Wozza's Blogs

I have to say, back in the day, nothing was less appealing to me than turn-based games. The battles in RPG's were pushing it, maybe I have mallowed, or just maybe I accidentally bought Fire Emblem for the GameCube thinking it was a traditional RPG. Whatever happened, I have found myself playing - hell even enjoying strategy RPG's.

As you may have gathered from the above paragraph, Fire Emblem was the game to break me into SRPG's, and a good thing too as I don't know if I would have got too far with other games of this type. The good thing about Fire Emblem, is that it seems to flow a lot better than a lot of games of this type and is more accessible not giving you too many options in terms of stats and weapons, instead focusing on characters.

One thing that made Fire Emblem more accessible was the fact characters were fairly defined, in SRPG's I played later, the game gave you clean slates to build into soldiers. Here you are forced to use what is given to you (although you choose which characters to use that mission) and use each characters attributes more wisely. The game also progresses at it's own rate so there is no grinding between missions, meaning you can't just grind your characters (and don't have to) meaning that Fire Emblem was also nicely balanced.

The next SRPG I played was Phantom Brave on the PS2. I mostly wanted to try this out as I am a big fan of 2d sprite art. The characters and maps were beautiful. What I wasn't expecting was how free-form the gameplay was, you pretty much need to grind here in some random dungeons.

To say this game has stats coming out of it's (virtual) ears would be an understatement. The characters can be moulded to your needs and weapons can be combined with items to level them up. Just make sure nobody chucks your weapon, or your characters off the map completely! Unfortunately I have been distracted from this game and feel I have only scratched the surface. I'll get back into it when I have a spare few hundred hours...

The third and final SRPG I have played is Final Fantasy Tactics on PSP. The portable system seemed to be the ideal platform for this type of game. It is. Being able to grind away in bed, on the bog or on a plane fits the genre perfectly. FFT has a fantastic job system that lets you earn skills across a range of categories and lets you put together some pretty powerful characters. There were a few annoying oversights and glitches, but overall I enjoyed this game. Grinding was back in a large way and some battles were frustrating, but it's another feather in my SRPG hat.

I guess the point of the blog is that even though I wrote off the genre as being boring, it just took the right game to show me the appeal. Sure I wouldn't want to play two of these games close together, but there is something strangely satisfying and addictive about these games.