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I guess since everyone doesn't listen to the Zelda Shopkeeper like they do the grumbling Moblin, or the Old Man, I'll have to try this again. Although clicking a link to a link is a bit more work, you people are lazy, ect, ect. But what the hell, I needed to update my list anyway.
Also note that these prices are all negotiable, and do not include the S&H (which you hafta pay).
GBA- Mega Man Battle Network 4: Blue Moon - $4 game only
PC
- Warcraft: Orcs & Humans - $3 game/case
SNES- Art of Fighting - $4 game only
- Battletoads in Battlemaniacs - $4 game only
- Fatal Fury - $4 game only
- Inindo: Way of the Ninja - $4 game only
- Super Mario World - $4 game only
- Super Mario All-Stars - ON HOLD FOR SPICEBEAN
- Super R-Type - $4 game only
Genesis- Battletoads & Double Dragon - $4 game/case/manual
- Columns - $1 game only
- Kid Chameleon - $4 game/case/manual
- Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi - $3 game only
- Shaq Fu - $1 game only
- Street Fighter II' Champion Edition - $3 game/case
- Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio w/ Mouse - $2 game/mouse
- X-Men - $1 game only
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - $2 game only
- The Revenge of Shinobi - OH HOLD FOR ENDASO
- Sub-Terrania - ON HOLD FOR ENDASO
- Strider - ON HOLD FOR ENDASO
N64- Killer Instinct Gold - ON HOLD FOR SEIJIKA
- Quake II - $3 game only
PS1- Street Fighter Alpha 3 - $10, complete
Also related to this is a small list of game stuff I'm looking to buy. Granted I won't have the scratch to buy this stuff until the sales start moving, but having it up here for viewing works.- Resident Evil 4 (GCN) Instruction Manual
- Mega Man Anniversary Collection (GCN) Instruction Manual
- Mega Man X8 (PS2) Instruction Manual
- Suikoden III (PS2) Instruction Manual
- Mortal Kombat 4 (PS1) Instruction Manual
- Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense (PS1) Instruction Manual and Case Insert(s)
- Mario Kart DS (NDS) Game Case with Case Inserts
- Streets of Rage 3 (GEN) Case Insert
A Master Run: The playthrough of a completed game in which the player challenges himself by putting self-imposed restrictions on the playthrough to make the game more difficult. Classic master run staples include the Speedrun (beating the game as fast as possible), the Single Character Challenge (using only one character period, found mostly in RPGs), and the No Death challenge for games which tend to be easy to die in (such as Contra and Battletoads).
Three days ago I got the sudden inspiration to Master Run another of my favorite games, Suikoden 1 for the PS1, not more than two weeks after I went through Pokémon FireRed using only a Raticate in battle. Close to a year ago I did a Master Run for Suikoden in which I did a speedrun while collecting all of the 108 recruitable Stars of Destiny in just about 9 hours.
However, that run was both unplanned and a tad lazy, and looking back on it Monday, I decided that I could do better. So, I changed up the criteria: I would not recruit ANY optional Stars of Destiny, and I would only use people in my party who I could not remove. So if the hero was left alone for something, I had to do it with just him. It doesn't seem like much, but realize that the game has at least 60 combat-usable characters, and you can have up to six people in your party at any given time.
I'll break it down into chunks of the game. Note that if you have not played Suikoden 1 and you do not want the game spoiled even a tiny bit, then reading the following will not be good for you.
I repeat: Spoilers ahoy.
Start of the game to acquiring my castle: You can't use anyone optional until your castle is up and running, so this went exactly like a normal playthrough. I didn't bother getting the best equipment for Camille or Tai Ho, but I did get everyone to about 19 by fighting the Kobolds in the Great Forest Village southeast of Kouan. I also got lucky on a Lightning Crystal drop from the Zombie Dragon.
Visiting Lepant: The challenge pretty much started here. Normally I'd go grab Kai, but he's optional. Using just McDohl, Cleo, Viktor, and Gremio wasn't so bad though. Cleo had the Fire Rune from Leknaat on, and outside of the giant roulette wheel and it's battles I think I got into like 3 random encounters total. Didn't struggle at all.
Taking down Kwanda: Going from the castle to the Elf Village with just McDohl, Gremio, and Kirkis was a bit tough since the latter two weren't able to crank out good enough damage. I did have Kirkis with the Lightning Rune I got the entire time though. When Valeria showed up, things improved drastically thanks to her Falcon Rune. Not many encounters in the Dwarves' Vault, and the boss didn't like Kirkis' lightning spells. Pannu Yakuta was easy like usual since Viktor and Kuromimi decided to tag along, and I had a six-person team for that.
The fruity Flower General: This whole segment was more about walking from town to town than actual fighting. Even though I only had Flik, Viktor, and Gremio alongside McDohl, the enemies weren't hard. The main difficulty came from dealing with the lack of Viki's teleportation and the Blinking Mirror for easy travel.
The greatest of the 5 Generals (imo): If I didn't have Black Shadow on the Soul Eater, going to the Secret Factory with just McDohl and Tai Ho would have been a LOT harder. Luckily though, I did. That, plus how much exp Tai Ho got from a two-man party meant that within several battles I had a high enough party level average to just "Let Go" all random battles I didn't care for. Love them Fire Spears, but the enemy didn't.
The Runic Vamipre: Nothing hard, or unusual about this at all. Cleo with a Flowing, and McDohl's "Hell" spell made this a cake-walk. Hix kinda felt unneeded and Viktor with the Clone Rune hit hard.
The Knight's of the Dragon's Den: Until I entered Sonya's Floating Fortress, I thought that the highest weapon level I could get to was 12. As such, I did everything before it with that as the max, and it wasn't that difficult. I just left Liukan for dead until he was removed from my party, and the trio of Humphrey, Milia and Flik hit the Crystal Core hard. I also gave Flik Cleo's Flowing Rune here, which he kept until the end of the game.
Moravia: The comments about the Hell spell and using "Let Go" on enemies pretty much sums up the difficulty here.
Sonya's Fortress: Ok, I had to stop and think at this point. Just McDohl and Viktor, a smallish dungeon, and two bosses in a row all without MP restoration. Prior to entering here, I went back through Moravia and grabbed the Mother Earth rune at the top and slapped that on Viktor (even though his magic is bad). Then, I got both of their weapons up to level 15 for the extra damage, pimped out their equipment and went at it. Funny thing: A level 60 Viktor with a Mother Earth Rune and around 98 magic can do 1,400+ damage to the Shell Venus with a single Earthquake. And Sonya? She didn't like Judgement.
The Final Stretch: I had to re-do Yuber's war battle three times becuase only 45 SoD = horrible war battle situation. I did get lucky in the end though and ended up winning with 500 troops left out of 9750, compared to Yuber's 20,000. Pimped out McDohl, Flik, and Viktor with the best equipment, level 15'd their weapons, and made sure that Viktor had Mother Eart and Flik had Flowing. I was a tad torn though, since I didn't know how much use Copper Flesh would be compared to Viktor throwing Rage or Thunder Rune spells. Went through the place twice, since I used magic to wipe out the forced battles on the first run, then I went after Barbarosa.
Final Boss: I had at least 3 Sacrificial Buddhas in each character's inventory, but I didn't end up using any of them. Viktor's Copper Flesh spell came in handy, and he did decent damage to all three targets with Earthquake and Voice of the Earth. Flik spammed healing spells, and McDohl spammed Judgement and Black Shadow, then all three fought until the final boss died.
Reflecting on it now, I'm a tad disappointed that it wasn't harder, or longer. It only took me about 14 hours to do the entire run, and I never needed to grind for levels or cash really. I'm tempted to do another run, like a No Rune run suggested by Hojo, but that'd just end up with a party of big strong hitters and lots of Mega Medicine/Sacrificial Buddhas. Not sure how challenging it'd be.
Still, it was a fun run for an amazing game, and I'm glad that the emotionally moving scenes in the plot still get to me, even after having beaten the game over 15 times in the last 10 years. I'd recommend doing a Master Run of Suikoden to everyone out there, provided they can stand jRPGs.
Until the next save point, Sobou's out.
When someone says "JRPG" to you, what do you think of? Long games of monotonous turn-based battles mixed with predictable plots featuring characters that are pulled along the path of the story with no apparent choice, as if they're forced to do the stupid shit you see.Despite this, we seem to like them. I can't explain why I like gameplay where it's walk to area, press X until fight is over and repeat until next plot point, but a bit of me hates it because I tend to be grabby about any RPG I can get my hands on. Lately I've stopped going after the bad JRPGs and gone with a few good ones; this is one of them.
For those of you who don't know this series, the premise is pretty simple. You're a silent hero named Ryu who's race has the ability to turn into dragons. You spend the entire game going around teaming up with other anthro characters such as winged girls and wolf men to defeat the looming evil that for some reason persecutes said dragon race.
The concept is simple, but I felt that Breath of Fire III lacked something that other JRPGs tend to have: a clear villian. Most of the plot is dedicated to Ryu, the last of the Brood race, journeying to ask God about a whole bunch of stuff. You find things out along the way but nothing is ever really resolved until the final area of the game, which made me wonder "Where's my motivation?" a lot.
It felt really drawn-out and tedious in going after this goal but luckily the gameplay more than made up for it in my eyes. Even though it played like a typical JRPG combat-wise, the systems attatched to it made it fun and more in-depth than the average Final Fantasy.One such system is the "Master" system. Scattered around the BoF3 world are a bunch of Masters who you can apprentice your characters to once you receive their approval (such as paying one all of your money once). Each Master adjusts the stat growth at level up, like a wizard giving more Intelligence but taking away Strength, and have a set list of Skills a character can learn after gaining a determined amount of levels. This allows the player to develop their characters how they want, which I more than took advantage of.
The aformentioned Skills are also an excellent bit. Very similar to Final Fantasy's "Blue Magic", where certain enemy spells are learnable and usable by certain characters, Skills are a little bit more open. Any of the characters you get can learn a skill by using the combat menu choice "Examine".You can only learn each Skill once, though, and only one character at any given time can have a Skill. I tend to love Blue Magic systems, so this was very attractive. I just wish that 8/10 of the skills weren't so useless.
Breath of Fire III also has my favorite mini-game I've played in an RPG yet: Fishing. With an easy-to-learn yet challenging system and the bonus that each fish has a purpose as currency and a combat item, it made it addictive. Spend some time fishing, buy a good weapon you can use until later when you can buy said weapon normally.
So not only could you get excellent equipment (including some of the best stuff for Ryu near the end), but some of the harder fish to catch were really useful in combat. In other JRPGs the player would tend to hoard items like a Mega Elixir because of how rare they were and hard as hell to acquire. With enough patience and skill in fishing, the player could have an entire bagful of excellent healing items, and didn't have to feel remorse if they wasted one because there were always more to catch.
For a game released in 1997, it looked rather good to boot. The game may have been 2D-sprite heavy, but the enviroments were built on a 3D-plane that the player could navigate which led to some interesting locations. Add the fact that you could hold R1 and adjust the camera to look around obstacles you normally couldn't see through and it led to some challenging puzzle-filled dungeons and a lot of hidden items.
Those same puzzles would have been tedious and boring too, but luckily the music of the game was excellent and totally helped with the atmosphere of each dungeon. I absolutely love the overworld theme as Adult Ryu, and the end credits song was awesome.
Overall, I love this game. It may have taken me 95 hours to get everything and, before level-grinding to get the last things, being in the high-thirties by the time I got to the final location but the way it was constructed didn't make it boring like a lot of RPGs I've played. If you're looking for a good JRPG to sink time into, get this. It'll be worth it, even if all you do is fish like I did.
I may have been a tad harsh when it came to my previous review on Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Genesis, but compared to some of the crap shovelware coming out nowadays I'll take that game in a heartbeat. At least that was a video game! Compared to some of the titles that Nintendo is letting companies like Ubisoft defecate onto their consoles, Dracula was awesome.
Some of the worst turds that I'm seeing now are nothing more than 3rd party duplicates of things like Wii Sports and Nintendogs. Granted I never gave a shit for the latter but apparently it did it's job well enough to have four thousand even lamer clones fired out of a rectum cannon to loiter noisily amongst the good titles the DS has sitting around.
Nintendo makes a virtual dog raising emulator and next thing you know series like the "Petz [Animal]z" are camping out next to the Imagine [Profession] series of "games". I'm trying to find a good deal on a used DS game shelf, and I have to toss aside failures like "Bratz Kidz: Slumber Party" to try and find a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for under $25.
And as if it wasn't bad enough, the same thing's happening to the Wii! Everytime I go to look at the Wii games, the stock is 80% mini-game collections that rip off Wii Sports like Babysitting Party and shovelware games that are making stuff like Kung Fu Panda actually look good.
I don't suppor the PS3, but even it's meager collection is looking better than the giant collection of crap that Nintendo is letting companies like Ubisoft spray all over it's waggle-heavy console like a pent-up torrent of diarrhea. As it stands, I'd much rather pay more for a console if it will further solidify itself in saying "We don't have as many games, but you won't have to wade through shit like the stuff flying out on the Wii."
This is why I fully agree with Noi-sama here when I say that Nintendo needs to get their shit together, and fuck Ubisoft. We have to deal with hundreds of horrid titles like that when companies can't get their shit together, deal with some minor profit gains, and give the gamers good shit that we want. Things like english translated official ports of Namco x Capcom or anything from the Super Robot Wars series we haven't received yet.
Yeah, I realize that it'll cost a lot of money to do that. Any more money that shitting out 30 different clones of a single game that all suck? At least gamers WANT those games, not Nintendogs clone #390 with extra waggle action.
