How many jrpgs do this?

So slow summer months are usually better for me to get into rpgs. Most of spring is wasted on tax season, and Holiday season is when we get a bunch of releases. Gotta mix it up. Anyway in between Divinity (which is fantastic so far) and trying to learn Dota (totally serious), I figured I'd go further out of my comfort zone and try Bravely Default.

Now the story and characters? butthole cancer. The type of garbage that I'd associate with not just shitty video game stories, but jrpgs in general.

The combat and job system? I'm digging it. The variety and potential complexity of builds you can make fascinates me, and standard battles aren't ordeals after a certain stretch. You can just run right through them with Brave spam, but the best part?

The ability to control how often random encounters happen. I can max that shit so it happens every few seconds so power leveling happens at the snap of a finger. Or I can put that shit down to zero when I'm in a hurry to get some quests done and run right through what the game calls "dungeons". That's a good feature for any game that does random battles, so which games did this before? I ask because no way did a jrpg do anything some other jrpg didn't do.

Mods:This isn't system wars material

Um A, **** you, and B: I was getting to that. Bravely Default is an example of how the 3DS allows developers to show progression and improvement in a genre. What does the Vita do for games? port jobs. Port jobs. port jobs. Gee how do we improve a game with fantastic characters, solid combat, but shit dungeon designs? gee I don't know add even more content to it so it's infinitely longer than it needs to be, and make dungeons that are twice as shitty. Add "golden" as a subtitle, and call it a day.

Sidenote: Apparently the 2nd half of this game is suppose to do something I'm going to hate and stop playing it. I kind of don't want it to be spoiled just to see the shittyness for myself. Call it morbid curiosity if you will.

Can't recall any, but yeah, that feature is too good.

I mean, they improved random encounters with having the monsters on the screen in some games, so you could avoid them. I guess it was a bit tougher to render those creatures on 3DS, so they went with that method of being able to control encounters.

It's brilliant.

stop playing dota. its for your own good. i put 14 hours into that thing and still dont know how to play lol

There are numerous JRPG's where you can equip certain items to raise or lower the frequency, but i've never heard of one where you can directly control it.

Yeah I loved that about BD. I put it to 100% when I grind and -100% when I just want to explore without being bothered. BD was so self aware of JRPG tropes. Too bad the 2nd half of the game sucks.

I can name a ton of RPGs with a good battle system but has a subpar party members. Tales of Graces, Tales of Xillia, Star Ocean TLH, Final Fantasy Dimensions, Lightning Returns (ew).

But really Bravely Default did progress the turned based RPGs with its random encounter meter. I'm shocked it took more than 20 years till Silicon decided to implement it in.

I have hope that Bravely Second will have a more serious story and characters, judging from the secret video at the end. Unfortunately though, Agnés will be returning.......

You literally need about 100 hours to get a general feel of the basics, 1000 hours to be decent, once you hit 2000 hours dota is love, dota is life, at 3000 hours you quit.

On topic: Pokemon had some sort of consumable spray that you could use (I'm guessing it's still there in more recent pokemon games, haven't played pokemon in over 10 years) and that meant no random encounters. It wasn't free, but still dirt cheap. That's close enough right?

Personally, I would just keep the encounters on and just fight the enemies that show up while normally making my way through dungeons instead of grinding.

Then again, BD does have a jobs system like FFV, so it might require some run-around-in-a-circle grinding.

That's kind of what fascinates me so much to be quite honest. The sheer depth to those things and mastery it requires. Plus no team oriented game can match that games richness in gameplay. The part I need to get over is having to click to move (I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT, even in games I like). Luckily I got myself a bit of a stepping stone for Dota in Smite. It's w,a,s,d driven. Shallower, but good teaching tool for teaching me the flow of these games. Plus enough of my buddies play Dota 2, that I figured if decent enough a match or 2 a night isn't going to hurt the cause.

To my knowledge, there is no battle system that has up until now actually let the player control the frequency of encounters. It's one of Bravely Default's absolute best features. The closest we have come to this has been visible enemies on the overworld map in other games, that let us decide if we want to initiate an encounter or sidestep it.

And yes, good luck for Chapter 5-8. Like, really. Good luck.

Also, of course 3DS does more to progress JRPGs, but that comes with the territory of getting original games in the genre.

Off Topic: I'd love to play Dota 2 with you whenever you get better or even now. I'm not the best but 700 hours in lul.

On a game I played for a jrpg they have it where if you're at a certain level (higher than the monsters in a dungeon) you slash through the monsters and gain exp without changing to the loading screen and then to the battle. That's the closest thing I can think of other than using items that repel monsters.

Kind of like Earthbound where it's like? you're too strong for this, you won, let's move on?

That's how I started the game lol. I said that I wasn't going to touch the slider, but I got tired of the random encounters when walking on the world map and in some dungeons.

Yeah pretty much. The game itself sucked but I appreciate the feature because it makes you avoid unnecessary battles. The game heavily relies on grinding, if that feature didn't exist it would be hell to play it.

You can't "brave spam" through the entire game. Early on? Sure. Later? You'll need the weapons and jobs to get through unless you have the game on easy.

One thing I don't like is you can register a friend who's already played the game, and summon one of their characters to help in sticky situations. They're so over-powered they can one-hit kill anything in the game. That sucks.

Only at 100 hours can you begin to call yourself a casual.

ALSO

http://store.steampowered.com/app/251150/

ALL PC JRPG FANS HAVE TO GET THIS.

from the same dudes who make ys as well

xD not even casual I think a 100 hours is the equivalent to a newb and anything lower is probably "just pressing qwer and buying items that don't make sense". Thank god they had the recommended items section. I mean I use different builds now but oh god if I didn't have that I would probably have people raging at me all the time.

Reminds me of how I saw some using Legion Commnander and they bought mekanism on it.... Or oh god.. Shadow Fiend with multiple unique attack modifiers like whatt the hell.

the feature is good and i dont remember any other ones having it, as for the second half your gonna hate it, but stick with it its not as bad as it seems and gets good again :P

I dont think iv run into a game that does that with the random encounters. Though to be honest I think random encounters shouldint exist. It just feels outdated. Now story and characters it varys person to person. Some hate the caste of tales of grace but I enjoyed them. Some love the xenoblade cast but I find them boring to be around.

Make fun of the Vita all you want, it still has the best jrpg

For boss fights or for even the standard enemies? I'm just now getting into chapter 2, but I got over leveled as shit because of the upgrade to random encounters. Otherwise currently I'm rocking just a black mage, white mage, with 2 monks for the early going. Trying to build up a specializations before I give them an extra close to **** with.

Because I'm just on normal and the standard stuff has become a matter of brave errybody, and kill. Boss fights I need to default more.

@jg4xchamp: What's your view on their RNG?

Be more specific.

RNG in general or how RNG is handled in this game?

Because RNG shit while not my cup of tea (I'm a control freak, not having control of things bugs me) is sort of like a thing you just deal with in these games. Everything about the battle system is built in mind to crunch numbers and do a glorified dice roll on crits and all that jazz. Like so far it hasn't been anything crazy or infuriating. It's not like Fire Emblem Awakening Lunatic: where oh look 1% chance to hit, and it's like OOPS CRIT GET MAD KID, or Valkyria Chronicles lancer shots which are INFURIATING to shoot.

At the same time I don't know exactly what's dictating when I do brave attacks where certain attacks do more or less overtime. That much I have noticed that standard attacks don't do consistent damage. It fluctuates. How I feel about it now? no big deal because I'm sort of breezing through the early chapters. But I could see being annoyed with the lack of consistency in more grueling fights. But I can't see the enemies health as it is (without using examine from what I know), so it's not like I can gauge if I got screwed or not.

But it doesn't have Demon's Souls, or Dark Souls, or SMT: Nocturne, or Mother 3, or Final Fantasy 9...actually wait it probably has Final Fantasy 9 by now right? it can play PS1 games.

I was referring to DotA since there is tons of RNG.

Not many. Every game with random battles should be able to have this feature though. It provides ultimate flexibility and minimal annoyance on the player. I personally like seeing stuff like this taken even further. The World Ends With You imo is the ultimate level of control on difficulty, leveling up and picking your battles. More games should look to it as inspiration.

You need to play more Dota with us, Champ.

I just got to the point where you get that 3rd douchebag character, and the gameplay is promising. I loved FFV, so BD's job system is very welcome in my book, and I can see how the brave/defauly system could potentially be interesting and intrigued to see how the challenging the game will get and see how much more thought I'll have to put into defaulting and braving.

The only other one that comes to mind is The World Ends With You, having no random encounters at all.

If more RPGs could give the kind of agency that BD does, and also do that Earthbound thing with "**** it, we know how this will turn out." On low level enemies, I might get into more of them.

some of the SMT games allow for altering the enemy encounter rate but I don't think they allow you to totally avoid them