How Is Your SNES Gaming Going?

[Ack]

Actually, last year I beat 10 RPGs and got a good chunk of both Live A Live and Secret of the Stars out of the way...

[ZeroAX]

Actually, last year I beat 10 RPGs and got a good chunk of both Live A Live and Secret of the Stars out of the way...

Teach me master

[Violent By Design]

I beat 4 or 5 RPGs last year, came close to beating about 1 or 2 others too. Albeit most were short ones.

[Ack]

Actually, last year I beat 10 RPGs and got a good chunk of both Live A Live and Secret of the Stars out of the way...

Teach me master

Well, this is what I beat:

Alpha Protocol (PS3)
Ys III (SNES)
Secret of Mana (SNES)
The Bard's Tale (PS2)
Arcana (SNES)
Breath of Fire (SNES)
Dungeons of Dredmor (PC)
The 7th Saga (SNES)
Chrono Trigger (SNES)
Dark Arms (NGPC)

There are a few tricks I have to navigating through RPGs quickly, though first I should note that just because a game is an RPG doesn't mean it's long. There are some very short RPGs, like Ys III, Lagoon, and Dark Arms, which can be polished off in a couple of days or less. But here are a few general rules I keep for RPGs:

If you have a character who can level in fewer than 10 fights, do the fights. Grinding towards smaller goals can make grinding considerably easier and makes it feel less monotonous. If the RPG gives fewer XP, like Breath of Fire, I'll sometimes push this to 20 fights.

Try to grind up five levels in each new area early on in the game. This builds you up to give you an easier chance to breeze through later segments and difficult bosses.

Finding a path with high and continuous rewards is essential in grinding. I tend to find loops in dungeons that I can travel around X number of times while fighting everything I come across. This works in action RPGs with respawning enemies too. The goal here is to break up the monotony by giving you a short term goal, while also building your characters in the meantime.

Abuse any healing sources you can find. If you enter a dungeon that has a place where you can easily regain health and mana, go nuts and fight your hardest each fight with all you've got, since you can just restore yourself immediately afterward.

Also ideal is the ability to analyze your enemies and arrange for the fastest battles. Whenever I enter a new location, I'll start doing rough estimates of enemy health and also try to figure out what the fastest and most effective means of killing them are. And I always make sure to focus firepower on one creature until it is dead, unless there is a benefit to splitting damage. The one-shot is best, but two- or three- ain't bad. And I vastly prefer being able to drop a group of enemies in a single round, preferably before they act and without my using any resources that aren't restored at the end of battle. Efficiency in strategy is key.

Also, it is perfectly acceptible to use a map or make your own. I tend to be quite good at forming mental maps of locations when I move through them(a skill also highly useful in FPS), but some folks prefer to draw them.

[fastbilly1]

It is also easy if you have a controller with turbo functions. I beat five RPGs last year using the following method on one of my arcade sticks:
1. Find a health spot in new area
2. Turn on turbo for main action button
3. Walk left and right until the music changes and I run into an enemy
4. Hold down action button
5. Turn off turbo and heal
6. Start watching tv show or movie and continue until I get to a good enough level.

While playing Breath of Death I got tired of doing this, and really just got tired of the game sitting on my PC unfinished, so I found an area that I had 100 battles left in, and remapped left and right to two buttons, and left turbo on those aswell and came back after dinner. I then cake walked the last two areas. True it was not a proper way to play the game, but I made some bad mistakes early on that cost me the fun in the game. Now I am halfway through Cthulu Saves the World (its "sequel") and am enjoying it thoroughly.

This method works best for Phantasy Star IV, since you can setup different combos for each character. Sadly I still have never finished that game. Maybe I will add that to my list for this year.

[Ack]

It is also easy if you have a controller with turbo functions. I beat five RPGs last year using the following method on one of my arcade sticks:
1. Find a health spot in new area
2. Turn on turbo for main action button
3. Walk left and right until the music changes and I run into an enemy
4. Hold down action button
5. Turn off turbo and heal
6. Start watching tv show or movie and continue until I get to a good enough level.

While playing Breath of Death I got tired of doing this, and really just got tired of the game sitting on my PC unfinished, so I found an area that I had 100 battles left in, and remapped left and right to two buttons, and left turbo on those aswell and came back after dinner. I then cake walked the last two areas. True it was not a proper way to play the game, but I made some bad mistakes early on that cost me the fun in the game. Now I am halfway through Cthulu Saves the World (its "sequel") and am enjoying it thoroughly.

This method works best for Phantasy Star IV, since you can setup different combos for each character. Sadly I still have never finished that game. Maybe I will add that to my list for this year.

Yeah, if you're playing just for the story, there's plenty of things similar to the Lete River trick from Final Fantasy VI. Ys III has a place at the very beginning where you have continuously spawning enemies flying above you, so you just set the game to continuously attack straight up and leave it on over night. After 8 hours or so, you'll be the max level. It's a cheap method for getting through a game, but it is effective.

[Violent By Design]

My friend plays games at 1.5 speed, I should really try it when I am playing a rom.

[Aar1012]

My Girlfriend got me a beautiful SNES for Christmas (No yellowing - looks like it just came from the box). I've been playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. She gave me an IOU for A Link to the Past.

I'm also thinking of picking up a good RPG but sadly, it won't be FFVI, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger as I don't have the money to drop on one of those. A y recommendations for a good (but not expensive) RPG?

[Ack]

My Girlfriend got me a beautiful SNES for Christmas (No yellowing - looks like it just came from the box). I've been playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. She gave me an IOU for A Link to the Past.

I'm also thinking of picking up a good RPG but sadly, it won't be FFVI, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger as I don't have the money to drop on one of those. A y recommendations for a good (but not expensive) RPG?

If you like dungeon crawlers, Arcana. It fuses dungeon crawler design with JRPG aesthetics.

If you want something difficult, The 7th Saga is usually cheap. Tough, and not always fair, but still rewarding and replayable.

For side-scrolling action RPGs, Ys III is cheap, though also very short.

Inindo fuses strategy and RPG gameplay in its battles, and features some interesting mechanics with your ninja abilities and employment, though it's very primitive looking.

Super Ninja Boy combines platforming and action aspects with a more traditional design. It's not always the best translated, and the game can be extremely cryptic at times, but not terrible.

Lagoon is a short top-down action RPG. This one is extremely hit or miss with people(due to your tiny attack box), and it is very short, but I've enjoyed it, even if it sometimes suddenly spikes in difficulty with boss fights.

Brain Lord is another action RPG, also considered extremely frustrating.

All of these are under $20. They all have some rough edges and don't necessarily have the polish or the character of the bigger names like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, or Lufia, but from what I've played I enjoyed them.

[Retrogamer0001]

My Girlfriend got me a beautiful SNES for Christmas (No yellowing - looks like it just came from the box). I've been playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. She gave me an IOU for A Link to the Past.

Your girlfriend is a keeper