LogFAQs > #970959533

AriaOfBolo posted...

I wanna get into Romancing Saga, somebody recommended Frontier as a jumping-on point.

Minstrel Song is a remake of Romancing SaGa 1, and it's pretty high quality, too. It's now available on Switch although it's basically the same version that has been out since PS2. I actually think RS3 on Switch is extremely new player friendly though, probably even more than Minstrel Song, despite being a straight port of a SNES game. it's also cheaper than Minstrel Song. so less investment needed to try it out. (I got it on sale for like 2 dollars or something, full price IIRC is still less than 10)

AriaOfBolo posted...

Probably should get into Etrian Odyssey proper too, I've played and liked a good bit of Persona Q and Labyrinth of Touhou.

for Q all I will say is that I don't think it actually made Persona fans or Etrian Odyssey fans happy. so I wouldn't let that influence your expectations too much. it lacks a lot of the core elements that makes EO games great. the same is also true for Labyrinth of Touhou, even if LoT is a fun dungeon crawling in its own way. the appeal of the game isn't excatly the dungeon crawling. that's more of a vehicle for gaining EXP and loot. although the dungeon crawling is a good structure for this type of game, because the dungeon design and exploration in EO is also solid. there are environmental puzzles and, in addition to random encounters, strong mid-boss type enemies you can see on the map. often times there are clever solutions to avoid these bosses so you can come back and fight them later under more favorable conditions. the real draw of the game is the character building and how well designed the battle system, player skills, and enemy encounters are.

look at my post above. this topic contains only a small fraction of the insanity of the kind of person who enjoys playing Etrian Odyssey. I have like 10 different EO related spreadsheets that I personally made, as well as having done paragraphs and paragraphs of character and class analysis that barely anyone else has even read. anyway, point being, neither Labyrinth of Touhou or Persona Q include any kind of character building system, and so they don't represent a real Etrian Odyssey experience to an outsider. Persona Q also uses a battle system that is more familiar to Persona fans, and neither the random encounters or bosses even come close to touching the greatness of the enemy encounter design in Etrian Odyssey. you just have to play one of the actual EO games to see for yourself. Untold2, Nexus, or 5 are good places to start.

Nexus will be the easiest and works almost like a "sampler" of every other game in the series. it contains classes from all of the other games, as well as ported and remixed dungeons from previous games. for the same reason it also might be more appealing to someone that is already a fan of the series, but I do think they did a good job of making it appealing to new players by making the feel of the game more casual and less daunting.

Untold 2 actually has a mode where you can play with pre-generated characters, and has more of a story mode to hook players that otherwise would complain about the game 'having no story.' Although I feel this does eliminate some of the fun of balancing your own party and choosing your classes, it's still better than the Persona Q solution because it still allows players the freedom to customize their own character builds on each of the pre-generated characters.

5 as mentioned above is the most unique game in the series but it's one of the more story-heavy games that doesn't feature pre-generated player characters. And the dynamics of race/class character building are interesting. so if those appeal to you based on what I've said above, it's probably a good place to start. although the standard campaign dungeon crawl in 5 might be the hardest of the 3, I believe it has difficult settings, so you can play on easy mode if you're really worried.

AriaOfBolo posted...

Is it worth swinging back to the old Ro3K games if I've only played newer ones? (but liked them) (but never had the attention span to finish a game) I think the ones I played are like, 8 and 11, and I have 14 sitting on my backlog.

Nobunaga's Ambition on Genesis for sure is worth AT LEAST trying out. there is a little bit of a difficulty curve getting started, as the territories in the game are NOT all balanced. I can provide a list of the territories where you can start the game and have an enjoyable experience as a new player.

if someone enjoyed Nobunaga's Ambition, then yes I would recommend checking out RoTK 2 and 3. However, I wouldn't just recommend it to any person, since I think most people would find the games slow, obtuse, and boring.