Tag: JRPG

Digimon Survive takes the Franchise into a New Direction

If you grew up in the 90’s or early 2000, you probably argued with your friends whether Pokemon or Digimon was better. Both are Japanese video game franchises focused on working with animals to fight other players. They were released around similar times in the United State. They also both ended with -mon so it was easy for people to argue which was better. Internationally, Pokemon has beaten Digimon in popularity and the number of games released. Digimon games’ genres have greatly changed over the year and don’t have a definitive genre, unlike Pokemon. Bandai Namco’s newest Digimon game, Digimon Survive, will be a Survival Strategy RPG. Perhaps the change will bring in more fans.

Digimon has always had the advantage of a darker story than Pokemon. It looks like Digimon Survive is taking the darkness and ramping it to 100%. The gameplay is split into two parts.

One will focus on traditional SRPG by moving your Digimon Units around the map and attacking other Digimon. Each unit has Energy Points and managing it is important. Energy Points can help you evolve or use different attacks. The battlefield is a mix of 3D areas with semi-2D Digimon sprites.

The second part is the interaction with other characters. You play as Takuma Momotsuka, an 8th-grade student who gets lost in another world. With his partner Agumon, they work together to help him find a way back home. There are other human characters and depending on how you talk to them, it will change the story, cause evolution, or death for some characters. 

There are multiple endings, paths, and evolutions based on how the story changes.

The art looks beautiful and the concept is definitely an interesting take on the series. There aren’t too many trailers on the gameplay so it will be interesting to see how the game develops. The idea of the game isn’t enough for me to instabuy but depending on reviews, I may change my mind.

Digmon Survives releases sometime in 2019 for all regions and for the Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Sources:

Bandai Namco

Eurogamer.net

Siliconera

The Power from Fan Feedback {Project OCTOPATH TRAVELER}

Project Octopath Traveler is a upcoming 2018 JRPG from Square-Enix for the Nintendo Switch. The game had a downloadable demo where they could gather fan feedback for the game. The feedback was used to improve the game. Fans were able to convince the developers to improve the UI, movement around the map, visuals, and motivate them to improve the game even more. More details in video below.

Recently, Nioh was another previous Japanese game title that also took fan feedback to improve the game and how fans felt about the overall game. The power of fan feedback can have huge effects and will greatly effect how video game development changes in the future. Depending on the success of Octopath Traveler, future JRPG or games could have more feedback demos. Even Star Wars Battlefront 2‘s beta helped induce changes before the release (clearly not enough before the game’s release). Although developers want to appeal to their fans as much as possible, they will not able to please everybody. For Nioh, developers become stress about trying to please every fan. “The first problem we encountered after researching feedback was that many members of our team became too influenced and affected by the opinions of the players,” Team Ninja’s Fumihiko Yasuda writes. “By attempting to consider all of those opinions, we were not arriving at solid solutions, but rather creating more questions” said Yasuda.

Nioh Americas Survey Results
Opinion on Nioh. First Beta

Fan feedback can create a good fanbase prior to the game release. Nioh did extremely well for a new IP from Ninja Theory with a 8.5 Metacritic rating. For a new game, developers can build a large interest by taking fan feedback. For a new IP, Square-Enix is taking steps to continue to push new classic JRPGs. Jairus Cambe stated that he is “excited for this since it’s an homage to the old school JRPGs presented in a beautiful way.”

Sources:

Endgadget

EGM Now

 

Persona 5 Anime announced for 2018!

The critically acclaimed Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG), Persona 5, will have an anime adaptation scheduled to release in 2018! Released worldwide earlier this year, the Atlus RPG has received rave reviews from gamers. The animation will be done by A-1 productions whose recent works include Sword Art Online, Aldonoah Zero, Fairy Tail, and Persona 4 Golden: The Animation. Voice actors have all been announced and the teaser trailer is below. No actual footage is shown but I’m a huge fan of the game and series so I am excited about the anime.

Sources: IGN