Now that the eight generation is mostly over, what are your favorite games and favorite hidden gems?
The ninth generation has been upon us for the last couple years and while we're still getting new games for the last generation, we're starting to see games that are exclusively releasing for next gen or next gen and Switch. What are your favorite games and what are some hidden gems that you've played throughout the history of the last generation?
So anyways, I'll just state that now more than ever I can easily say that I think that the eight gen was so far the best generation we've ever seen with gaming. It's certainly not the fifth or sixth, or even seventh generation where the portable market is concerned for RPGs, a genre which is my favorite, and there was a lot of variety that we are missing from the sixth generation, but the eight generation brought us so many new ideas from indie developers. It brought us a new wave of developers that pushed ideas that we haven't ever seen before into existence and we've received a lot of truly amazing games that are better than the classics we've grown up with. It's also been a long time, but this last generation has also given us a Nintendo console that people can actually be proud of with the Switch, no backhanded remarks with the Wii having mostly shovelware and selling to people who play it for the weekend and then toss it in the trash, the only bad thing about the system and its popularity are that the psychopath Nintendo fanboys, the most loud and toxic fanbase in the industry are at an all time high.
I might start listing stuff later, but I'll list some of my favorites and favorite hidden gems. I'll go more into detail about the hidden gems though.
Bloodborne is my favorite Souls and is in my top 10 games of all time. If you were to count each trick and non trick version of the weapons individually and remove all the duplicates, there are 47 unique weapons in the game.
The Last of Us. The theme of the game might be horror, but the game is one of the best stealth games of all time.
Ys8. Falcom's best game imo, taking the flat Ys7 and Celceta mechanics and adding depth to it with the ability to jump and the verticality of the Ark of Napishtim engine games. One of the best action RPGs of all time.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I had no faith that this game would have turned out as good as it was and it just blew me away by being one of the best RPGs I've played in a long time. I'd put it at a comparable level to the original game in terms of quality, specifically because just how amazingly well done the combat system integrated action and turn based combat.
Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. While I initially did not like the physical and magical armor system, I came to eventually respect them as they do balance the game and remove the ease of status effects that was available in the original, additionally the source points kept master spells unavailable for use unless you acquired source points and while very few specific areas in the game had unlimited source points(one or two per act) it's up to the player to abuse the system and go back to those locations each time. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a near perfect game in the genre and just in comparison to the original, no other western developed RPG comes close to their quality in comparison.
Salt and Sanctuary could pass for a From Software game if they actually came out and said it but it's not. This is a 2D game that perfects the formula as good as even From Software themselves could do it. This game has an incredibly well done leveling system, a sphere grid that actually doesn't suck allowing you to plan and create your character build, and aside from the excellent combat system the game has some of the best platforming in a game that isn't even at its core a platformer. The soundtrack is good, but the biggest problem I can say is that I think the soundtrack is literally just a single looping song outside of boss battles.
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. While platforming and gameplay is not to the level of Salt and Sanctuary, the entirety of this game and the absolute density of what it offers is more than any other platformer except N++. The entire world is masterfully designed with secrets within every inch. The absolutely massive amount of unique puzzles that are just simple enough for you to solve without banging your head into the wall, atleast until the late game puzzles and the manor which will truly have you wanting to break the game with their absurdity. I can forgive those manor puzzles simply because I know I will never forget and the rest of the game is just so good.
Hollow Knight. Truth be told I think Hollow Knight is super overrated and the ones above I feel are the better games in terms of the way their worlds were designed. However, I do feel it is at the very least a great game and the one thing that I will state is that it has the best bosses I've ever fought in a 2D action game. There are so many bosses in this game and not one of the bosses aren't exceptionally well designed. There is no game of this style that has better bosses than Hollow Knight.
Crisis Core Reunion. Have you ever played a remake that changes the mechanics of the game so vastly that you have a completely different experience despite being the same exact game? Crisis Core Reunion is that game. I liked the original Crisis Core, but the change in combat mechanics vastly improved the experience to this game. Combat is fast and fluid, a more action focused Final Fantasy 7 Remake. In the middle of any of your attacks Zack can cast a spell materia and hop back and toss the spell or jump straight into a command materia. Being able to outfit Zack and change the style of how he plays at any time as well, having a more magic oriented character or attack oriented character in terms of how his statistics are built.
Tactics Ogre Reborn. Have you ever played a remake that changes the mechanics of the game so vastly that you have a completely different experience despite being the same exact game? And both this and Crisis Core released in the same year. Now my initial playthrough of Tactics Ogre Reborn I was frustrated with some of the absurd boss difficulty and how some of the game mechanics were sort of hidden. They were visible but they were either at the bottom of the consumables shop and even after that you had to upgrade each weapon and go to a completely different page to see what they added, you may have never known until chapter 4(as in, I didn't know until chapter 4.) However, I like replaying games, and these mechanics fit together perfectly. Archers are no longer broken, but they are a great asset to the party. The best weapons in the game aren't even the best weapons when +1 weapon mechanics give them greater benefit than just more damage will ever do. This game is not perfect, but it's hard to say it deserves any less than a perfect score.
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The games above are fairly well known, Salt and Sanctuary might be overlooked, maybe Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, but I'm pretty sure both have sold atleast a million copies. The ones below I would say are hidden gems.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar. Sadly, everything from THQNordic runs like crap, and this game is no different. Maybe the Switch port runs better as it was a late port. Music that loads in seconds after the battle starts, framerate problems in and out of combat, and the occassional crash on PS4. I've never experienced a crash after the patch but it's the physical version that matters imo. That being said, this game is one of the best RPGs of last gen. Forget Octopath Traveler, which I feel is solid, it's overrated more than anything. Battle Chasers: Nightwar has your characters has a magic pool that you can expend, or you can use physical attacks that can build up a temporary poor of mana to subsidize with your MP so that you use less. Each character has a lot of skills that synergize with one another from the regular attacks, to defensive mechanics, to the skills themselves. Each character has a Final Fantasy 9 like AP system where you can choose section A or B to further customize your character and you can craft weapons and armor and then add stats to where you want each character to better perform. One character I pumped everything into evasion allowing her to dodge a lot of attacks and take less than she otherwise would with defense due to her high base evasion, and then use her attack skills to taunt enemies and make her the target of attacks.
Skul. Now, the next few games in this list are going to be procedural generation games because they do do it well, but I really hate procedural generation and for the most part I feel that it's abused to make it appear that games have a lot more content than they actually do, a way to artificially add replay value to their games. I would go into depth why and how these games difficulty could be fixed but I'm not going to do that here. Skul happens to be one of the games I find to be an absolute masterpiece of a gem while hating the procedural mechanics that were added to the game. In terms of level design there's nothing procedural about it. All the maps are preset and it's only the order of these maps or whether that particular run will even get the maps at all. Each of your skulls have a single combo and they start with one special attack that has a cooldown, one you level these skulls to tier 3, these skulls now have a second cooldown added. Now there are four different abilities per skull so you can pick up a skull and the ability will be one of these four, level it up to tier 3 and the second ability will be another random ability out of those four. Some classes that start at tier 3 will always have one specific cooldown while the second will be randomized. Then finally, every single skull has a transformation cooldown which will use a skill when you transform into the skull. You also get one spell that can be cast as well. So you pretty much want to go through the game making a build for your two skulls while also getting skulls that perform well together. The gameplay mechanics as an action platformer are some of the best ever made. It's just that you play through around maybe seven maps per area, plus boss, plus mid boss, and health recovery is a joke. You will defeat hundreds of enemies by end game and you'll do it on a single life which can gain an unlock that let's you revive with 50% health once. The game does feature a rookie mode, a slap in the face that is identical but enemies deal half damage.
Skul is an amazing game and I've got to the boss just before the last boss more than once, several times, but I haven't beaten the game... on normal. After 80 attempts I changed the game to rookie mode and on my very first attempt I finished the game. I do not feel proud of myself that I did that, because the name rookie mode alone is enough to just make you feel like less of a gamer by having to do so in order to finish the game. That should have been normal mode though.
Has-Been Heroes. Another procedural generation game but I have no issues with the design of this game as the game starts off by actually being beatable by the player, gradually increasing in difficulty and allowing for more bosses on subsequent playthroughs. Has-Been Heroes can be seen as simply going through the motions, but the mechanics of this game could not be any better. You have three characters, a character that attacks with a single powerful attack, a character who attacks with two attacks, and a character that attacks with three attacks. The gameplay is on three lines and the enemies have stamina, each stamina is reduced per attack. After attacking, you can then swap the characters around, so you essentially want to knock each enemy to zero stamina for the next attack to deal full damage and reduce their maximum stamina by one. As you play through you will add accessories and spells to each character allowing you to try and fine tune how each character will work mechanically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Bp...nnel=kupomogli
Siralim series. I would rate the Siralim games 7/10, but I would give them some of my highest recommendation ever when it comes to recommending an RPG, because the games are far better than my rating may imply. I'd rate it as such because what is within the game but that certainly doesn't take away from the enjoyment I've had with them. Now I would just say ignore Siralim 1, and honestly if you want to only play the most refined game in the series minus mechanics that may be missing within a previous entry, just go for the latest game. Since I do not play digital games, I've only played Siralim 2 and 3, and while there are some mechanics I like in the second game, the third game removes some things I didn't like in the second game and is a better overall experience.
So what Siralim does, is that much like a true roguelike, you go deeper within floors and the dungeon is randomized closer to that of a true roguelike, such as Shiren the Wanderer, etc. Monsters move when the player moves, and random items strewn about. When a monster runs into you, six versus six turn based combat ensues. Siralim 3 has a boss every three or four floors and each floor gets progressively more difficult. Enemies on the earlier floors up to 20 level up by one per floor, it then starts going up to per floor, later on three, and so on. Additionally, the monsters that you get early on may not synergize perfectly with one another, there are 700+ and you will start finding those who synergize better with the monsters you have. You'll shortly after be able to start crafting artifacts(weapons) of which each of your monsters can equip one and each weapon can have a single trait, in essence that monster having its own trait and that of the other monsters. You'll get spells which there are hundreds which also yield randomized properties such as attack, defend, provoke, cast again, % uses different stats, etc. You'll gain access to a nether creature of which you can have only one in a party but including artifact can use four different traits. There are 13 positive and 13 negative stat traits that can be added to each monster giving them better benefits while leveling while decreasing others you don't feel are as necessary for that monster, you can level up any of the 15 God's favor to unlock even more stuff and you can battle any of the games 20+ bosses again at higher levels and get unique traits and you can even battle the Gods themselves to unlock their avatars.
There is no way for this game to exist without being procedural, because with the amount of synergy that you can go into creating a party, a regular game could not exist with the amount of depth that this game has. However, it's finding new monsters and constantly seeing what more you could do to build a party that this series does. So the goal is to build the ultimate party to see just how far in the dungeon you can go with this party and how many more levels the enemies can be before they just get too powerful for you and continue to make a better and better party. Infact, the game actually allows you to do tavern brawls, what kind of party can you build that can defeat others while also not being able to be defeated yourself? There are a lot of counters to certain builds such as anything that happens when a creature provokes or defends does not happen, so whether you want to make a build with those mechanics in mind or if you want to make a build that does not use those mechanics in order to not be countered by a build that can be made to cancel out those mechanics. There are actually some builds without a counter that I haven't been able to beat, a lot of them I have, but my build is really built off one specific monster taking a turn and it's all over, so if they take that monster out first and take the other out last, that's how mine is beaten. So yeah, despite the 7/10 I'd give it, this is a must own RPG whether you pick up Siralim Ultimate, 3, or 2 in that order(Ultimate has no physical version as of yet and may only ever come to Switch due to development issues in which the developer has officially cancelled the other versions.)
Huntdown. This amazing game has pretty much went unheard of and it's easily the best 2D shooting platformer of the generation. The biggest complaint I hae with the game is while there's a full game underneath, the developers have later released a score mode which redoes the levels with more enemies and skulls for every kill as well as a kill combo counter. This new score mode makes the game even more replayable and all of this can be enjoyed due to a patch.... not on disc, however the game itself in a bubble is still an absolutely amazing game and still the best 2d shooting platformer of the generation. 32bit quality game with a gritty 80s movie storyline. The game includes four different gangs, each with five stages with a unique well designed stage boss and three different difficulties. Much like Hollow Knight, this game has a lot of exceptionally well done bosses, there is not one boss in the game that isn't well designed here. If I was to state what this game most felt like, I would say that this is more like Robocop vs Terminator than anything else. On this game your characters will have their primary weapon, but can also pick up a secondary weapon as well ranging from shotguns, uzis, machine guns, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, gatling guns, phaser guns, different melee weapons, etc, as well as their own special cooldown weapon and grenades. If an enemy is right on the character you will do a kick instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qepv...el=PlayStation
Star Renegades. This game is a turn based RPG that is deterministic in nature. What that means is much like a game like MS Saga, enemy actions appear to the player and the player chooses their actions. Now the negative in this is that the player can view each effect that the action will have and I do feel that this sort of gives the player a guide to follow. However, it is a difficult game and you still do have to make the right decisions for the entire battle, so your actions telling you how the round will unfold before you submit those actions isn't too big of a deal.
So at the start of the game you will get three characters that you initially start with but get to choose. All of the maps in the game are preset, enemy locations and items will be randomized on those maps. You get three actions per day to unlock areas in the map and after each day some areas will be locked down, which the game will inform you meaning if you need access to those areas you will want to unlock the ones that will be locked down over others. Additionally, between each day you will make camp and have a preset amount of points to use to allow characters to bond with one another which gives temporary buffs to the characters the following day, depending on what their bonding rank increases to, characters will get permanent buffs and co-op attacks which are extremely powerful. After the third day, meaning you will have nine areas you can unlock to collect item boxes, shield upgrades, experience, etc, you will fight the boss of that map. Now within each battle, there is a bar up at top, now the bar kind of looks like something you'd see from Grandia 1, but it's not. This bar designates a 60 second time frame and wherever enemies are placed on this bar is how long it will take for their turn to go into effect. Players can choose quicker less powerful actions or slower more powerful actions and each of these actions will have a delay on it(some won't.) If the enemy is at 45 seconds and you attack them with delay 30 they will be pushed back to 15 seconds into the next turn.) Additionally, whether you push the enemy into the next turn or not, attacking before them will deal critical damage. You can only delay an enemy twice at the start of battle and they only gain one delay point at the start of the following turn(and I do not think they gain this point if they get broken the previous turn) so there's no way to keep them broken indefinitely, even if you build one character to do so. The co op attacks that you earn use up two character turns, go instantly, but they are the most powerful attacks in the game, they also use fury points which is a bar that will slowly recover after you take and you deal damage.
There is no healing during combat, but you do have classes that recover shields.a The types of classes are four categories, attacker, tank, delay, and support. After finishing the first two planets, you get a fourth and fifth character, while I find it best to have an attacker, delay character, and support. With a tank and attacker, you don't have enough delay to push bosses back any turns and with a tank and defender, you don't really have enough damage that the attacker of the group can provide. There is a character who was patched in and is not on disc, apparently they are the best tank in the game but I did not try them for reasons that may be obvious.
One thing to note is if all your characters die then yes, you restart from the very beginning of the game. However, starting the game on the normal difficulty, I did finish the game in 10 hours on my first attempt. The game has six difficulty levels beyond that which I think I got to the third before it became just too hard and the game only becomes harder as you lose. The game, much like that one Lord of the Rings game, has this feature where if an enemy kills you they get more powerful and gain new resistances. It just feels impossible to complete when this happens, but I guess you could lower the difficulty, kill all the leaders and then increase the difficulty again.
Overcooked and Moving Out. Overcooked is the better game, but the idea behind both and despite not the same developer the map feels almost identical. What you have here are two games that can be played solo(and with Overcooked I do feel it's certainly easier playing solo) where your goal is to either get orders out on time or get the moving truck loaded on time. You pretty much want to work together to try and get it done as efficiently and quickly as possible, however the more people you bring into a game the more chaotic everything becomes, but when you have everyone working together properly. I wouldn't say Moving Out is quite the gem as Overcooked is, but it's similar in style so I just paired it along with it. Overcooked though has you first required to get each ingredient, then take those ingredients to the cutting board, some ingredients like meat, fish, fries, etc, have to be added and cooked, some like pizza have to have all ingredients added and then cooked, and then the order needs to be rushed out. Plates need to be washed, and if you add an ingredient to a dish that doesn't need the ingredient you've ruined the dish, you can either trash it or you can keep it on a plate and hopefully someone orders something with those ingredients(you don't get penalized for serving people old food, but you only have a certain amount of plates so odds are you won't be holding a meal in hopes that someone orders it and then often times there are mistakes that are generally items you will never see ordered.)
Bloodstained Curse of the Moon 1 and 2. The first one is a great game, but I think the second game is much better. It's actually been a very long time since I've replayed the Castlevania games, but I would honestly say going back the only ones I feel that still hold up really well are Castlevania 2, Super Castlevania 4, Castlevania Bloodlines, Castlevania 2 Belmont's Revenge, Castlevania Legends(which isn't on the collection,) and Castlevania Rondo of Blood. I haven't played the SNES Dracula X lately so I can't really tell you if that gets any better or worse, but I can tell you that as much as I liked the original Castlevania and while it holds up somewhat, if not for the holy water trick, it feels almost impossible to beat death without just getting extremely lucky where his scythes appear. Castlevania 3 receives high praise, but the game itself isn't very good just due to the cheapness of the whole game. It's not hard, it's not fun, it's cheap. The levels within the game are small and filled with the most unbelievable bs and it's just not a good game and I've actually always felt it was overrated.
Bloodstained Curse of the Moon 2 on the other hand is HARD. The game is not hard because it's cheap however. The game is very difficult but the game is also fair, and this is even with the four characters. The mechanics in which you take different paths are closer to Rondo of Blood where the alternate path leads you elsewhere, but on this game the alternate path is usually an alternate version of the level and they all lead to the same boss at the end of the level rather than another boss and a different level. The game starts off with easier versions of the bosses, but once you finish the game the first time you have the harder versions of the bosses as well as new bosses. You eventually play through a version of the game that allows you to play through with all seven characters, this includes the three from the first game, and then after completing that, you are able to play through the game in solo mode which you can play through the entire game as one of the seven characters. Now other than the easy difficulty, I'd pretty much find this impossible due to the difficulty of the game and the fact that at most you can get hit six times, less with other characters, but aside from being an already great game, it really does give you a lot of value in its design.
Mega Man 11. Mega Man is back and better than ever, and I feel that this game just didn't get the recognition it deserved. My favorite Mega Man is still the third one, it always will be, but if I was to say which game I feel is the best. It was actually Mega Man 10 until 11 came around and blew it out of the water by switching over to power(get it?) Mega Man 11 is the hardest game in the series without having to result in being cheap(Mega Man 9) and while playing through the game Mega Man now has this function to activate speed mode to slow down enemies or power mode which not only powers up your beam attacks but allows Mega Man to user powered versions of the robot master attacks. I'm never going to come close to the ceiling of truly skilled players using these mechanics, but the skill ceiling is astronomically high. Additionally, the game has an in depth resource guide, all the music, and a lot of unique challenge stages that are available, plus the ability to watch jaw dropping player videos playing through any stage or playing through the entire game. Not only do I think it's the best game in the series but there was a lot of love and care that went into its development so it's really unfortunate that a lot of people just ignore it, especially when it's someone as popular or who used to be as popular as Mega Man.
Streets of Rage 4, Fight N' Rage, and Dragon's Crown. If there's one genre I don't like, it's the beat em up genre. I honestly feel that minimum effort is put into most of this genre because it's just easy to slap together a game compared to most. The reason why I think this is that most of the genre just lacks any depth. It's not like I want to hate the genre so I do enjoy it when I see developers actually putting effort into the games they develop. When Sega developed Streets of Rage, it was their version of Final Fight, an arcade experience on their console. It's pretty basic and it holds the same complaints I find with most beat em ups while it did have mechanics that other beat em ups didn't have. Then Streets of Rage 2 added the blitz attack. The simplistic mechanic of forward forward attack adds a ton of depth alongside everything else that can be done, grabbing enemies and then tossing them behind, forward, jumping over the enemy you're grabbing(depending on the character into a jump kick) even the delayed attacking was likely purposefully implemented into the game mechanics. However aside from Streets of Rage 3 which doesn't really do anything else but the rolling up and down evasion, the genre just stopped. Most games felt that the basic generic beat em up mechanics were fine and the laziness of the genre continued. That is until, atleast for 2D games, Odin Sphere released on the PS2, but I didn't even care for that due to the framerate issues and the backgrounds themselves were massively repetitive, same with Muramasa. Castle Crashers offered a slight amount but it was still like they were behind Streets of Rage 2, and then Dragon's Crown comes along. The PS4 version is merely 1080p with 60fps and no frame drops, as it was on the PS3 and Vita as well, however Dragon's Crown offered unique environments throughout and each character plays very different to one another and not just your basic mash the attack button. Now at some point during the game there are classes that will do that, such as the knight whose whilrlwind attack is his go in most every instance, but the game just has an incredible amount of versatility to it that you don't see in these kinds of games. Just happens by coincidence that the only games you did see this kind of versatility were other Vanillaware games.
Streets of Rage 4, takes what made Streets of Rage 2 good and expands on it, adding aerial hits, adding wall bounce, increasing the damage for using your offensive and defensive skills but giving a risk versus reward system where you can regain all of that lost health as long as you deal damage without getting hit. Then it adds a lot of enemies that you want to fight them a specific way and learn their counters. Fight N' Rage is another one that adds a lot of aerial combo potential with two of the characters and allows grabs to be added into each attack by holding the down button rather than moving into the enemy. There are other solid games, like Dawn of the Monsters for instance, but the genre even to this day is filled with mostly lazy efforts.
Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise. Much like above, the 3D beat em up genre is in the same boat. When did we get God Hand and Urban Reigns and the market still remains stagnant? Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise is a 7/10 at most, but it's the only game we've got in the 3D beat em up genre that is above and beyond what's normal. It's barely a step up beyond the Yakuza system, but it's still a step up. Kenshiro's ability to evade immediately after making an attack, every finisher he has is a launcher allowing you to launch the enemy in the air and then conitinue comboing, also includes wall bounce, by expending atleast one of your Hokuto Shinken power meter you can leap into the air to do multiple kicks on an opponent in the air or on the ground as well as specific heat actions. There's a lot of combo potential within this game and gameplay wise, this is easily the best the Yakuza series has been even if everything else is not quite as good as many of the mainline Yakuza games.
Brigandine The Legend of Runersia. While I do have some complaints about it not being as good as the original or Grand Edition, The Legend of Runersia is a great game with some aspects I find even better than the original games, but even then I would not rate them as I would the original. That being said, there is not a TRPG this generation that I would prefer more. Tactics Ogre Reborn is a 10/10 game and by design I feel that the game itself does nothing wrong to consider that score lower(ignoring the fact that they don't make things quite clear, so of course I mean once you figure all this stuff out.) Brigandine The Legend of Runersia is the better game imo opinion, worse scoring or not imo. The reason for this is much like the original Brigandine, much like any grand strategy game, the end result is that you've taken over the continent, giving this game more replay value and variation in battles and what happens each time you play than a story driven TRPG no matter how good it is. There's variations that just cannot happen in a regular TRPG.
Brigandine The Legend of Runersia much like the original game has several countries that are at war with one another, six infact. Each of these countries have a unique leader and multiple rune knights, semi unique in that their stats are unique to that knight despite having a pool of shared classes. Each month within the game you are able to quest with your knights, train to gain experience without combat, or move to another location owned by your own country, provided that that location is not cut off from the rest which is rare, but can happen. If the knights do not take a turn in the movement phase then they're able to attack any adjacent enemy country and this goes into the battlefield where it is a turn based TRPG. Within this turn based battlefield, you can have three knights alongside the monsters under their control and the defending country can have three knights with the monsters under theirs. Terrain will reduce or increase movement speed based on the unit and it's a hex based grid, allowing for attacks to come from multiple sides. An addition added by Brigandine The Legend of Runersia is that there is a zone of control where if two creatures are parallel or semi parallel to one another where two of their hexes meet in the middle, then no enemy will be able to move within those hexes and will not be able to break through, allowing a defensive wall with two units, allowing weaker units to stay one space behind the start of the ZOC and still be safe without another character having to be in front of them. This adds a lot of new strategy that doesn't exist in the original game and is one of the major things you need to learn to use with berserkers.
Despite the game at its core being Brigandine, there are things within the game I'm certain the developers just didn't understand otherwise they wouldn't have made such a drastic change. The two biggest flaws to this game are the effectiveness of the character's level and the lack of effectiveness of elements. In Brigandine you are going to lose monsters and your characters start from a range of level 1 but can go as high as 30. Higher level characters and monsters were more powerful, but it wasn't by an astronomical amount and lower level monsters and characters could still at the very least somewhat hold their own in combat. In The Legend of Runersia however, level matters and because of that, knights are significantly more powerful and the major driving force of the unit, where the previous games knights were only slightly more powerful than monsters and they needed to be protected and limited within battle. Because of this, lower level knights struggle while higher level knights are just demons on the battlefield, and if you focus on killing enemy monsters and making sure yours don't die, enemies will eventually only have low level monsters in battle and battles start to have no challenge. The fact that enemies almost never attack each other is the only reason the challenge exists is because what they do is they just keep training their knights and monsters so that whenever you do go fight them they're pretty powerful, but as you take out their monsters and they have to summon low level replacements, the battles get easier and easier. When it comes to elements, the elements within Brigandine The Legend of Runersia are essentially meaningless. Now they can be quite powerful, but that's with a full set of equipment and even if the enemy has one matching defensive element a full set with the same elements will still increase damage. It's a lot of timee to just waste searching for equipment though and the elemental system just becomes useless in this game in comparison to the other titles where elemental differences truly mattered. Here, you can pretty much ignore the elemental differences when you're going to attack.
Now there is one thing Brigandine The Legend of Runersia does to sort of fix these flaws, at least enemy and monster level. Aside from story mode, there is also another mode called challenge mode. On challenge mode all knights and monsters start at level one, once you complete enough objectives, the levels of all the enemy units on the map increase to a minimum level. The same thing happens again and again throughout the game and once you capture everything, all of the countries will come back with one city and all of the units will be level 30. Now in this scenario since you will probably have three or four forces taking over everything, they will level up faster than the enemy, so the first battle when everyone is a matching level will be difficult, but the second battle will be easier with your characters higher than theirs. It should still be somewhat difficult, especially when if you like to continue expanding you have to break units off into a group of two in order to have enough characters to continue expanding. So around the somewhat early part to a little bit after the mid point the difficulty is still a bit easy even on this mode, but once the enemies increase into their late teens the difficulty starts ramping up. It mitigates the biggest issue I have but it is not a solution.
However, it's that the remainder of the experience, the core Brigandine experience, is so good that the game is still such a great experience even with those issues. For what The Legend of Runersia did better than the original game is that the new class system, while it does have its own flaws that are worse than the original, gave a lot more depth to each of the non magic classes in terms of versatility and how you'd utilize them. With such a great game and what has just an endless amount of replayability, Brigandine coincidentally followed by Tactics Ogre just like the PS1 are the two best TRPGs of last gen.
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While last gen did not have Taito Legends or a physical version of the Capcom Classics Collection(PS2) either 1 or 2, there are a lot of great collections as well.
Castlevania Anniversary Collection featuring Castlevania 1-4, Bloodlines, Adventure, Belmont's Revenge, and Kid Dracula
Contra Anniversary Collection featuring Contra, Super C, Contra 3, and Contra Hard Corps. It also has the Probotector versions for people who are communist(lol, jk.)
Castlevania Advance Collection. Now while this collection has yet to get a physical release, doubtful that it's not.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection. I really think these games are overrated and I find the original NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Game Boy games the biggest reason to purchase the collection as I don't care for the beat em ups, but a lot of people love this collection.
Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. There's been so many of these I don't even know if this is the correct name for this one. If you ask me, the PS3 collection is the best as it has the best UI, best way to categorize your favorites, less issues, and it also includes arcade games and Phantasy Star 1 which this game does not. However, this collection does include Monster Boy in Monster World and that's a great game until you get to the end and there's an out of the way invisible door that's required to progress(stupid as hell.)
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection. It's hard to be hyped up about a collection where every game looks worse than the worst looking SNES game, especially when the physical collection was announced for the US when most people in the US were sleeping and no one who was interested got a chance to purchase it, but hey, it's Final Fantasy. BS that standard versions are going to be priced out the a** by resellers if anyone wants one. This is one that will keep going up for sure, even Snatcher prices will be cheap when this one takes off.
SNK collections, Bioshock Collection, DMC collection, 27 Mega Man Collections, etc, etc, etc.
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Originally Posted by Az
