combat that you eventually come to understand as you proceed through the game. Xenoblade 2 in particular is easy to get into as it takes its time with letting you get a feel for all the different aspects of combat, starting out with just using plain arts and then eventually graduating to fighting alongside other characters, and then onwards to using Blade and Driver Combos.

And honestly, past that point there's not much more to learn. You have a lot of freedom when it comes to which Blade you want to pair with which Driver (apart from story-related Blades, of course) and you don't have to worry at all about optimization unless you plan on taking on the optional endgame boses, as PU pointed out.

I suppose one thing that might seem daunting is the whole deal with aux cores and accessories, but even that doesn't really matter much if all you're looking for is to experience the story.

@MVS
You don't have to be a mod to delete your own posts. You can just do it yourself if you want. I believe you click on "more" next to submit after editing your post and there should be a box to check to delete it.

So my current list of jrpgs I intend to beat

DRAGON quest XI
SUKIODEN 2
Shadow Hearts covenant

After that probably xenogears and symphonia dawn of the new world