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Each step you take makes all other combatants get a bit closer to their turn, and if you take too much steps positioning their interrupt your turn with their own. You basically have battle order, but during your turn you can move freely on chessboard stage. The battle system is pretty strange and takes a bit to get used to. This made the game pretty original now, and it keeps being original today. Note how they went out of their way not to include most common trope of medieval fantasy with a knight saving world. There is a lot of murder and sad, unfair deaths in many of those stories. Prehistoric one is rather funny, while the "near future" one can be pretty dark.
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They vary very much not only in theme, but also in tone. It's like each team making those games took their favourite movie and made it in jRPG form. There is also Street Fighter the jRPG, where you just have a few fights like in fighting game arcade mode.Īnd finally there's a rather basic jRPG where you are tasked to train 3 martial artists in ancient China. around 2012 (it's a SNES game, remember), where you can read minds and ride giant mechs. Oh, and then there's prehistory jRPG where none of the characters can speak, and everything is communicated to the player by animations and emoticons.Īnd you have a game happening in near future of. There is sneaking mission, which you can complete without killing anyone, or by killing everyone. But Wild Arms is full of typical jRPG concepts, like giant guns attached to hands, or girls fighting with umbrellas. We have a clean western, I can't think of any western jRPGs except for Wild Arms. We have a jRPG that is a survival horror in space with (nearly) no combat, no levelling, and mostly based on the dialogue and story. I mention RPG maker, because that's the only place I've seen similar games released.
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This feels more like a set of very polished RPG maker games, where developers could explore themes that were (and still are) rather original for jRPG genre. Although some are much shorter than that, while others are a bit longer. The games are very short - on average about 2 hours to beat each of them. Instead of getting singular game we're getting an anthology of 7 small jRPGs that only have basics of the UI in common. It was very strange on SNES where it originally released, and honestly it is till very strange even in 2023.
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