The reason I still have a fondness for overworld maps is it sells the scale better. The abstraction allows it to feel like you’re actually exploring an entire world. Even the biggest open world games feel like you’re exploring an island or something. FFXV feels like driving around Connecticut or something, not a huge country.
Two games that you missed are Penny Blood and Ark Fantasia that were funded via Double Kickstarter. Both are spiritual successors to Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms.
Lots of good stuff here. A few I haven’t heard of but will look forward to now. Runa is almost giving me flashbacks to Edge of Eternity. Hopefully it doesn’t have all those performance issues because the game does look great.
I'm bad enough not playing enough indie games but kickstarter games are even further behind 😬 I hope Penny Blood sees the light of day I know of that one.
Not related to kickstarter jrpgs, but if you're not feeling pokemon anymore, I highly recommend Monster Hunter Stories. For me, at least, they're what I always wanted pokemon to be. Fighting with your monsters and the combat is RPS style turn based.
Alzara's combat section looks real. I think the special effects on spells really shows that, as it's using common real-time techniques rather than fancy prerendered effects. I think what makes it look so good is the scripted camera movement and character animations. AAA teams need that many people more for the amount of raw content (horizontal scale) rather than detailed, high-quality polish on specific mechanics (vertical scale). A combat system makes sense to focus effort on since you only have so many abilities and characters and it is reused for all combat, so good mileage for effort. Similar to Runa (which has a level design/environmental art specialty), I would bet they happen to have people that specialize more on the animation and character modeling/texturing and VFX.
Regarding the overly-animated idle stances, I agree it's not always necessary. Some games it is logical, tho. If a game features a debuff that freezes a character in place, a good way to represent that is for them to stop moving. An idle animation with more frames will more-easily stand apart. Yes, I know there are other ways. But.. this is what the animators choose to go with sometimes, and it makes sense.
My favorite idle animation is Ukyo in the original Samurai Showdown. He doesn't move at all to the point where you think he may have a single frame of animation, but then he blinks and you're like "oh he's just that good at being still"
Uhhh you are not too old for Pokemon - I'm in my 60's and still playing Pokemon but then my husband and I not olny played all the released games as well as many ROM hacks but also very much enjoyed playing the card game. And still loving your videos - "...they made some kind of deal with some demon like entity..." - LOVE THAT.
Yeah, I'm not too old to enjoy Pokémon at 39, but I sure do get burnt out on the franchise after a while. (First time I got tired of it was after defeating the Elite Four in Emerald. Then I picked up Black as X was about to release, and kept going until starting the post-game of Sun and quitting again. I'm sure I'll be back eventually.)
Runa definitely has near AAA-quality environment art for sure, but I would say character models, combat (animations and VFX), and progression systems seem more lacking (so they are definitely showing real footage). The creators have acknowledged the animations be something they are missing expertise for, so I think they are just asset packs. One of the creators has prior experience in the industry as an artist, so I see this as them spending a lot of time polishing the environment for this vertical slice/Kickstarter trailer. We also don't know how fleshed out the story and/or quests are yet, so if they spent most of the last few years on the world, I can see it looking that good.
I only ever funded one game on Kickstarter. I can't remember the exact name of it, but it looked really promising and seemed reasonable in terms of budget breakdown (given I didn't know as much about game development at the time or how many devs were working on it). It faced several delays, but did eventually get picked up to be published by Atlus which gave me hope that it would get released. They started putting out more updates, but then things stalled out again until the lead on the project put out a really mean sounding update about how the Kickstarter backers were putting too much pressure on them to complete the game and give a timeline so they refunded everyone and said the game might happen one day or it might not but now they aren't beholden to anyone.
Sakuraba is one of those composers/arrangers where I'm perfectly happy to listen to his work... that's been curated by others. Too much of it is just kind of there, but he's got his moments.
Love the Urbosa vibes from the female character in the battle scenes from Alzara! ❤️ ⚡ The art for White Raven looks incredible!Great video showing off these amazing games, dude!
Great video i love seeing about indies and Kickstarters. I had backed 3 of these and knew of all but one and that's Bestiario. Holy crap it looks amazing and I'm so bummed i didn't only about it at the time to back it. As a 42 year old, i totally understand screwing up your shoulder by moving it wrong. Hope it's not too bad.
I backed Godshard Chronicles, but thanks for bringing some others to my attention. I am also older than you (Gen X'er) and I am huge Pokemon fan, so you have no excuse lol
I feel like a team that small must be very well off to have the time to do that, also might be utilizing AI or possibly that prescribed thing that gets a bunch of people through college. Probably that one. You know the one for ADD.
Hey I like Secret of the Stars, I know it is not great but had some things that if been done right would have made it a great game. Needed to expand on each character and made the other party worth it (maybe doing things with them would have made the town mechanics better).
I'd honestly put Motoi Sakuraba as kind of mid. His work gets the job done and always fits the mood of the scene, but I also don't remember it after that scene is over. Certainly not the best but far from bad.
You mentioned liking Sakuraba's earlier work - is there a particular point after which you felt he's phoning it in? I've gotta say I personally loved the Golden Sun and Baten Kaitos soundtracks, but you said he's been phoning it in the last 20 years, and it does occur to me both of those are a little more than 20 years old, so maybe they're not the pieces of his work you're mostly thinking of in saying you dislike him. Obviously the GBA sound hardware had some serious limitations, but I felt those examples at least managed a pretty good range of evoking different feelings for different situations. That said I'm sat on a giant backlog with little time to catch up, so I can't say I've played much of his more recent work, and can't comment on whether I'd agree with you there.
I really think he's just phoning it in on the Tales Of series, for some reason that series in particular just has music that I don't find to be very inspired.
@@JustTheGems Fair enough - I've only played Symphonia there and long enough ago that I don't recall the music, so I can't tell if we just have different taste there or not, but I felt in the ones I mentioned he did a pretty great job of capturing a variety of moods of pretty different locations at least.
Is it a crime that I say puppers instead of doggo? I'm a millennial too so I'm just making sure I'm not enacting a crime again generations, I can change my ways. Regarding the list though, lots of those games look pretty cool! I would take a look at Alzara and and Runa look pretty cool, and the spanish one seems intriguing. There's so many cool games to look at nowadays.
Ha, I feel like we rarely have the same taste in games, but I don't think your take on Sakuraba is crazy at all. Of all the well known game composers he's easily the most mediocre overall.
Had to look up Motoi Sakuraba bec I wondered why you seem to dislike his work so much. Surprised to find out that he's the composer behind music I dislike so much too lol. I love Tales, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, and Souls series but the music GOD THE MUSIC!!! 😩 Idky why I find them too generic and too prog rock for me...
My comments probably going to get disliked, but I'm still going to say it. My suggestion is DON'T BOTHER. Ignore most kickstarter even early access, it usually ends up dissapointing at best, that's even if the status is finished. 3-5 years to wait for a game developement and then wondering how or why half the promises stuff doesn't even there, if it's there is either broken, or shallow. Just buy/play the games that's already in the market for JRPG, this space is very niche and we had so much options that available ready to play RIGHT now.
95% of my long list of backed projects disagrees. And even then, there are more amazing ones out there that I didn't pay attention to when funding happened.
The reason I still have a fondness for overworld maps is it sells the scale better. The abstraction allows it to feel like you’re actually exploring an entire world. Even the biggest open world games feel like you’re exploring an island or something. FFXV feels like driving around Connecticut or something, not a huge country.
Two games that you missed are Penny Blood and Ark Fantasia that were funded via Double Kickstarter. Both are spiritual successors to Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms.
I thought it was Wild Arms Fantasia?
@AlastorShadow0 Sorry. My phone autocorrected on me. It's Armed Fantasia that's the spiritual successor of Wild Arms.
pretty sure they do Idle animations like that because it is more difficult to do subtle animations in pixel art games.
I know we are getting great jrpgs, I love games
Lots of good stuff here. A few I haven’t heard of but will look forward to now. Runa is almost giving me flashbacks to Edge of Eternity. Hopefully it doesn’t have all those performance issues because the game does look great.
I'm bad enough not playing enough indie games but kickstarter games are even further behind 😬 I hope Penny Blood sees the light of day I know of that one.
I don't think you're missing out on much......
Not related to kickstarter jrpgs, but if you're not feeling pokemon anymore, I highly recommend Monster Hunter Stories. For me, at least, they're what I always wanted pokemon to be. Fighting with your monsters and the combat is RPS style turn based.
Alzara's combat section looks real. I think the special effects on spells really shows that, as it's using common real-time techniques rather than fancy prerendered effects. I think what makes it look so good is the scripted camera movement and character animations. AAA teams need that many people more for the amount of raw content (horizontal scale) rather than detailed, high-quality polish on specific mechanics (vertical scale).
A combat system makes sense to focus effort on since you only have so many abilities and characters and it is reused for all combat, so good mileage for effort. Similar to Runa (which has a level design/environmental art specialty), I would bet they happen to have people that specialize more on the animation and character modeling/texturing and VFX.
Regarding the overly-animated idle stances, I agree it's not always necessary. Some games it is logical, tho. If a game features a debuff that freezes a character in place, a good way to represent that is for them to stop moving. An idle animation with more frames will more-easily stand apart. Yes, I know there are other ways. But.. this is what the animators choose to go with sometimes, and it makes sense.
My favorite idle animation is Ukyo in the original Samurai Showdown. He doesn't move at all to the point where you think he may have a single frame of animation, but then he blinks and you're like "oh he's just that good at being still"
Uhhh you are not too old for Pokemon - I'm in my 60's and still playing Pokemon but then my husband and I not olny played all the released games as well as many ROM hacks but also very much enjoyed playing the card game. And still loving your videos - "...they made some kind of deal with some demon like entity..." - LOVE THAT.
Yeah, I'm not too old to enjoy Pokémon at 39, but I sure do get burnt out on the franchise after a while.
(First time I got tired of it was after defeating the Elite Four in Emerald. Then I picked up Black as X was about to release, and kept going until starting the post-game of Sun and quitting again. I'm sure I'll be back eventually.)
Yeah I'm finding that more and more people my age and older DO like Pokemon, so I guess that's not a great excuse......
@@JustTheGems Thankfully you don't need an excuse. It's fine to just not be into it.
Have you played Dark Souls? Its impossible to say Sakuraba doesnt deserve his sucess when this dude composed the Gwynn theme
LOL that's so accurate to how the newer pixel sprites breathe 😂 RIP your shoulder now.
Runa definitely has near AAA-quality environment art for sure, but I would say character models, combat (animations and VFX), and progression systems seem more lacking (so they are definitely showing real footage). The creators have acknowledged the animations be something they are missing expertise for, so I think they are just asset packs. One of the creators has prior experience in the industry as an artist, so I see this as them spending a lot of time polishing the environment for this vertical slice/Kickstarter trailer. We also don't know how fleshed out the story and/or quests are yet, so if they spent most of the last few years on the world, I can see it looking that good.
I only ever funded one game on Kickstarter. I can't remember the exact name of it, but it looked really promising and seemed reasonable in terms of budget breakdown (given I didn't know as much about game development at the time or how many devs were working on it). It faced several delays, but did eventually get picked up to be published by Atlus which gave me hope that it would get released. They started putting out more updates, but then things stalled out again until the lead on the project put out a really mean sounding update about how the Kickstarter backers were putting too much pressure on them to complete the game and give a timeline so they refunded everyone and said the game might happen one day or it might not but now they aren't beholden to anyone.
I thought I was the only person that remembered Tecmo Secret of the Stars. 😂
I actually enjoyed that game - a lot. I never got to finish it, as I had to rent it to play. *sad*
Sakuraba is one of those composers/arrangers where I'm perfectly happy to listen to his work... that's been curated by others. Too much of it is just kind of there, but he's got his moments.
I’m glad that thinking the pixel idle animation thing is weird isn’t just me lol
Love the Urbosa vibes from the female character in the battle scenes from Alzara! ❤️ ⚡ The art for White Raven looks incredible!Great video showing off these amazing games, dude!
Based. I'm wishlisting it for the tanned tummy as well.
I backed Bestiario and Godshard Chronicles. Looking forward to getting my hands on those in the future.
Great video i love seeing about indies and Kickstarters. I had backed 3 of these and knew of all but one and that's Bestiario. Holy crap it looks amazing and I'm so bummed i didn't only about it at the time to back it.
As a 42 year old, i totally understand screwing up your shoulder by moving it wrong. Hope it's not too bad.
Hahhaa thanks, I've fully recovered 😅
I really dig Bestiario’s art style. I agree there is something about it that is reminiscent of old Saturday morning cartoons.
We'll have to check it out
I backed Godshard Chronicles, but thanks for bringing some others to my attention.
I am also older than you (Gen X'er) and I am huge Pokemon fan, so you have no excuse lol
Haha oh no! That was my one out! 😅
I feel like a team that small must be very well off to have the time to do that, also might be utilizing AI or possibly that prescribed thing that gets a bunch of people through college. Probably that one. You know the one for ADD.
Gonna get to play in the nxt months meaning "Pileup on the backlog" :'D
No action games? Was expecting you to cover Anima Song from the Abyss which looks like a massive upgrade tfrom its prequel Anima Gate of Memories
Please look into "A Frog's Tale" it looks amazing.
Hopefully Penny Blood gets released, we could use more horror themed jrpg games.
good news, as of their latest KS update they said that a bunch of publishers got in touch with them, so fingers crossed!
Some really cool games! Godshard Chronicles has my attention, that one actually looks gorgeous ❤
Hey I like Secret of the Stars, I know it is not great but had some things that if been done right would have made it a great game. Needed to expand on each character and made the other party worth it (maybe doing things with them would have made the town mechanics better).
I'd honestly put Motoi Sakuraba as kind of mid. His work gets the job done and always fits the mood of the scene, but I also don't remember it after that scene is over. Certainly not the best but far from bad.
Backed all these except white raven, after eiyuden and armed fantasia/penny blood I’ve been to okay with just backing kickstarters
You mentioned liking Sakuraba's earlier work - is there a particular point after which you felt he's phoning it in? I've gotta say I personally loved the Golden Sun and Baten Kaitos soundtracks, but you said he's been phoning it in the last 20 years, and it does occur to me both of those are a little more than 20 years old, so maybe they're not the pieces of his work you're mostly thinking of in saying you dislike him. Obviously the GBA sound hardware had some serious limitations, but I felt those examples at least managed a pretty good range of evoking different feelings for different situations. That said I'm sat on a giant backlog with little time to catch up, so I can't say I've played much of his more recent work, and can't comment on whether I'd agree with you there.
I really think he's just phoning it in on the Tales Of series, for some reason that series in particular just has music that I don't find to be very inspired.
@@JustTheGems Fair enough - I've only played Symphonia there and long enough ago that I don't recall the music, so I can't tell if we just have different taste there or not, but I felt in the ones I mentioned he did a pretty great job of capturing a variety of moods of pretty different locations at least.
Strong agree with you on Motoi Sakuraba. He's got a couple good old battle songs, but overall his soundtracks feel tiresome.
Sakuraba phoning it in the last 20 years is one hell of a bold claim looking over his resume lol.
I guess I really just mean in the Tales Of games in particular, that's his most well-known consistent series and I just find it really uninspiring.
@JustTheGems Just to play a sorta devil advocate, maybe thats what the directors of the Tales games have been asking for?
Nice vid again, Fires. I backed Alzara and Runa, so, good choice.
But.... no Warside? Tttttt. The tribute to a modern variant of Fire Emblem.
Great video way to put true sleepers on there first I heard of these
Vagrant story is not too hard if you understand the crafting.
⬅️ Does not understand the crafting😅
So, TIL that you don't seem to like the games set in the Ogre Battle or Final Fantasy Ivalice universes lol
Animon, souls, probably anima monsters
I hit like. I almost didn't but I did it for you. It was sitting at 69 and I got a chuckle but I turned it into 70.
Is it a crime that I say puppers instead of doggo? I'm a millennial too so I'm just making sure I'm not enacting a crime again generations, I can change my ways.
Regarding the list though, lots of those games look pretty cool! I would take a look at Alzara and and Runa look pretty cool, and the spanish one seems intriguing. There's so many cool games to look at nowadays.
I’m a millennial, I’d say puppers is 100% acceptable too, lol.
They're equally acceptable & repulsive. Hope that helps!
It's honestly insulting to my intelligence that Motoi Sakuraba is more renouned than Noriyuki Iwadare.
I had to look him up. That guy goes way back too, Space Invaders '90?!
Ha, I feel like we rarely have the same taste in games, but I don't think your take on Sakuraba is crazy at all. Of all the well known game composers he's easily the most mediocre overall.
My shoulder hurt watching you hurt yourself...
🤕
Had to look up Motoi Sakuraba bec I wondered why you seem to dislike his work so much. Surprised to find out that he's the composer behind music I dislike so much too lol.
I love Tales, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, and Souls series but the music GOD THE MUSIC!!! 😩 Idky why I find them too generic and too prog rock for me...
damn you look especially handsome today
Sea of Stars!!!!!!!!!
Your channel made me wanna give jrpgs a try, starting from trails from daybreak
My comments probably going to get disliked, but I'm still going to say it. My suggestion is DON'T BOTHER.
Ignore most kickstarter even early access, it usually ends up dissapointing at best, that's even if the status is finished.
3-5 years to wait for a game developement and then wondering how or why half the promises stuff doesn't even there, if it's there is either broken, or shallow.
Just buy/play the games that's already in the market for JRPG, this space is very niche and we had so much options that available ready to play RIGHT now.
I've had a lot of Kickstarter successes, so I have to disagree. It's a great platform to fund new IPs.
i love you
Coulda been half the length but you just had to keep on yapping.
You figured out my secret! 😅
Christ, you show your mug way too much in between the previews of the games you are trying to tell us about.
🍺
The words "amazing" and "kickstarter" never go well together. Try again, kid.
Thats not remotely true lol.
Try again "Kid"
95% of my long list of backed projects disagrees.
And even then, there are more amazing ones out there that I didn't pay attention to when funding happened.
Except when they do ..?