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I've not played 2, but the original Alterier Iris is fun. Reviews of the second suggest it's not quite as good as the first, which makes it a bit of an oddity in the games world.
It's not a traditional JRPG, though. The actual role playing stuff is, but it's also very dull. The meat of the game is in the cookery and alchemy stuff, but you need to trudge through the storyline for a fair while before you can really dig into those. Progress in the story opens up new bits of hte world, where you find new ingredients that you can use in recipes. The whole cookery thing is lovely - you get a couple of bsaic recipes to begin with and create new dishes by substituting different or better quality ingredients. It all feeds on itself, too. For example, one recipe is for gin, one is for a dish that includes gin as an ingredient. If you change the gin recipe you create a new drink, which you can then use to replace the gin in the food recipe and create something completely different. It feels endless.
But yeah, the RP bit of the RPG is snoresville.
Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle is also a pretty nice twist on the trad JRPG experience. It's by the Dragon Quest VIII team, before they became famous for that game, and for my money offers a deeper, more involving play. You're tasked with travelling into the past and building the game's towns and cities up in order to prevent a catastrophe in the future, and how you lay those towns out affects how they appear in the game's present. It's got a kind of alchemy/cookery system in it to, in the form of inventions. Although that's a bit disappointing here - like the alchemy pot in DQVIII, you can only really come up with new things when you've already been told the recipe.
The only thing that lets it down is that a lot of the time you're battling through randomly-generated dungeons. Otherwise, it's quite charming.
Or there's Sega's magnificent Yakuza, which is like a harder-edged Shenmue crossed with the first proper 3D recreation of the classic scrolling 2D brawler. It's very much like Shenmue in terms of structure, which isn't totally trad JRPG stuff, obviously, but it's an alleyway just off that street. Very strong characterisation, too, even if the swearing is about as ott as it's possible to get. |
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COTE without any conventional shooting but were forced to because you can't sell a game otherwise. (I liked the 'clever' ways of defeating the big, nasty mythos monsters the best.)