Not sure if anyone created a topic about this in the past but am I the only person who dearly misses turn based RPGs? I know that RPGs still exist and most now are in the form of Kingdom Hearts style action RPGs or FFXII style hybrids but what I'm talking about are purely turn based games with emphasis on team combat and strategy like the older Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games and of course awesome attack and spell animations. I know that times are changing and I don't necessarily have a problem with modern style RPGs, but I like variety and the fact that there are hardly, if any, decent turn based RPGs on console anymore is pretty disheartening.
 
So, do you miss turn based RPGs as well? And do you know of any good modern ones? What are your favorites from the past?

Yeah I fuckin love turn based stuff, even though I've never ever been good at figuring out good RPG strategy. I like mashing Attack commands. "ritualistic combats..." One of many incredible game mechanic paradigms that everyone assumed would be around forever, and as a result might have faded from memory in recent years more than we would want...? We're all just huddled on the lonely black island, waiting for a good turn-based game to come out and light up the bridge to mainland. I'm sure someone will eventually put two and two together: Huh, we always had to fight against the limitations of the system to make these Summons look cool, or render these enormous open fields, and now we can finally do that effortlessly. Like now that we have magic tardises for consoles we can fit something in that space that isn't megatextures. Surely there's some shared unconsciousness that is leading us all towards the same endless grassland?
 
(sudden realization: human's historical "Heaven" idea is a stunted approximation of the same psychogeography that is more aptly incarnated by the Windows XP/Sonoma County "BLISS" image, also Mario grasslands (hills have eyes), Green Hill Zone, ff7 Gaia hypothesis conjunction, God/planet dichotomy, return to the ideal form of Mother Nature?????
 
 

CryZENx uploaded a demo to YouTube on July 11th of Mario running around a meadow that he made using an earlier version of UE.
The video is of Mario just running around, but it is beautiful and evokes strong emotions. Please check out the 1080p60HD version in full-screen.

)
 
 
If the final fantasy devs from 1995 had been transported forward in time and got access to the new technology we have, how much would their product resemble the FFs we see today? I feel like there'd maybe somehow be LESS shallow bullshit, but that could be a baaad assumption.

I never played the DQ games properly, so when I finally rounded them up and started popping by them it was this bizarre experience. They all have their own stories and settings but it's all really like one story and one setting. It's a JRPG and you play a JRPG hero doing JRPG things. If you play FF, each one tries to go off in a different direction, but DQ feels more like one artist chipping away at one ultimate theme, slowly making it clearer and clearer. (I think a big part of it could be Toriyama's involvement - another guy who scatters Grasslands throughout his work; it's seriously noticeable here.) It's extremely honest and that's why it can get away with that. I say we need more series like DQ, which to this day knows exactly what it's there for, and maybe less like FF, which has been losing track of why it was ever interesting since 8. Not that I'm anti-experimentation or pro-finding-a-rut, but none of the recent FF games have seemed to experiment or hold interest at all, to my knowledge. (I think some might have unusual new fighting systems, but that's quite anathematic to this thread and I don't care about them anyway.) But the new DQs do because they're still developing a continuing, evolving idea. And these are my opinions on the two really big turn-based jrpg series.

Lol, to be honest I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not by the way you worded the first reply, but by the sounds of it you agree with me as well (I think). One aspect of turn based RPGs I've always liked is that they have a less frenetic pace than action based RPGs, they're more about using your brain to come up with strategies to beat enemies and bosses and utilizing each of your party members to the best of their abilities as opposed to a lot of the action based RPGs where your party members (if you have them) are entirely controlled by the computer and you have little input into what they do beyond "do this pre-set strategy" and the action often boils down to mashing buttons. Having a more relaxed pace to certain games isn't necessarily a bad thing, games that are constant action, explosions and loud noises can get tiring after a while in my opinion and sometimes you want to play a game to relax, which is usually when I pick up a turn based, story drive RPG. I get that newer demographics want more instant gratification and action rather than slower paced stuff that involves thinking, but to me the whole purpose of an RPG is to think, that's why they often have deep stories, advanced combat systems and a lot of other stuff like exploring, creating items, interacting, ect, and there should be at least something decent to appeal to the old school JRPG gamers like myself who grew up with Final Fantasy 6 and 7, Phantasy Star and Breath of Fire III, the fact that there's basically nothing when not that long ago it seems they were a staple game genre is baffling.

Lol, to be honest I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not by the way you worded the first reply, but by the sounds of it you agree with me as well (I think). One aspect of turn based RPGs I've always liked is that they have a less frenetic pace than action based RPGs, they're more about using your brain to come up with strategies to beat enemies and bosses and utilizing each of your party members to the best of their abilities as opposed to a lot of the action based RPGs where your party members (if you have them) are entirely controlled by the computer and you have little input into what they do beyond "do this pre-set strategy" and the action often boils down to mashing buttons. Having a more relaxed pace to certain games isn't necessarily a bad thing, games that are constant action, explosions and loud noises can get tiring after a while in my opinion and sometimes you want to play a game to relax, which is usually when I pick up a turn based, story drive RPG. I get that newer demographics want more instant gratification and action rather than slower paced stuff that involves thinking, but to me the whole purpose of an RPG is to think, that's why they often have deep stories, advanced combat systems and a lot of other stuff like exploring, creating items, interacting, ect, and there should be at least something decent to appeal to the old school JRPG gamers like myself who grew up with Final Fantasy 6 and 7, Phantasy Star and Breath of Fire III, the fact that there's basically nothing when not that long ago it seems they were a staple game genre is baffling.

 
No that's how I actually think. I really love how before the ats system in FF, when it's truly turn-based without any real-time element, you could just sit there and have your characters stare at the enemy, who would stare back, for as long as you like. (Same with not advancing text in cutscenes.) It's this hilarious aspect that's unlike any other medium where any crucial event, no matter how plot-important, will happily wait hours, frozen in a diorama-like state of permanently looping time, if you want it to.
 
I totally agree w/r/t baffling how the style just spontaneously died like everyone got distracted. (hurrrrnrnnggghh, it weas 2006 when the Dark Game Men came for our rpgs........) It's like, we spent years developing our RPG Maker technologies, and now all that shit is just getting consigned backwards, right when it's easier and quicker than ever to make and play games exactly how you want to, in whatever veins you enjoy. I really really really want to talk with kids growing up today who are super into video games and see how they're experiencing things. Like, rationally there must be a big echelon of kids growing up with only newer stuff who are going to have bizarre perspectives about pre-[3d, ][/3d,] game design. Would they generally hate the slow abstract weirdness of old rpgs? Or would it seem even cooler, not being used to all the really out-there video game shit. I imagine it's on a person-to-person basis. I wish we could just skip 20 years ahead and bring it all back now. Sick of engines spinning / lame-ass companies making increasingly feeble shadows trying to capture whatever zeitgeist to which devs today are less privy. Like, Jesus, Mighty No. 9. That is going to be remembered as an extremely pathetic and dumb part of 2016. Or maybe forgotten as uninterestingly mediocre.
 
 
There's a great mod for FF7 that turns it into a much harder game with a lot of surprising moments that trip out people used to the game (e.g. right off the bat when you fight the reactor boss spider and the timer's going down, unlike in the base game, when you go to rescue jessie a few screens apart it jumps at you AGAIN outta nowhere and now the time is way tighter). But honestly, I'm not going to get my mind blown that hard playing FF7 again. I can learn new things from entering the particular world of FF7 so I will replay it but on the whole I want some new ones. It's not particularly hard to scribble some shit on a paper and scan it into rpg maker so there's really no explanation for there not being 1,000,000,000,000 games about whatever besides the laziness and uncreativity of the gamer. And my laziness, too lazy to trawl the web seeking out the ones that I know are there.
 
The last and most important time an RPG BLEW my MIND was space funeral, at many points, but the one I most remember was the dracula convo. That was one of the simplest things in the world and it was funnier than probably every joke in entire years of gaming put together. Maybe 86 or 96. I know I can't expect every dev to come up with brilliant shit like that with any frequency, but I can dream.

Yeah I know there are mods out there but there hasn't been many new games, I'd like to see some new turn based RPGs using today's technology, showcasing modern graphics and sound, mods are really just adding layers to something we already have, like putting sprinkles on ice cream. At the moment the only turn based RPGs I know of in recent memory are Arc Rise Fantasia (which has voice acting and dialogue so horrid it's like it was written by an alien), and the Neptunia games which do not appeal to me at all and cannot be taken even somewhat seriously.

Also the gameplay/designer guy is Yuji Horii I think? Toriyama just did the character designs which like I said was fucking pointless/useless back in the NES days, especially when the localized instruction booklet didn't even use the original character artwork. I remember I thought the purple haired chick in Dragon Warrior II was an old guy with a beard somehow
 
http://www.realmofdarkness.net/dq/img/nes/dw2/sprites/characters.png look at the side view
 
also I remember there was that Nintendo DS?? game a while back, it had a bunch of game parodies including one called GUADIA QUEST which seemed like pretty spot on satire of dragon quest games

 
hahaha, that's all awesome. I tend to like the looks of DQ games more consistently but of course they never approach the pandora's box of ff7. That's the trade-off. I haven't gotten very far in any of them and get distracted since I mostly just like the idea of this series that is very committed to its focus on eternally orbiting the primeval white hole of ur-jrpg.
 
Well, it's not that they're not crazy, because dq's 7 is also fucking batshit, what ballsy length. I strongly admire that shit, and the sort of mind it takes to create/plow through that sort of crazy ordeal. If I was a kid I probably would be able to dig it to its fullest extent.
 
I couldn't get 8 to run but it was lamer looking. Speaking of turn based rpgs and toriyama, i haven't played the dbz rpgs... i heard there's a specific translated? snes rom that a lot of people downloaded and played as kids. I don't remember which one.