I recently had a birthday and the result is me playing remakes of old JRPGs. What a surprise. Anyway, here are some first impressions.

Final Fantasy 3

I’ve played furthest into FF3. I’m not going to tell whether it’s fun or not because the gameplay is a straight port of the original with minor changes—the starting class has been renamed, and each character is added to your party one at a time, so the first section is a little harder. But seriously, this is still FF3. Even though the DS makes it LOOK a lot like FF7, the difference is like night and day. (You can decide which is which.)

Well, actually the graphics are closer to a lo-fi FFX: the 3D world doesn’t look tile-based like the 2D original. Seamless 3D enviroments complicate FF3’s NES-style INVISABLE BLOX somewhat; the annoying invisible secret entrances have been converted into actually visible secret entrances, though they are still well-hidden. That’s an improvement, but the invisible squares concealing items are truly invisible until you zoom in to see them sparkle. In the original you could find invisible item squares because they blocked your path.

The two biggest complaints I have so far: everything is designed for a single, much bigger screen, and battles take about three times as long as the original because the interface is so much less responsive. The top screen isn’t well used–it stays blank all the time, with tiny tiny text overlaying the bottom one instead. And when the camera is at the default zoomed-out position, it’s the character models look nearly identical. It feels like this remake was designed for the PS2 or the Wii. Something that can do at least 480i, anyway.

Final Fantasy 12 : Revenant Wings

Yeah, yeah, Revenant Wings is a rip-off designed solely to extract money from suckers like me. But it’s actually kind of fun. The basic gameplay is a simplified, sped-up Warcraft 3: you have a small number of heroes leading bands of melee, ranged or winged fighters around. Melee defeats ranged defeats winged defeats melee. The rounds are really fast for a strategy game, usually 5-10 minutes. Like most console RTSs, there is no base-building: you just have to capture “summoning gates". So far the battles have been pretty easy, excepting a couple that were almost impossible with the wrong strategy. Strategies are simple to work out, though, so I think it’s more a matter of not being stupid. Probably recommended for JRPG players that find real RTSs too hard, like me.

The graphics are 2D sprites on a 3D background. The 3D landscapes are just amazing—islands float in the sky, topped with gigantic crystals and derelict cities. Like FF12 for the PS2, it’s probably the best-looking art I’ve seen on the DS. On the PS2, the tradeoff was in texture quality; here the tradeoff is the 2D sprites. The sprites are tiny, and scaling them up or down the least bit turns them into messy blobs. This, of course, happens all the time. So best to spend most of your time admiring the scenery and the rest learning that the blobby red fighters are fire-based while the blobby green ones are earth-based.

The biggest problem so far? Not only is the story lamer than FF12’s (difficult, I know, but possible), the writing is worse. Yeah, I know. If you can get yourself to care whether the plucky kids stop the something pirates from defacing the something something over there, you need to stop and read some real literature. Get yourself a heart-rendering and come back for the gameplay instead.

Dragon Quest 4 : Chapters of the Chosen

Dragon Quest 4’s remake came out a year after FF3’s, so I think Square-Enix learned some things about porting games to the dual-screen Nintendo portable. Either that, or Square and Enix are secretly two companies on the inside and Enix is better at adapting their games. In any case, DQ4 looks better than either FF3 or Revenant Wings; it too uses 2D sprites on a 3D background, but its sprites do not scale and in fact look to me like the SNES-era Dragon Quest characters. The 3D scenery, while not as impressive as the natural landscapes of Revenant Wings, has a lot more nostalgic character. It feels a lot more like a conversion of a 2D tile-based map than the other two games: churches, shops and inns are stylised and recognisable at a glance.

I haven’t played the original DQ4 (DW4 in the US), so I can’t say what’s changed. I pretty sure the translation is new because, like DQ8, it is heavy on the British dialects. Right now I’m in the first area, where everybody is Scottish. I know some people don’t like accent translations, but when they’re done well I’m a fan (although I hate them when they’re bad, see Frog in the original Crono Trigger).

Phantasy Star Portable (demo)

I have never played any of the Phantasy Stars for more than an hour, and nothing newer than PS4, so I don’t know how different Phantasy Star Portable is from the rest of the series. Plus, I just played demo, so I don’t know how much deeper the game gets after the demo. What I saw, though, was a kind of fun action-RPG. I’m not a huge fan of action-JRPGs, so I’m not really qualified to comment on the quality. (I like Morrowind, but that’s a completely different animal than Secret of Mana, for example.)

The graphics seem pretty bland for a PSP game, as do the level designs; I think the game was spending a lot of polygons on the character models (which look really good for a PSP game) and not as much on the environment. Unfortunately, once you start fighting, the camera is always a couple of meters from your character so all of that detail is invisible. I mean, most PSX character models didn’t even have EYES. Go play FF7 again. You can’t even see Cloud’s eyes in the battle scenes until you’re less than 2 meters away.

Ahem. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that part of the problem is that this is designed to be a multiplayer game. Given my memories of Secret of Mana, PS Portable is probably ten times as fun with friends, maybe five times with random internet guys. The controls are well-designed for this; you can pull up the menu and poke around with the d-pad while continuing to maneuver with the analog pad.

I have to end by saying that the PS Portable has some of the worst voice acting I’ve heard in a while. The obligatory teacher character sounds like a bored West Coast college kid interning at Sega of America. The helper robot sounds like a Minnesota expatriate who is planning to work her way to up bad anime dubs by sounding smarmy.

A couple of small notes on the PSP: I resented re-buying Final Fantasy Tactics until I started it. Not anymore: the translation is so improved it’s like playing a different game. Probably worth it even if you already own FFT. Also, UMDs may have been a good choice in the mid-00s, but these days they are just loud, slow battery hogs compared to flash memory. It’s a good thing Sony is moving away from UMD.

Edit: I noted in passing that FF12’s story is lame. However, I should point out that its characters are pretty interesting, at least the royalty. Motivations are never quite clear; in particular Bhujerba and the Empire on the surface appear to have a Star Wars-esque Rebel/Empire relation, but as the game wears on, Rozaria jumps in and the Good Guys aren’t quite so clearly Good anymore. Unfortunately, this makes the game’s supernatural ending a total non-sequitur. The whole thing resembles FFT but less confusing.

Also, the second chapter of DQ4 features Russian accents. It doesn’t matter if it’s inaccurate, it’s just hilarious. “I am busy like fluttering of little bee", etc etc.