Forum - View topicThe X Button - Neverland Knows Best
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Ryusui
 Posts: 463 |
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Man, Sorcery Saga. I wonder if anyone's going to remember that as anything but "the game Aksys announced when everyone was expecting them to announce Danganronpa"? I think about the only positive thing resulting from that announcement is that we finally have a decent official translation for the title "Madou Monogatari."
Thank God for NISA and their announcement of Danganronpa for the US, or else I would've written off this year's AX entirely. |
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Lyrai
Posts: 174 Location: Potatoes (Idaho) |
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I found Lufia DS to be pretty decent. Once you beat the game, you can play it again in a psuedo-New Game+, where you get the inner thoughts of Iris at each event. It's pretty decent, up until the ending, where spoiler[Iris decides to just magically swoop in and save Maxim & Selan and force a happy ending for no apparent reason other than pyrrhic victories are verboten and everyone must be happy, followed by two god-figures basically acting out a buddy-cop movie, saying that NOW EVERYTHING IS RIGHT, LET IS MOVE ON TO OTHER DIMENSIONS before vanishing]
Felt like a bloody middle finger flipping me off. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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A bit OT here, but I wonder if this week's thread title "Neverland Knows Best" a reference to FLCL's "Never Knows Best" cigarettes that Mamimi likes to smoke? Man I love that series.
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toddc
 Posts: 164 |
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Yeah, that didn't sit right with me, either, even if it was an optional replay. I get the impression that Miyata wanted to combine the happy Lufia 1 ending and the downbeat Lufia II ending just in case he never got another chance at the series. And at this point he probably won't.
Sure is! |
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belvadeer
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New Tales of:
Still at it with generalizing Tales I see. Sigh... Neverland: I've always been a fervent follower of Lufia. It was one of my earliest RPG series next to Final Fantasy and I'm sad to learn of this news regarding Neverland. I wasn't even aware they closed their doors until I looked it up just now. I'm going to reminisce now on the past Lufia games: *Lufia: Quite possibly the one SNES game, alongside Secret of Mana, that I rented the most frequently back in my Blockbuster days. I loved this game to death and played it as often as I could during weekends. I fell in love with it as much as I did with FF4. I enjoyed the story; for its time, it was well written and the dynamic between Hero, Lufia, Aguro and Jerin was endearing. The fact the game emphasized teamwork and putting faith in each individual's abilities (since you never got any other party members) was what it made a solid entry for me. I never got to own this title beyond renting it. What really ticks me off is this entry was slated to be put on Virtual Console, which would have made my day, but it never came to be thanks to Square Enix's usual stupidity (the infamous promise made in 2011: http://www.siliconera.com/2011/03/11/lufia-the-fortress-of-doom-the-virtual-console-re-release/). Nevertheless, Neverland earned a fan for life because of Lufia, which led to... *Lufia II: When I saw screenshots in a game magazine and heard about how it would talk about Maxim's whole story up to his death in the first game, I seriously popped a cork. I was so excited that I begged my folks to get it for me for Christmas as it was the only thing I wanted that year. After putting it in my SNES, I literally sunk hours and hours of my time into it, exploring every aspect of the map, leveling up every Capsule Monster and raiding the Ancient Cave numerous times to find all the Iris treasures. I know the localized game wasn't perfect due to some garbled text in some places and the seriously glitchy graphics in the Dual Blade Shrine along with the usual immature censoring, but it's still the most talked about among Lufia fans to this day. *The Legend Returns: I am sad to say I never owned or played this entry due to it being widely unavailable for some reason. I didn't know if it was due to low stock or what, but I could never find a copy back then. Unfortunately, I heard many negative things about this game and then I checked YouTube videos to see why everyone felt that way. Based on what I saw, it seems battles are tiresome since you're literally babysitting an entire gaggle of characters, even when the reserve units don't actually do anything other than take damage from all target spells. I still want to get this entry, especially since the wish-granting Egg Dragon can join your party (this isn't a spoiler, everyone knows it by now). I am surprised the main story dungeons were randomly generated; it worked for Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2, but for Lufia? Weird. *Ruins of Lore: Here comes a big rant, feel free to ignore. Quite possibly the weakest entry in the series due to the story and characters having absolutely nothing to do with the Lufia storyline whatsoever (except an aged Dekar, who joins temporarily but leaves later). Honestly, this could have been a different game entirely and they could have just slapped Dekar in as the prerequisite "other game reference by this company" cameo like they did with Lufia in Energy Breaker. Ruins of Lore was also very shoddy in its design. Of the four primary heroes, only one of them is programmed poorly (supposedly he was supposed to be something like a Blue Mage according to one villager calling him a Magic Fencer late in the game, but he never learned any monster moves in my file) while the other three can learn the same skills from the same instructors, turning them all into clones of each other. The game was also buggy and lagged if you taught too many skills to the first three heroes; that's right, you get to deal with scrolling lag in battle just because you had Eldin, Torma or Rami learn more than fifteen skills. Sometimes I can't believe I tortured myself with finishing this entry, but I did...only to get an ending that was so weak and poorly scripted I wasn't sure what the point of it even was. Catching your own Capsule Monsters was about the only neat thing to do, but that was ruined by the fact that monsters are very limited in equipment and thus can die easily in battle unless you acquired Dragons or Cores. *Curse of the Sinistrals:
It certainly raised mine. I'm among the folks who did not enjoy what they did to Lufia II with this entry. For me personally, it ruined something that was perfectly fine in its SNES incarnation. No surprise it sold poorly. Maybe I'm being too hard on it, but it still left a bad taste. With that, I bid adieu to Neverland and Lufia. Thanks for all the great SNES memories with the first two games. I won't forget them. Last edited by belvadeer on Thu Dec 05, 2013 5:52 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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RyanSaotome
 Posts: 4210 Location: Towson, Maryland |
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Seems weird to throw an old PC RPG in there when we're discussing JRPGs... but I think Lufia 2 is one of the best SNES RPGs out there and should at least be put on the same level as Earthbound. It was one of the first times I ever cried to a video game story, and it had many very unique features like the Ancient Dungeon, the best puzzles ever seen in a JRPG up to that point and great characters. |
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belvadeer
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I know right? It was literally one of the earliest games I played that had a bittersweet, tragic ending. |
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Northlander
 Posts: 911 |
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Hmm. I've only played the original Snes version, so maybe the DS version played a certain scene out a bit differently, but spoiler[didn't Iris/Erim kind of... you know, die at the end of Lufia 2 as well? Or was that death also substituted with "a journey into another dimension"?] As for Bravely Default, I'm... actually kind of intrigued. It's been a long time since I bought a new JRPG, and even longer since one has engaged me. (Maybe I'm just picking the wrong ones.) Also...
Given that there's been a lot of games I've been interested in that only got localized in the US, this is exactly the sort of thing I don't care to read. |
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Kaioshin_Sama
Posts: 1215 |
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Not only does Europe get Bravely Default first but they also get an Agnes figurine with it. Life can be unfair sometimes for us North Americans.
edit: Ooooh on second though looking at an image of the Agnes figurine I don't think we're missing much. Looking pretty Hong Kong bootleg there. It's like somebody took a vague description of what the character looks like and used spare parts from Barbie dolls to slap together a facsimile of the character as a Western designer sees it. |
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Dmysta3000
 Posts: 50 |
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DQ iOS:Not all that surprising considering how successful the FF ports were combined with DQ's popularity in Japan. I do hope that at least SOME of them makes it over here....
Bravely Default/Bravely Second: Its nice to see SE giving this series some love, its also cool this will becoming out near my birthday in february so I'll be getting this along with LRXIII. As for the sequel, I'm just waiting to see how I feel about the first game after playing it first. PS4 Backwards Compatability: dont really mind this that much seeing as I dont plan on buying a PS4 for at least a year and I have NO intention of giving up my PS3 anytime (especially with the awesome lineup of games we're getting next year, But this is nice Next Tales of: Ahh, Tales.... I've had some mixed feelings about this franchise for a while now, Vesperia was one of my favorite JRPGs this past gen, I loved Graces F's combat but the story was really really stupid, and I liked Xillia story (boring characters aside) but it was kind of a let down (especially when I found out the game was rushed to meet the Tales Anniversary date). Maybe Xillia 2 will make up for it in my eyes. All I wish is that this game strike the same cord that Vesperia did. Untill then, maybe Symphonia HD will do, still haven't played that game... Never played any of Neverland's games to be honest (though I've been meaning to pick up Rune Factory 4) stilll sad to hear. |
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mckg1
 Posts: 287 Location: From Puerto Rico living in Japan |
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If a demo will be available, I wouldn't mind trying out Sorcery Saga
 . I am kinda busy with Ys memory of celceta though (Awesome game btw!  )
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mewpudding101
Industry Insider
 Posts: 2210 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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Positivity overload...
That curry game looks so cute!
No really, I would like to pick up a Japanese copy. :3 |
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Henry Jones
 Posts: 97 Location: Nebraska |
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I think the worst part is you had to play through it TWICE to get… THAT. I was perfectly fine with the remake up until that point. It had some rough spots and I could tell where the corners got cut, but I actually quite liked the new style, the remixed tunes were quality, Tia was made more awesome, and their re-imagining of the sinistrals actually was fairly creative. However, the ONE thing I wanted from the game was spoiler[expanding on Iris' double identity and making her not just drop off the face of the earth during the last act and just have them kill Erim with no bridge or transition. Well, yeah, they kinda' did that… and they also completely screwed up everything Lufia II got right with the ending. And going through it twice was like doubling down on 11 in Black Jack and then getting a 2.] |
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nhat
Posts: 922 |
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Lufia 1 had a lot of potential. If they sped up the battles and reduce random encounters would be a huge plus. Also just putting more story and dialogue would be the second huge improvement.
Lufia 2 pretty much remedies that |
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Lyrai
Posts: 174 Location: Potatoes (Idaho) |
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spoiler[She poofs in when Maxim & Selan are at the spot where they normally die. No explanation, no reason. A bullshit flower speech about something something atoning for her sins/she learned her lesson/What the god damned fudge ever, before she teleports them to safely and saves the thing herself.] And I agree with the power above. As radical a re-imagining as the game was, it worked enough that I had fun with it. Up until THAT ENDING. |
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