I’m cheating a bit here by listing two games at once, but you really can’t have one without the other. Persona 2: Innocent Sin & Persona 2: Eternal Punishment Like Ogre Battle, any successful reintroduction to this franchise would likely require a remake or remaster for this anti-highfalutin, high-noon-gunfight JRPG franchise to reemerge in the 2020s.ħ. Wild Arms spawned four sequels, of which Wild Arms 2 and 3 are especially strong entries. With names like Rudy Roughnight and Jack Van Burace, the cast embodies Wild West tropes but maintains a palpable level of Japanese scriptwriting and its traditional focus on character development. Developer Media Vision combined high fantasy with a distinctly Wild West aesthetic to create an environment uncommon even among WRPGs, let alone the JRPG genre. One of the best examples of this is the Wild Arms series, which began in 1996 (1997 in the West) for the Sony PlayStation. The mid-to-late 1990s were a breeding ground for bizarre JRPGs with impressively original settings. Any revival of this mesmerizing brand of JRPGs, however, would be best served to return to the beginning. You’ll definitely notice some similarities between The March of the Black Queen and that more famous title, but it’s Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together that really cemented Matsuno’s penchant for dark narratives and expansive battlefields. Ogre Battle was Yasumi Matsuno’s big claim to fame before when he teamed up with Square Enix and created Final Fantasy Tactics. The first game, The March of the Black Queen, would be the perfect starting point for a series revival because it introduces the world and several key characters whilst featuring real-time strategy battles that can feel riveting to this day (if you can ignore the hilariously tinny, utterly random, announcer who says “fight it out” before each match). Instead, it sounds like a bargain bin fighting game that even your rich collector uncle doesn’t have in his collection.īut Ogre Battle rules. The name, which is in fact a reference to a Queen song, does nothing to suggest the franchise’s relatively grounded sociopolitical storytelling and fantastic isometric JRPG gameplay. The worst thing that can be said for the Ogre Battle series - and I’ll admit, it’s a pretty accurate slam - is that it’s called Ogre Battle. Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen A jump straight to the second of these JRPGs would probably be for the best, as the actual first game… really isn’t all that great.ĩ. While it’s technically the second game in the Lufia duology, Rise of the Sinistrals is a 99-years-past prequel to the original Lufia and thus, with a clever little title tweak, could easily be mistaken for being the first. But since your primary focus is puzzle-solving, it’s great not to have to worry about losing cognitive momentum on a bunch of flappy birds and token goblins. In this fashion, a player can feasibly avoid monster encounters altogether, although a little grinding can save some frustration in the long run. What this JRPG does differently is that it turns its dungeons into a series of genuinely impressive puzzles not entirely unlike The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and other contemporary action-adventure games.ĭungeons are turn-based and enemies won’t move unless you do. Solid, perhaps, but hardly revolutionary. At first blush, the game’s combination of a conventional SNES-era overworld and multiple dungeons to traipse through doesn’t sound like anything special. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has long distinguished itself from dime-a-dozen JRPGs courtesy of a fairly unique approach to gameplay. We’ll even tackle this list in ascending order, which means that while I urge you lovely readers not to do this, there’s undoubtedly no stopping at least a few of you from jumping straight ahead to the top spot and reading the rest thereafter. Let’s take a look today at 10 aging JRPGs in need of either a remake or a at least a remaster, all the better to glorify brilliant games anew and expand their audiences into the modern era. That’s just the nature of a somewhat niche genre worldwide. In fact, some of the best JRPGs are blips on most folks’ radars. For every mainline mainstay like Persona 5, there are several games that most folks won’t even recognize a few years down the line (if they ever did, to begin with). JRPG fans are no strangers to seeing some of their favorite games wither away from mainstream memory like sand through an hourglass.
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