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I've been playing two games lately that have a significant overlap in some ways, and are filling completely different niches for me as Things I Want In Games go. Which I find interesting. So, here, I'm going to talk about both of them for a bit.
First off we have Fire Emblem: Awakening, which is a grid-based tactical combat game. Or possibly a dating game. Or both! It's got a standard pseudo-medieval RPG fantasyland setting, with fireballs being a standard battlefield attack and a portion of your cavalry riding on pegasuses. (Pegasi? Pegasus? Pegasoi? It was originally a singular beast, so plurals are hard. I can see why they're so often referred to as "pegs" by the players.) Defend your plucky little kingdom from the mad king attacking it, plus mystical forces manipulating folks, etc.
Now, the tactical combat is a lot of fun; I enjoy maneuvering little units around on the field, and there's a lot to be said for actual considering placement and movement and range when it comes to doing my level-based RPG fighting fun. But what totally sold me on the game was the relationship system. Every unit (and there are many, especially if you pick up all the optional characters) has a set of other units they can form relationships with. Make your characters fight in proximity, and they'll not only help each other out with buffs, but they'll build those relationships. And as you build relationships, you unlock cut-scenes of interaction between each pair, which give them even better buffs with each other...
So it's got the whole Persona 3&4/Rune Factory thing of working up relationships via a series of scenes, which tell different sorts of little narratives about how the various characters interact. And unlike those games, instead of just building relationships with your protagonist, you're building them up between a series of different people, so there are a lot more relationship dynamics at play. It's awesome! Which means the fact that it's also a great tactical RPG is icing on the cake. (And the graphics definitely help; it could have all of this, and I'd be a lot less likely to buy it, if it had boring or bad art.)
Then there's Etrian Odyssey IV, which is also an RPG set in a bog-standard pseudo-medieval fantasy world. You explore dungeons, fight monsters, complete quests, level up your characters, work their way through the skill tree, lovingly equip each slot on each character with incrementally better armor and weaponry... It's very much an old-school dungeon-crawler, which I'd call a rogue-like if it had more randomness in dungeon design. Heck, a big portion of gameplay is that the lower screen on the DS is your map, and you have a variety of colors and symbols to choose from, with which you're supposed to draw your own map as you go through various dungeons. Which you'd better, because they are twisty and full of one-way doors and so forth.
If it has a plot beyond "The government wants explorers to explore! Have fun!" no hint of such has been given. NPCs have stock personalities, all of them fairly pleasant; even the stern characters are polite and helpful. PCs? Well, you build your party by making adventurers yourself, which is a matter of picking a class and then picking one of the four portraits for that class. There's no personality beyond what you make up in your head; heck, there's not even voice acting to imply personality for any of the given portraits.
But oh how I love it. Sometimes I just want to crawl some dungeons without Plot and Ethical Dilemmas and Personality getting in the way, and it's a great little dungeon-crawler with good standard turn-based combat. My characters have cute portraits (again with the art thing), the monsters are weirdly adorable, and I didn't realize until I got to this game how much of a relief it would be to have a hack-and-slash RPG where all of my opponents are...monsters. Clearly non-sentient animals, if sometimes animals with magic. I have not, to date, run into a single opponent that appears to be tool-using or sapient. It requires some tactical thought in more difficult battles, and the mapping can be tricky, but...that's it. It requires nothing more of me.
Anyway. These are the games distracting me from homework lately. They're both good RPGs for the 3DS, and I'd recommend both of them, for completely different reasons.
First off we have Fire Emblem: Awakening, which is a grid-based tactical combat game. Or possibly a dating game. Or both! It's got a standard pseudo-medieval RPG fantasyland setting, with fireballs being a standard battlefield attack and a portion of your cavalry riding on pegasuses. (Pegasi? Pegasus? Pegasoi? It was originally a singular beast, so plurals are hard. I can see why they're so often referred to as "pegs" by the players.) Defend your plucky little kingdom from the mad king attacking it, plus mystical forces manipulating folks, etc.
Now, the tactical combat is a lot of fun; I enjoy maneuvering little units around on the field, and there's a lot to be said for actual considering placement and movement and range when it comes to doing my level-based RPG fighting fun. But what totally sold me on the game was the relationship system. Every unit (and there are many, especially if you pick up all the optional characters) has a set of other units they can form relationships with. Make your characters fight in proximity, and they'll not only help each other out with buffs, but they'll build those relationships. And as you build relationships, you unlock cut-scenes of interaction between each pair, which give them even better buffs with each other...
So it's got the whole Persona 3&4/Rune Factory thing of working up relationships via a series of scenes, which tell different sorts of little narratives about how the various characters interact. And unlike those games, instead of just building relationships with your protagonist, you're building them up between a series of different people, so there are a lot more relationship dynamics at play. It's awesome! Which means the fact that it's also a great tactical RPG is icing on the cake. (And the graphics definitely help; it could have all of this, and I'd be a lot less likely to buy it, if it had boring or bad art.)
Then there's Etrian Odyssey IV, which is also an RPG set in a bog-standard pseudo-medieval fantasy world. You explore dungeons, fight monsters, complete quests, level up your characters, work their way through the skill tree, lovingly equip each slot on each character with incrementally better armor and weaponry... It's very much an old-school dungeon-crawler, which I'd call a rogue-like if it had more randomness in dungeon design. Heck, a big portion of gameplay is that the lower screen on the DS is your map, and you have a variety of colors and symbols to choose from, with which you're supposed to draw your own map as you go through various dungeons. Which you'd better, because they are twisty and full of one-way doors and so forth.
If it has a plot beyond "The government wants explorers to explore! Have fun!" no hint of such has been given. NPCs have stock personalities, all of them fairly pleasant; even the stern characters are polite and helpful. PCs? Well, you build your party by making adventurers yourself, which is a matter of picking a class and then picking one of the four portraits for that class. There's no personality beyond what you make up in your head; heck, there's not even voice acting to imply personality for any of the given portraits.
But oh how I love it. Sometimes I just want to crawl some dungeons without Plot and Ethical Dilemmas and Personality getting in the way, and it's a great little dungeon-crawler with good standard turn-based combat. My characters have cute portraits (again with the art thing), the monsters are weirdly adorable, and I didn't realize until I got to this game how much of a relief it would be to have a hack-and-slash RPG where all of my opponents are...monsters. Clearly non-sentient animals, if sometimes animals with magic. I have not, to date, run into a single opponent that appears to be tool-using or sapient. It requires some tactical thought in more difficult battles, and the mapping can be tricky, but...that's it. It requires nothing more of me.
Anyway. These are the games distracting me from homework lately. They're both good RPGs for the 3DS, and I'd recommend both of them, for completely different reasons.