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I really miss the PS2/PS3 era Level 5...

FF:Enhanced_Reality

FF:Enhanced_Reality

Member
Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle are games that I have literally sunk countless hours into. When I first played that PS2 demo with Dark Cloud, I spent hours playing the demo again and again and again because I couldn't fucking find a copy of the bastard game anywhere. I wouldn't own my own copy until PS4 came out because they were so expensive and physical prices only tanked when it came to PSN as a digital download. The demo timed out after about an hour or two but I kept rebooting it and going again. What a game man. Whilst limited to building pre-set things to a requirement, I loved building my own village and going into the randomly generated dungeons. It just gave the game that bit of freshness which made it quite re-playable. Building weapons, farming crystals for level ups, trying to stop my arse from falling out when I had a weapon on the verge of breaking, no repair powders and tonnes of enemies left. The story wasn't anything to write home about but it was such a good start.

A friend of mine came home one day with a copy of Dark Chronicle and it was like Dark Cloud on crack. We were addicted. I'd play as Max, he'd play Monica. I had the Ridepod and he had the monster transformations and we played that game to death. When we weren't playing Red Faction or Summoner of course. Level 5 were good to us in the PS3 generation too. White Knight Chronicles and the sequel for me, are vastly under appreciate J-RPGs. Turning into a huge suit of armour and kicking ass was like being a Power Ranger, especially when there were multiple knights fighting. Ni no Kuni... man, they were just a great company. Their output with Dragon Quest and Nintendo DS titles like Professor Leyton was crazy.

I really wish they were going strong today. :/ It feels like since that Yokai Watch thing, they've kind of fallen off into obscurity...
 
The problem is having an money-hunger idiotic president. He was always looking for the big thing for the studio to live on it for their entire existence. After Ni no Kuni DS they decided to make an game on their own using some of the systems and had their biggest success with Yokai Watch. After that it was just they trying again and again for their biggest hit and failing more and more.

Even now they are still not great. Sure, some people liked the Inazuma Eleven and they have an new Layton game in the works but, they don't seem as diversified as they once were during these times. Also the idiotic president is still jumping on the next buzz word to make his big hit, now he is saying that his games are all being made with AI, as in "100% being developed with AI", and that's an big lie since this is impossible.
 
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They just can't ship a game on time. Remember when DeccaPolice was supposed to release in 2023, or when Inazuma Eleven was scheduled for 2018?
 
I replayed Dark Cloud 1 about 5 years ago and loved it. It's a game that I appreciate more and more over time - something about the dungeon crawling is just so relaxing and satisfying. I never played the sequel, though I intend to. Someday.

Rogue Galaxy was also awesome. Definitely a lil bit repetitive, but still hits all the right notes for what I'm into. Absolutely loved that one.

I never played White Knight Chronicles, because while it looked super cool in the reveal, I recall the reviews weren't great. Should I check that one out? Always nice to find the odd ps3 game that's actually worth going back to.
 
I dunno, I loved the newest Fantasy Life game they put out. We're also getting a new Professor Layton soon, and Deca Police... eventually.
 
jshackles said:
I dunno, I loved the newest Fantasy Life game they put out. We're also getting a new Professor Layton soon, and Deca Police... eventually.
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I completely forgot about Deca Police! What the heck is going on with that? It seems it's in dev hell considering how late it is.
 
Danny Dudekisser said:
I replayed Dark Cloud 1 about 5 years ago and loved it. It's a game that I appreciate more and more over time - something about the dungeon crawling is just so relaxing and satisfying. I never played the sequel, though I intend to. Someday.

Rogue Galaxy was also awesome. Definitely a lil bit repetitive, but still hits all the right notes for what I'm into. Absolutely loved that one.

I never played White Knight Chronicles, because while it looked super cool in the reveal, I recall the reviews weren't great. Should I check that one out? Always nice to find the odd ps3 game that's actually worth going back to.
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White Knight Chronicles is a huge game. I remember watching the review on Gametrailers before the Dorito's Pope became the VP of gaming shows, relieving Kevin Butler of his role.

Honestly after playing the game, you could tell from the footage that they didn't get really far in and later in the game, a lot of the complaints are addressed. It's got a world building element like the Georama of Dark Cloud. But some of the later combo's and abilities are brilliant. It's a very big game. Memory seems to serve, the sequel came with a version of the first game that had all the new engine improvements and QoL improvements the sequel introduced.

The real piss take was they made EU voice chat contain every swear word and insult in every language turn to **** so if you didn't have a headset, your text didn't make any sense at all.

There was a really common one as well, I don't remember if it was Spanish or Polish but it was three letters that in English are commonly used in many words, so a big word like conundrum would come out like con***rum and then you were playing guess the word.
 
FF:Enhanced_Reality said:
White Knight Chronicles is a huge game. I remember watching the review on Gametrailers before the Dorito's Pope became the VP of gaming shows, relieving Kevin Butler of his role.

Honestly after playing the game, you could tell from the footage that they didn't get really far in and later in the game, a lot of the complaints are addressed. It's got a world building element like the Georama of Dark Cloud. But some of the later combo's and abilities are brilliant. It's a very big game. Memory seems to serve, the sequel came with a version of the first game that had all the new engine improvements and QoL improvements the sequel introduced.

The real piss take was they made EU voice chat contain every swear word and insult in every language turn to **** so if you didn't have a headset, your text didn't make any sense at all.

There was a really common one as well, I don't remember if it was Spanish or Polish but it was three letters that in English are commonly used in many words, so a big word like conundrum would come out like con***rum and then you were playing guess the word.
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Ah, yeah - I seem to recall that being the case with the sequel. The games are still good as offline experiences, right? I think the online component was the other reason I never bothered back in the day, but I don't know if it's one of those games that's actually just boring offline or if it's still compelling.
 
Jeanne D'Arc was excellent. I had Rogue Galaxy ages ago when it launched. They've got some amazing art to their work. White Knight Chronicles was probably the easiest JRPG I think I ever played. I'm not fluent in Japanese and I finished the Japanese version just by transforming into the knight during every encounter. My only gripe with Level-5 nowadays is the pacing. It feels like it's all dry Studio Ghibli moments. Perhaps the wow factor was more about how it looked versus substance. I tried Fantasy Life on 3DS and I just couldn't keep up the pace. Yeah, I'm probably in that camp that misses their earlier works. I always wished Rogue Galaxy had a speed up feature. They could have given that game a lot of good QoL improvements. I really enjoyed unlocking costumes for the cast back in the day.
 
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Decapolice is one of my most anticipated games and that's saying a lot for me because I'm normally anticipating western RPGs like The Witcher, Cyberpunk, and KCD.
 
I think I only played Dragon Quest VIII and White Knight Chronicles from them.

I remember being excited for White Knight Chronicles, when I was still playing on ps2, watching this super old trailer:


The final game wasn't like this though, but even this nowadays doesn't look very fun :messenger_grinning_sweat:
I was a bit disapointed by the game, I found the combats extremely slow and boring. Still had some enjoyment out of it because the visuals and atmosphere were alright, and it was at a time when RPGs were incredibly rare on ps3, the 360 actually had a lot more jrpg during that time.

I liked the online, because I didn't have a PC back then, and it felt a bit like a mini mmo where you could plug in a keyboard and chat with others, go on quests etc, although it was very repetitive.

Also something I remember very well, is that, even for the single player mode, where you had to create your own character, you had to pay for a UNIQUE (worked only once) 10€ ticket if you wanted to edit your character again. It was the first time I saw something like this, and it was quite shocking to me to see such thing.

Never played the second game.
 
Northeastmonk said:
Jeanne D'Arc was excellent.
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Yeah, don't forget PSP & DS in the convo (although their portable work was kind of the beginning of the end unfortunately.) Jeanne was right on, the Laytons were loved, Guild01 on 3DS a few other things... Not Ushiro, unfortunately.

(BTW, White Knight Chronicles had a PSP spinoff game in Japan. It was one of the MANY MoHun wannabe 4P Co-op games, I don't know how it was but it wasn't developed by Level5 so it doesn't matter much here.)
 
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CamHostage said:
Yeah, don't forget PSP & DS in the convo (although their portable work was kind of the beginning of the end unfortunately.) Jeanne was right on, the Laytons were loved, Guild01 on 3DS a few other things... Not Ushiro, unfortunately.

(BTW, White Knight Chronicles had a PSP spinoff game in Japan. It was one of the MANY MoHun wannabe 4P Co-op games, I don't know how it was but it wasn't developed by Level5 so it doesn't matter much here.)
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I finished the UMD back in the day, so I bought it on PSN. It's great to have on Vita/PSP. Sony released it on PSN for PS4/PS5 and it feels super weird playing on such a large screen. There's also no way to speed things up. Which is something to consider especially when older games, especially JRPGs ran slower than they do now.

It looks like the WKC prequel got released in Europe (PAL) in English. Sad because WKC had so much potential in those early teaser trailers. Large open world, beautiful graphics and high fantasy combat.

I remember Yokai Watch was where I stopped paying attention. The IP looked great at first but maybe too heart felt for me. There were quite of few of those.
 
White Knight Chronicles is one of the best bad JRPG I have played. I also bought WKC2 day one, it wasn't even certain the game would be published but Sony did in Europe at a reduced price.

WKC2 disc is all you need. It contains WKC1 with quite huge improvements and better performance.

The story itself is kind of drab, but the town building and co-op missions were really fun.

The game was absolutely nothing like the bullshit TGS demo though. That was some top level PS4 quality in hindsight.

Its OST is absolutely fire.
 
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Level 5 became Level 1 with all that Yokai and Inazuma shit. They were great and gave us a lot of great games then I don't know what happened. Hopefully Professor Layton turns out decent
 
Digity.exe said:
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This is I miss the most, and nothing else they've made since I like as much. Inazuma Eleven games are kinda fun, just because I think the idea of a JRPG soccer combat system is neat on its face.

Hopefully they have more to show about DecaPolice, I only ever remember that short gameplay trailer.
 
They still published some good games:
Inazuma eleven: victory road, fantasy life i, megaton musashi w. All are quality titles.

Business wise, they moved on from developing games for other publishers (dragon quest 8/ 9, Jeanne d arc, dark cloud/ chronicles, wkc, rogue galaxy); they want their own IPs.
Self publishing layton after successful partnership with Nintendo is one of their bad decisions, I think. They really miss switch era of success.

Now, they are extremely slow on releasing games compared to their PS2/DS/3DS era. Hopefully they can release new layton this year.
 
FF:Enhanced_Reality said:
Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle are games that I have literally sunk countless hours into. When I first played that PS2 demo with Dark Cloud, I spent hours playing the demo again and again and again because I couldn't fucking find a copy of the bastard game anywhere. I wouldn't own my own copy until PS4 came out because they were so expensive and physical prices only tanked when it came to PSN as a digital download. The demo timed out after about an hour or two but I kept rebooting it and going again. What a game man. Whilst limited to building pre-set things to a requirement, I loved building my own village and going into the randomly generated dungeons. It just gave the game that bit of freshness which made it quite re-playable. Building weapons, farming crystals for level ups, trying to stop my arse from falling out when I had a weapon on the verge of breaking, no repair powders and tonnes of enemies left. The story wasn't anything to write home about but it was such a good start.

A friend of mine came home one day with a copy of Dark Chronicle and it was like Dark Cloud on crack. We were addicted. I'd play as Max, he'd play Monica. I had the Ridepod and he had the monster transformations and we played that game to death. When we weren't playing Red Faction or Summoner of course. Level 5 were good to us in the PS3 generation too. White Knight Chronicles and the sequel for me, are vastly under appreciate J-RPGs. Turning into a huge suit of armour and kicking ass was like being a Power Ranger, especially when there were multiple knights fighting. Ni no Kuni... man, they were just a great company. Their output with Dragon Quest and Nintendo DS titles like Professor Leyton was crazy.

I really wish they were going strong today. :/ It feels like since that Yokai Watch thing, they've kind of fallen off into obscurity...
Click to expand...

Hells yes. I've thought about this a lot, about why the Dark Cloud games and Rogue Galaxy pushed all my buttons so hard. Ultimately I think it's the complementary, interlocking systems. You're always doing and thinking about multiple things at the same time. Sure you're running a dungeon, but you're also juggling weapons so that you can level them up, and looking for resources so you can build your town, and taking photos or looking for bugs or playing golf or whatever. These systems aren't separate, they're linked, so doing well in one area can help you in another. It encourages you to engage in everything and take a more completionist approach. For contrast, I love the 'Yakuza' games, but there's nothing really encouraging you to engage in areas you don't immediately gel with. Don't find kart racing or casino games too interesting? Then just leave them alone, they stand alone and doesn't really integrate with the other minigames / systems. Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy are complex games made of interesting interlocking parts, and I goddamn love them.
 
kJqPfy5btyRTJ8ag.jpg



The game I always wanted to play but never got to own. I imagined it like the Vision of Escaflowne game for PlayStation.


The only one I played a little bit was the PSP version.

This game was good?
 
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They've definitely fallen off, but they're not done yet. Hopefully that new Layton game will be awesome. Definitely getting it on Steam, day one, and I want to try out Inazuma Eleven Victory Road sometime. Also I've never actually tried one of the Yo-kai Watch games :pie_thinking:.

But anyways, I think the Guild01 and Guild02 collections of games on 3ds were seriously underrated. They might've been pretty low budget, but they were mostly cool. Also I love that all these trailers emphasise the creators so heavily.
Make sure to disable Youtube's stupid shitty auto-dubbing before watching.
By Suda51 and Grasshopper

This one was written by a Japanese comedian. I love this trailer in particular

By the maker of the Boku no Natsuyasumi games, he's also got some games on Steam or coming out on Steam these days which I wanna check out

and then there's Crimson Shroud by the FF7 Tactics guy. I never really got super into that one, but I was reminded of it again because Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle seems like a more fleshed out take on that same concept.
I also wanna try Aero Porter at some point. Unfortunately the creator hasn't made any new games since, but he did also make Sim Tower and Seaman.
 
They were one of my favourite studios for JRPGs that weren't from Square.

Dark Cloud 2 / Chronicle in Europe is one of my fav games of all time.

Rogue Galaxy was great.

White Knight Chronicles was quite a bit lacking but I still enjoyed it.

Ni No Kuni wasn't 100% to my tastes but again it was a great attempt.

Now they don't even register on my radar as I can see their priority is completely chasing the money from kids.
 
I don't really understand why a lot of these games that would've been on 3ds like the Yo-kai Watch series are now mostly exclusive to phones. Just put the game on Switch and tell people it's intended to be a handheld game, you don't have to make graphics that'll look good on a tv. Unless if these are low budget old school gacha or something, I guess.
 
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uncreativename said:
I don't really understand why a lot of these games that would've been on 3ds like the Yo-kai Watch series are now mostly exclusive to phones. Just put the game on Switch and tell people it's intended to be a handheld game, you don't have to make graphics that'll look good on a tv. Unless if these are low budget old school gacha or something, I guess.
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They already did
Gk-GR5-KDWo-AAc3-Si.jpg
 
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According to their list of games on wikipedia it seems like for a while there they weren't. But yeah it does look like they're releasing pretty much everything on Switch now :pie_relieved:.
 
uncreativename said:
They've definitely fallen off, but they're not done yet...
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Their president Hino talked a bit about their falling off from the glory days, and how they're trying to find ways to get back up to speed. (He personally is a proponent of AI to assist development.) Here are some articles translating a big interview he did recently for Japan's 4Gamer.

automaton-media.com

Level-5 CEO explains why delays happen so much and why “just announcing things later” isn’t always a solution - AUTOMATON WEST

According to Akihiro Hino, Level-5 is set on polishing its games no matter how much it gets criticized for delays.
automaton-media.com automaton-media.com
automaton-media.com

Level-5 CEO says modern quality demands have made fast game development like back in the day extremely difficult - AUTOMATON WEST

Level-5 game director and CEO Akihiro Hino talks about dev cycles inevitably growing longer in the modern game industry, making yearly releases difficult.
automaton-media.com automaton-media.com
 
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I'd play 3ds lookin handheld games and Dragon Quest 8 graphics tier tv/computer games until the end of time, Mr. Hino :pie_open_mouth:. Art style >>> graphics.
 
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Wtf with the hate for Ni no Kuni 2? While it's not their best game, I enjoyed my 100 hours I spent on it. It can be quite repetitive, and world building and story kind of sucked, but I really enjoyed the kingdom management and skirmish battles.
 
emivita said:
Wtf with the hate for Ni no Kuni 2? While it's not their best game, I enjoyed my 100 hours I spent on it. It can be quite repetitive, and world building and story kind of sucked, but I really enjoyed the kingdom management and skirmish battles.
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Well, since you're wondering... the world building and story sucking is a massive problem for an RPG. If I'm after kingdom management and large scale battles, I can fire up Crusader Kings, or Stellaris for a sci-fi variant.

It's great that you enjoyed NNK2. But it was a complete waste of $60 for me.
 
If only at least half of 5b usd invested this gen by sony into st00pid gaas shit was instead used on proper higher budget AA and lower side AAA jrpgs, we would be back to at least ps3 lvl of jrpg bonanza, if not even ps1/ps2 lvl, man can dream :messenger_expressionless:
2,5b usd would mean 15x 100m usd(roughly GoY budget) smaller AAA jrpgs and there would be still left 1b usd aka enough money for 20x 50m AA jrpgs, total 35 games, obviously not all would be amazing, some would be 6 and 7, but chances are at least 15 out of 35 would be very good aka 8/10 and above =]
 
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