I wouldn’t
lol at Seiken Densetsu 3 being an action RPG while Tales and Star Ocean are “traditional” RPGs.
Thats what they are…
Secret of Mana, all the battles happen real time. Tales and Star Ocean, you always enter a battle screen.
But, I’ve had this debate before. The only thing different from Tales and Star Ocean that is not tradional is what happens in the battle after you go to a battle screen. Thats just the battle system. Thats like how Persona differs from Phantasy Star. They are all traditional rpgs, just different battle systems.
Secret of Mana and Brave Fencer Musashi on the other hand are not traditional rpgs at all. They are action rpgs.
Tiers for fighting styles in San Andreas
Broken:
Kickboxing
Upper-Mid:
Boxing
Shit:
Martial arts
The Kick boxing shit is makes CJ more of the one man army he is. In one clinch combo, he kills a pedestrian. All he does is Kick -> grab -> knee -> knee -> Punch and it’s game ova.
THe boxing is okay, its not as good as kick boxing. But it’s better than the martial arts by miles. Plus CJ reminds me of Dudley when he does the boxing.
The cobra martial arts is just crap, the Kicks aint even that good damage wise. It looks terrible anyway.
Since someone mentioned Seiken Densetsu 3, for the average play-through [not leveling, not Low Level Game]:
Top:
Kevin
Lise
Upper-Mid:
Hawk
Mid:
Duran
Low:
Angela
Carlie
Not going to do classes at least for now, but top is definitely… well any Kevin class, and Lise’s Star Lancer and Fenrir Knight. Bottom is probably Hawk’s Rogue. What causes the tiering in this game is:
- The game is easy to the extent that healing spells are generally not needed when you factor in how good and attainable healing items are. Therefore Carlie is relatively not useful.
- Spells, if they don’t kill an enemy, will cause a powerful tech counter-attack from enemies, lowering the usefulness of offensive spellcasters, so Angela isn’t as useful.
- So melee dominates. That’s why Kevin, king of melee, is top. Lise, with her stat raising by or stat decreasing [by 1/3] spells, make battles go that much easier and faster. Hawk’s stat-decreasing Jutsus are the lesser version of Lise’s stat decreasing spells.
That SD3 list is really good, but I would change some minor things. Kevin should be above everybody in an extra tier (because … c’mon :bgrin:), and Hawk should be above Liese. He’s the second best physical attacker, so you definitely want to have him on the team when Liese is buffing. And that’s her best quality, since when she goes Star Lancer (definitely the best class), she doesn’t even have a good full screen tech, and only attacks once either way. And buffing is just going to slow you down in regular battles, which means you’ll use it almost exclusively on bosses. There will be times where Liese is just there, because Kevin and Hawk is really all you need for random battles, and needed to make short work of bosses. And while buffing is the most broken gimmick in SD3, Hawk’s debuffing when he goes Nightblade/Ninjamaster isn’t too shabby either, and goes well with Liese’s buffing any way.
So imo:
[S] Kevin
[A] Hawk, Liese
** Duran
[C] Carlie, Angela
Carlie above Angela, because Necromancer class is more useful than anything Angela has, imo.
I SWEAR someone posted threads for TMNT games in this thread, but I searched and didn’t find anything so…
TMNT(NES)
Broken: Any turtle with a scroll. Stock up on these things…
God tier: Don-he just wrecks shit with his Bo. It’s a little slower than everything else but not enough to cause a difference. I usually save him for the bosses.
Top: Leo. Can’t quite compete with Donny, but he’s a good substitute if Don is hurt.
Mid: Mike: Totally average, he’s just like Leo, but not as good
Low: Raph: Shit. Seriously. I only use him to soak up damage in the swimming level.
Truth be told though, due to the nature of the game, all the turtles are useful at some point.
TMNT 3(NES). This is entirely based on their special moves.
Top: Raph: His PSYCHO CRUSHER rapes, if you time it right, it’s completely safe too. It’s easily spammable when you’re low on life.
Mid: Mike: I used to think his Kangaroo Kick sucked, but it gets you out of the way of danger.
Don: I think his rolling attack is boring and just not very useful.
Low: Leo. His spinning attack keeps him completely still, which isn’t a huge issue since most enemies will run right into you. It’s not bad if you have an enemy that is standing still though.
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks
Top:
Kung Lao-Holy shit there are so many cheap tricks with Kung Lao that it’s almost sickening. Divekick infinite + hat toss ricochet + pulse spin = basically the death of everyone.
High-Mid:
Liu Kang- His infinites are harder than Kung Lao’s, but they look cooler. His Bicycle Kick is trash, though. Save your energy for his uppercut + fireballs.
Low-Mid:
Sub-Zero: Ehh. Sub-Zero’s a gimmicky fighter in a lot of the MK fighting games, and Shaolin Monks carries on this tradition. I didn’t play him for long, though. I’m guessing that I didn’t discover his infinites, because I’m SURE that he has at least one.
Jury’s still out on Scorpion. Someone complete this for me?
Alright, I just finished Final Fantasy V.
This was my FIRST playthrough though. So, this is what worked well for me my first time through. I’m no expert on this game and I didn’t memorize everything but this is for sure what got me along through the game.
This includes, random battles, job class benefits, stats having that job, weapons equipped, boss battles, walking around, how they are early in the game, middle of the game, end of the game, during the entire game, and many other things.
High Tier
Ninja - Excellent character, I keep at least one ninja in my party almost from the entire 2nd part of the game and on. TREMENDOUS help in random battles by being fairly hard to hit, fast, doing good damage, not having bad magic, and PREEMPTIVE attack. Oh my gosh, you don’t know how many preemptive attacks you get with one Ninja in your party. Just makes the game go by so much faster.
Summoner - The core mage of the game. Has excellent spells that negate magic and protect from physical attacks for the whole party. At the point where you get titan and on. I usually kept at least one summoner or character with summon ability to finish off battles with many enemies much easier. Excellent powerful spells good for one or many enemies during boss battles.
Hunter - S-Shot! Has excellent attack power and very good weapons from the back row. Decent magic. But most of all, its all about saving up to S-Shot. Cuz when you do and then you equip two weapons plus hit the 4 times in a row equals basically just bouldozing your way through the dungeons. I just had one character equip S-Shot with the most powerful weapons and it just destroyed the final dungeon besides Omega, Shinryu, Necrophobe, and the final boss. Otherwise, its just a cakewalk.
Mid Tier
White Mage - What can I say? this is your source of healing. High magic stats and can equip nice magic enhancing weapons. The problem is that its solely for the heal ability and holy spell otherwise, not something you’d really want in boss battles.
Black Mage - Your source for one enemy elemental damage and good main ability for boss fights. But, Summoner is your main job for random battles and multi-enemy bosses.
Monk - Counter and buildup are very useful for random battles and boss battles for your physical attack characters in the early part of the game. He is your core physical attacker for the first 3rd of the game. Has high hp. But, stopped using for the 2nd half of the game due to other jobs having better advantages.
Mystic Knight - Very useful for certain boss fights but besides a few major instances, a black mage or summoner can usually take the place of a mystic knight during bosses for elemental damage. Can’t equip the best weapons though but has good armor.
Mime - can equip 3 abilities and copy the very last command that happened. Pretty nice for boss battles at the end of the game.
Low Tier
Time Mage - Haste 2 is excellent for boss battles. Meteo is quite good. But thats it. The job itself is awful for in game battle.
Samurai - Can use fairly powerful weapons and I believe has the highest evade rate of all the jobs. I never used gp rain though and other abilities aren’t that great.
Thief - Not bottom tier because of his dash which is key to running and passages to see secrets. Complete shit in battle with the only good stat being speed. So, learn those 2 skills and never use thief again. Even his steal only comes useful at certain instances.
Dragoon - Alright, I NEVER used Dragoon my entire first time through. I know his jump is good, does a lot of damage, and avoids the enemies in the process. But, I was too occupied with other jobs to bother using him. I assume he can be a good physical attacker, but I can’t just rate based on assumption. Plus, I used an easier strategy against Shinryu rather than trying to steal from a Crystal Dragon and jumping.
Trainer - Has some somewhat helpful gimmicky weapons that stuns enemies and a few instances in the game where it does good damage from back row. But, thats about it.
Geomancer - The terrain ability is useful when you get it and for a few more hours into the 2nd part of the game for powerful multi-enemy terrain attacks. Pitfalls is useful in certain dungeons. Otherwise, I never use it.
Bottom Tier
Knight - Just a waste of money IMO. Don’t fall for making your characters knights at the beginning, just go for the Monk, it gets you through with no problem and doesn’t kill your budget buying all the armor and weapons. There was never a time in the game where I ever needed to use a Knight.
Red Wizard - Garbage Stats, just a crappy combo of theif and weak white/black magic.
Blue Mage - Besides Big Guard which you get near the end of the game. Its complete shit. Plus there aren’t really any cases where you think “I NEED Big Guard for this battle”.
Chemist - I just never used it at all. Just seems like a gimmicky job to me. Played the game fine without ever using this job.
Berzerker - LOL, worst job ever.
Bard and Dancer - Never bothered to use it.
Gotta change a couple of things:
Hunter should be dropped a tier, as without X-Fight, they are just an above average fighter, and it takes a hella long time to get X-Fight.
Bump Samurai up a rank. Samurai can do big damage, has high critical rate, and GP Rain is an incredibly good skill when fighting more than one enemy.
Bard and Dancer are solid low tier and can be argued to belong to mid tier (not so much for Bards). Bards are awesome against undead, and their songs are ok for support. Dancer gets sword dance, which is a very good ability, although Dancer probably fits best in low. A case can be made to bump Dancer’s to mid due to Ribbons though.
Knights need to be bumped up because swords are hands down the best weapons in the game. And they aren’t totally useless, as they are better defensively than monks in the early going.
Blue Mage also needs a bump up. Deathclaw owns a hell of a lot of enemies in the first half of the game (even bosses), Mighty Guard makes BM useful at end.
Barebone characters belong in top tier, as does Mime (get all innate abilities from other classes outweighs almost any negative).
Halo 3 weapons:
(list in mades without dual weilds)
Top:
Tigerboi
Sniper-Rifle (both)
Battle-rifle
Shotgun.
High:
Rocket luancer
Covy-BR (carbine)
SMG
Sword
Mauler.
Mid:
Hammer
Assualt Rifle.
Plasma rifle.
Magnum
spiker.
Low:
Bruteshot
Plasma pistol.
Crap: Spartan laser.
The genre of a game is not dictated by the presence of a fucking battle screen, for God’s sake. Next thing I know you’re going to tell me MMOs are action RPGs because they don’t enter a battle screen, never mind that most use a heartbeat turn based system, to the best of my knowledge.
How about .hack GU? Is that an action RPG or not? Never mind that it’s real time and everything, you do go into a battle screen.
To be on topic…
Someone asked about Star Ocean 3 tiers and to the best of my knowledge, they’re something like this:
Top:
Maria (one of, if not THE highest HP in the game with the convert skill, great long range skills)
High:
Mirage (Cliff on steroids)
Fayt (Side Kick rapes most things)
Nel (variety of useful skills, one of the better characters to MP kill with iirc)
Mid:
Cliff (nerfed Mirage, skills aren’t as useful basically, though his final one’s pretty damn good and might bump him up)
Low-Mid:
Albel (too long combos hurt him and his skills aren’t too good…)
Mages in general
Low:
Peppita (has instant death skills that make her a pretty viable choice for random encounters)
Bottom:
Roger (no idea what his strengths are, if there’re any)
why is the smg above AR if u dont include dual wielding?
wont the assault rifle essentially do what the smg does better?
Well, see, you pointed out you didn’t agree with what I said, but you didn’t actually say what an action and traditional rpg is to you.
The only difference between Tales of Namco and Star Ocean series compared to say Persona, Final Fantasy (traditional series prior to 11), Lufia, Wild Arms is purely what happens in the midst of battle. Thats it, otherwise, its all the same genre. In fact, Wild Arms, Lufia, and Persona all have different battle systems anyway. Just like Tales and Star Ocean.
Brave Fencer, Terranigma, Zelda, Alundra, and the like on the other hand are completely different genre of rpgs, its action rpgs. Just like how Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea or completely different genre which is strategy rpg, not traditional rpg.
MMO Rpgs are just that, MMO rpgs, not traditional.
Ah but you completely leave out so many other RPGs.
You’re leaving out Planescape: Torment. Fallout. Arcanum. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. ADOM, Nethack. How about Ys? Fire Emblem? Summoner 2, one vastly overlooked game. The SaGas, from Square Enix, which are either looked favourably upon for being so drastically different, or lamblasted.
And your definitions don’t include Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter, which gives you a time limit, exceedingly limited inventory, practically no money, save tokens? Is that a really similar to other games in the genre when they’re vastly different?
How about one I mentioned earlier, PLanescape: Torment, in which you can win the whole game by talking your way through?
You’re also missing out on rougelikes, known for the brutal difficulty. The most popular ones are Nethack, ADOM and Itar Vehemens Ad Necem (aka IVAN).
The Mega Man Battle Network series?
You’re far too green as far as I’m concerned to really even bother to start making the distinctions, especially with a completely intangible word like “traditional” which, unfortunately, doesn’t say much if you lump Persona in it.
I mean, if you were to say turn
Just because it’s the same genre doesn’t mean everything’s the same. FFX - super linear game progression, FFVI - really linear for most of the game, somewhat open ended at the end. And that’s the same series.
Multiple endings?
Alignments?
Completely gameplay oriented or not?
What about dungeon crawlers?
See, you can’t just split it up to just “traditional” and “action” RPG because that’s still far too broad. And the distinction you made was an honestly stupid distinction.
I mean, if you’re going to say you split it by BATTLE SYSTEM, sure. Even though the games are horrible different as far as progression goes anyway. And skill system. And story/gameplay ratio/focus.
Not to mention that Suikoden has an emphasis on collection (let’s not even get started on Pokemon). The Tales of series seems to have somewhat even story/gameplay moments, though Star Ocean has a clearer skew towards light dungeon crawling.
Wild Arms has some gimmicks which change it from other games (I don’t like most of them save for the Hex system, but whatever). Some would argue that Lufia is a traditional RPG but most would argue that Persona isn’t (maybe the first one, I haven’t played that one). Why is that?
Why is SMT: Nocturne considered new school but SMT 2 considered old school? Is it the first person perspective or not? Is it that SMT 2 has archaic design choices?
How about games that mix both? Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land has a barebones battle system that only introduced one major idea into it. And that there is no main quest, you just get quests from other people in the tavern that post up bills? But there is also a main story that you can finish if you clear all ten floors of that one lengthy dungeon.
And Final Fantasy XII? There’re all the marks, that’re clearly there to be a huge part of the game, seeing how they thought very hard on just how (absurdly) difficult some hunts are. And the main story too.
And FFX and FFX-2? Final Fantasy X had a turn based system with a few modest but workable changes, and I’ll mention once again the super linear mission structure. FFX-2 had a modification of the turn based system that introduced in battle class changes, and a mission based game structure, with multiple endings to boot and a new game plus feature.
Number crunchers? Even though Disgaea has many similarities to, say, FFTactics or Stella Deus or Hoshigami, all these games have somewhat different target audiences even though they’re all strategy RPGs. One has a distinct focus on powering up (and they’ve made it even easier to do so in later installments) while the others have either a skill based focus to them in battle, or AP juggling even.
Sorry if I sound bitchy. It’s just that your definitions are still too broad if you’re going to group games with a similar nature to each other (and this is in fact how RPGs work in general, so it’s not all your fault). There’re more genres than Action, Traditional or MMOs.
And there’re subgenres in each genre, like dungeon crawlers and whatnot.
Not to mention there’re text based RPGs too, which I totally left out because I’m unfamiliar with them. And MUDs (Multi User Domains, I believe is what it stands for).
Well, the reason I take this genre breaking seriously is because people have rather specific tastes when it comes to RPGs. I have a distinct dislike for what some consider classics, for example, like Chrono Trigger and Suikoden 2, but I still love a lot of RPGs that don’t fall here. Of course, I don’t really approve of genre breaking but if you really want to show your taste, just list the games you like/dislike and that’ll be that and we could just skip this genre disagreement or whatever altogether.
Man, I hope I don’t derail this thread too badly, as I’ve nothing on topic to contribute at the moment. If it’s too inappropriate, then mod this as you wish.
PS - I also missed hybrid RPGs, like Deus EX and System Shock 2. And god knows what else because the labels we have are inadequate and sometimes even inappropriate. No, FFXII is nothing like a goddamned MMO just because it has on field encounters dammit, unless you wanna count every other RPG that does that like Ys, Kingdom Hearts, etc.
PPS - And honestly, the reason I attacked you in the first place is because it seemed like you differentiated games by their battle screen presence. Maybe I misread that or took it out of context. Maybe you phrased it wrongly. Still, I hope you don’t take this lengthy and really high strung post the wrong way.
I don’t have a problem with your opinion but the way you’re explaining it is sounds like you’re very condescending and because I look at it different than you do. You want to group rpgs in other genres, but just because I keep it to my solid core of specific genres you come across like “Oh, this guy is inferior to me as a role-playing gamer because of that”. I didn’t go into naming tons of rpgs genres because the question before hand that we were discussing was “Star Ocean an action rpg?”. Since some people were calling it an action rpg, I compared the two and thats all using strategy rpgs as an example. But, you went on a big explanation about how you feel about rpgs in general, which is cool, but you insult me for not doing that when the original question was about Star Ocean with people saying its an action rpg or not. Nothing wrong with your opinions, but you definitely come across pretty insulting.
Condensed version: Star Ocean is an action RPG, yes. Whether it has a battle screen is irrelevant.
Well, as you know, I disagree, so, that settles that debate.
Not really, but I’d rather not intrude in this topic more than I already have.
Anybody have tiers for the Game Boy Advance Prince of Tennis games? Silver or Gold doesn’t matter, I just screwed around with them the other day and I just can’t figure out anything in the game.
Ah, see, this has been discussed by the community not the long ago, and it seems to be true after playing it myself.
The smg, even when single wielded, does more damage than the AR. Also, it’s reload is faster and the melee has a longer reach.
That, and the clip is damn near bottomless. it’s actually extremely good in halo 3.